For those of us who like Kubrick's movies¹, we've come to appreciate that his insane² obsession with detail and verisimilitude are a big part why his movies are so well-crafted.

Of course, this same obsession is why, for The Shining, Shelley Duvall spent a year in living hell (and probably years of therapy afterwards, over and above what would presumably be baseline for working on a Kubrick film), and the actor who played the kid remembers it as something somewhere between an awesome extended vacation and spending time with a really cool babysitter who bends the rules about bedtime and lies to your parents.

As for the future itself? There's a lot of mileage to be gotten out of looking at how fiction writers handle futurism, not to mention other sources of predictions, both where they get it right and where it goes laughably wrong. (I saw someone recently claim that William Gibson's predictions about the Internet were eerily spot-on, which was a statement on roughly the same level as when the film student/video store clerk told me that Princess Mononoke was an American film -- just do not engage, because no good can come of it.) Pay phones are my personal favorite -- their unquestioned ubiquity up until ... hell, not fifteen years ago, maybe ... and how difficult it proved to be to see their demise coming until cell phones hit a critical mass. Thus, they're all over the place in The Future as depicted in things written/produced even as late as the mid-1990s, and now I'd be hard pressed to name a place where I could find one.

1. I've generally liked his movies, though I deliberately avoided seeing Eyes Wide Shut, and I was rather disappointed to learn that far-future ending segment of A.I. dated to when Kubrick was still directing it, and couldn't be fairly blamed on Spielberg despite feeling far more like his work than the rest of the film.
2. Quite possibly clinically such.