What do you see when you look at at the streets of 2072? Wheels, Hover, Leggs personal blimps what does your imagination conjure up?
Look around the streets today; it'll be much the same. Smaller compact cars, high-efficiency sedans, a few sports cars, a few choppers and rice rockets. Big trucks, medium trucks, pickup trucks. Every once in a while you'll see something unusual -- a seriously hot sports car, an odd sort of truck like a dump truck, whatever. Look up -- the occasional plane or helicopter.
It's just that some of your medium trucks will be drone delivery service, some of your huge trucks will be rigged, some of your bikes will be 'serious' SMG-armed ganger bikes, that sort of thing. It's the stuff upstairs that'll be different -- a lot more flying crap in the air, spotter drones and suchlike.
Nah, I'll still complain it took me 20-years and I missed out on so many good campaigns like Bug City and the Arcology and such.
One of the things I want to do is to run/co-run a game that starts in 2050 and flows through the SR history, enabling the GM to toss in foreshadowing, or plan runs that are connected to interesting other things in the game world. So playing SR4 doesn't mean you can't be in a game that doesn't play through those events.