Seems like Asimov's main genius was just looking at what the trends of his time were - long distance communication, television/media, cheaper/nuclear energy, automation (robots are the ultimate automation, right?), and increasing inequality and just forecasted that those trends would get cheaper and more widely accessible.

Futurists like Kurzweil seem to forecast much more drastic changes in human behavior (although the link to predictions made by RK is actually a lot more accurate than I would have guessed. Still out there, but none of them seem "impossible" to me. He seems to mainly just be too aggressive in his "when."