They are 'observable' if you bend your critical faculties to a point where small airplanes are flying cars and the Messiah is your favourite politician. Most of Steve's predictions are nonsense. Most predictions are, so it's hardly Steve's fault. But going through great logical contortions to defend some predictions the guy was either brave or foolish enough to commit to paper in 2004? I'll say again, come on.
Small airplanes already existed in 2004, and politician and son-of-god is quite a bit different than XML and JSON which are basically interchangeable serialization formats for the purposes they are both used.
Remind me again what that has to do with the point at hand, please.
The point is that Steve's predictions are actually observable, though some of them are advancing at a slower pace than he thought (and a tiny bit different, like JSON instead of XML, which IMHO is irrelevant).