Those chaps accusing some random chic as being a witch, are like MK's leading minds today. Fantasy who should stick to their specialty areas like numbers and not slap their delusions about this number looking like an alien. Thanks to the fact most of society have evolved in the way they think about existence, not many are mindwashed by the threat of alien invasions, or the threat of witches, vampires etc.
Because there are still leading minds who value lessons learnt from history, respect data, and just evidence, keeps those fringe b@stards exposed, that that chic isn't a witch, a post-human, a trans-human, any other label slapped by delusional thinkers subservient to the media hype.
500 years ago, it wasn't in the business of scholars to make predictions about the future. That's what soothsayers may have done and have done. It makes no difference to scholarly understandings whether an iphone, a computer, a Boeing is invented or not. These are just modes of communication, efficiency, connectness, ain't mean it adds value to knowledge. It facilitates knowledge collection, but it doesn't mean IT IS knowledge. Most of what's done in science today isn't new knowledge, it's just procedural, efficient, observational, a capitalist venture- nothing more insightful than that.