Don't make me get out my sombrero.
But technological and social change happen so fast these days. We can see where the future's going. There's always another country legalizing gay weed, always another YouTube video showcasing some shitty robot. The robots get less shitty every year. The weed keeps getting gayer.
The Idea of Progress is so firmly planted in people's heads that whenever Redditors discuss a fantasy setting, someone always wonders why they don't simply invent guns and start blasting at the orcs, zombies, and assorted elves.
What you call contemporary science fiction, I'd call other genres using scifi trappings. Cyberpunk is just noir with cyborgs and . . . punks . . . and post-apocalyptic is just your standard fantasy setting WITH GUNS. Classic science fiction was all about hope for the future, and about man using his inventive powers to make the world a cooler and better place. The optimism doesn't need to be in-your-face about it, but it has to be there, or it's not scifi. Speculative fiction, sure, but not scifi.
Like, Star Wars is closer to fantasy with scifi trappings than it is the other way around. There's spaceships and rayguns, but the most important characters fight with space-swords and space-magic. And there's nothing optimistic about the setting either. The Dark Side is never going away. Things look even bleaker when you consider the once-canon Expanded Universe, which maintains that the galaxy has been in technological stasis for millennia.