In Brave New World, how does Huxley predict the future and does this compare to how society is today?

Huxley envisions a future in which people are cloned and put into classes based on intelligence, ranked from A to D, with A the most intelligent and D the least. The As are the intellectual leaders and the Ds the factory workers. Most of the society is geared to consumption, which people, especially Betas or Bs, conditioned to buy, buy, buy. People take a drug called soma to stay happy and well-adjusted. Conformity is valued...

Huxley envisions a future in which people are cloned and put into classes based on intelligence, ranked from A to D, with A the most intelligent and D the least. The As are the intellectual leaders and the Ds the factory workers. Most of the society is geared to consumption, which people, especially Betas or Bs, conditioned to buy, buy, buy. People take a drug called soma to stay happy and well-adjusted. Conformity is valued and critical thinking is completely discouraged. Conditioning is constant: people do not live in family units but usually in dormitories and listen all night while they sleep to tapes telling them what to think.

The novel is, one level, a satire that makes fun of the 20th century tendency towards consumer goods, conformity and trying to "feel good." Huxley was surprisingly accurate in some of his predictions, so much so that the satire loses some of its bite. For example, the song the betas hear over and over about throwing a piece of clothing that has lost a button would have had shock value and caused laughter when the book was written in 1931: people simply would not have thrown out clothing for that reason, but today it is not considered unusual since we live at a level of consumption in the First World that would have put even the betas to shame. Likewise, soma bears striking similarity to the many prescription pharmaceuticals people take today to enhance feelings of well-being or fight off depression. People today are also subject to a constant barrage of conditioning (known as advertising): if it is as effective as in Brave New World is open to debate.