It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction.
In addition to "There Will Come Soft Rains" we have short stories like Stephen Vincent Benét’s "By the Waters of Babylon."
In that story, society has been bombed back to the stone age. Even religion is a stone age recreation. Something like hot and cold running water seems like it must come from gods’ magic.
This short story was particularly meaningful for me when I read it in school. I lived the same distance from New York City as the protagonist. And this was during the last days of the Soviet Union, which had placed my small hometown on its top 10 places to bomb list.
In Walter M. Miller Jr.'s book A Canticle for Liebowitz, we’re back in society that's recreating itself, with the Catholic Church acting as a centralizing force again, as after the fall of Rome and European plagues. Monks discover, collect, copy, and maintain shreds of texts.
Apart from increasing society-level anxiety, that focus on the dramatization of nuclear war is considered to have turned people away from nuclear power. Imagine the different potential outcomes had our authors not been so talented. You can go back to Plato’s Republic for explanations of why sad music, for example, is bad for society. But maybe the real effect was on swaying public opinion, protest movements, regulations, and where people choose to focus their productive talents.
For sure, but it doesn’t pervade public consciousness in the same way. Not sure why, perhaps because the memory of mass-scale war has faded with the previous generations.
Nuclear annihilation on any sort of global scale is further off than ever in the past 60-70 years or so. The doomsday clock is mostly worrying about climate change, conventional war and Facebook boomers spreading and believing fake news.
I don't mean that things are fine, just that Nuclear annihilation is less of a concern than some make it out to be.
Miller's situation is a little more nuanced - he was crew on an Allied Bomber that levelled the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy during World War I, falsely believing it was occupied by German troops. His subsequent PTSD was a driving force behind his subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism, and he uniquely imbues the novel with the structure and lexicography of a closed order. His fear was not so much war - atomic or otherwise - as it was the loss of knowledge and tolerance as a consequence of the cyclical and barbaric nature of human society.
Indeed he takes some other significant cues from Bradbury - who faced a similar, if less poignant, Road to Damascus moment upon learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
For example, the concept of 'Booklegging' is lifted wholesale from Fahrenheit 451, published a few years prior. Bradbury has oft-cited political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book, and Miller makes his views very clear by the time we encounter the flanderised Atheist in the final third of Canticle - reinforcing his core theme of the juxtaposition of scientific progress and moral wisdom, and the shared thematic motif expressed by Montag in Fahrenheit 451 that the books of the past have messages that can save society from its own destruction.
As such, it is clear to me that the fear of war - and the trendy nihilism imbued by the then innovative atomic variant - doesn't so much affect mid-century fiction as the cultural and societal upheaval seen as the Baby Boomers assumed their place as the generation in ascension. In many ways this echoed the post-WW1 Brideshead Revisted era of England, merely substituting a surplus of capital for a dearth of inheritors.
Thus, while both can be read as atomic jeremiads, they are more appropriately realised as treatises to the social and political mores at the time. The scare for the average American wasn't so much Nuclear as it was 'Red' - something that can be seen in the stubborn cargo-culting of very American Institutions and Practices in the post-apocalyptic canon. As can be seen across the US Sci-Fi Canon, preservation of self is often secondary to the preservation of American Exceptionalism; be it via an ICBM or the stochastic terrorism of McCarthy.
Beautifully articulated, but I have to disagree with you on nuclear power. We're close to the point where renewables and battery tech are a solution to all our power needs. Remaining obstacles being primarily political / geopolitical.
Meanwhile, after 70 years we're still no closer to a safe long term solution for nuclear waste. Every new and untested nuclear reactor design falls into the same pro-innovation bias of failing to address it's own unintended consequences. Like the utterly wild and rarely estimated cost of decommissioning older plants.
I read this story in 4th grade. It felt like the future. Now, it feels like most of the technology is within reach - at least, it could be built. The automated stove being the main exception.
But the most unrealistic part of this story is how all the IoT automation continues to work in the absence of the Internet.
> But the most unrealistic part of this story is how all the IoT automation continues to work in the absence of the Internet.
It's actually one way this story about the apocalypse is more hopeful than the present day. We don't need the internet to make most of the things in that story work, but in our timeline we'd add it anyway to get and sell those good analytics.
Except that isn't really why it happened: iot being Internet tied is because it's much, much easier to get devices to work when you control at least one side of the server with skilled professionals rather then your average home user.
And no one has really come up with an alternative: home assistant is good, but it's not for the non-techy.
I will squarely blame IPv4 for some of this: NAT has meant that the key application people might want to use is broken by default (remote device access) without mediation servers.
The vision of the automated stove is partly fulfilled, at least around San Francisco, by the astounding number of people who get all their meals delivered, for the moment by humans but soon robots.
Most of which you don't need IMO. When a bunch of stuff had to be redone after a kitchen fire, I told my electrician that I wanted everything to be dumb.
This. Not only does everything still work in an internet outage, mine actively detects and heals most internet outages by power cycling the router with a smart plug.
I really wish we could just get a thermal imager integration for a stove which could catch a pot of boiling water about to boil over and back off the heat automatically.
Born in 1968 I missed “duck and cover” but rode the wave of Reagan brinkmanship with my skater friends until 1990, watching all the broadcast TV PSAs and songs and art about nuclear war. It was real. It pervaded daily life: the notion that two old white men were having a pissing contest with every human as disposable bargaining chips. And as always, 25% of the US population cheered for purification of the planet because Jesus was coming (see: Hal Lindsay).
I've always thought, easily, we humans were our own worst enemy. But that's nothing new, it's been known for many different eras. What gets me is we don't seem to care. Obviously many do, but why not enough?
Egomaniacs seem to always be the problem, but when one pops up in a country, the people, whether they have a choice or not, protect/ignore them. Your disposable remark, to me, is the key. Most need to wake to this fact and at least talk about it. (As for Hal Lindsay, he's just like any other nutjob author who uses grains of some truth to create fear and anxiety to promote his narrative.)
I'm born in Norway in 1975, and in the early 80's, while we didn't have "duck and cover" we had regular air-raid siren tests and my primary schools basement was a bomb shelter that doubled as an activity space.
The sirens still exist, but the test schedule has slowed dramatically.
Other religious fanatics outside the gov’t take a more circumspect public stand on this particular holy war, but aim to use the Supreme Court to convert the US into a religious dictatorship.
Here’s a primary source; an interview with the defense secretary’s pastor:
The parent comment is getting dunked on because it feels rich for the majority racial group to claim aggrieved status.
But I agree that adding the whiteness status of the men doesn't add to the story. The distinguishing characteristics of the men were they were rich and powerful. There are many people in the United States who despite their whiteness, suffer injustice, lived in poverty, and are oppressed by powerful interests.
The above does not erase the fact that systemic racism impacts Black and Hispanic Americans significantly to this day, and work to mitigate this should continue.
Is it? There are lots of wonderful US Christians who believe in kindness and compassion and love. There are also lots of US Christians who are deep into end-times insanity, like Christian Zionists. Perhaps the 25% number is high, but this is a very real thing.
It's hard to find specific surveys covering exactly that, but given the widespread belief among US adults that we are living in the end-times and beliefs in being raptured, 25% if anything seems low:
"About four-in-ten U.S. adults believe humanity is ‘living in the end times’"
"Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats to believe they will be taken up in the biblical Rapture, according to a new YouGov poll."
"The September 23 poll of 4,041 U.S. adults found that 63 percent of Republicans said they would be more likely to be taken up, compared with 40 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of independents. "
> Anywhere from 6 to 35% of the United States population is evangelical, depending on how "evangelical" is defined.
> In the 2016 presidential election, exit polls reported that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump
> Evangelicals generally view the Middle East through a dispensationalist biblical framework and strongly support Israel. Often perceived as the most vocal supporters of Christian Zionism in the West, they believe that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews and that the U.S. will be blessed if it blesses Israel. The establishment of the State of Israel was seen by many American Protestants as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, reinforcing their commitment to Zionism as a religious duty.
> Where do you see there that 25% of the U.S. population cheered for nuclear annihilation?
Anecdotally; Growing up in the NorthWest USA, I knew entirely too many (crazy to my mind yet considered perfectly "normal" by most "average" folk back then) people in the 1980s who genuinely believed that Revelations' "rain fire from the Heavens" in the bible meant "Nuclear War" and Jesus would arrive momentarily thereafter "leading a host of angels" to "rapture the faithful" and/or "smite the wicked" who survived that initial "rain of heavenly fire".
What scares me even more than that kinda craziness bein' way more common back then than it should'a been is that too many (still crazy people IMHO) still believe such madness today and some of those people are in charge of (or at least in positions of significant power) entire nations with huge stockpiles of WMDs at their disposal.
If you’re talking about Pete Hegseth, he I think is CREC, and they are post-millenialists, which means they think more so that the earth will get better and better and should build things that last to welcome in Christ when he returns.
25% might be low for the "better dead than red" crowd, given the lasting and widespread popularity of communism in the worker's paradise that is America.
The most striking incongruity with our modern era to me is that the family was all outside when the blast occurred. With pervasive screens, we just don't get outside like we used to.
And why on earth was that dad mowing when the house was able to take care of it?
That's one of the usual failures of science fiction: most authors imagine technological progress, but don't also predict what societal changes it might bring. So this family had a quaint picture-book suburban 1950s life, just with robots. Same as Asimov's Detective Baley smoked a pipe and had a traditional 1950s marriage with a stay-at-home wife - just with robots...
They don't even predict all the technological changes. I love how in William Gibson's Neuromancer they have VR, true AI, and even fancy orbital resorts, but not mobile phones!
I think you have to distinguish what the author can imagine and what the audience could likely accept. Part of writing stories is engaging the readers, who have biases of their own.
Man, if only I wasn't so burnt out. I've still been day-dreaming about architecture and design for my side-projects. I haven't had a chance to sit down and get into the flow state like I used to.
This adaptation is heavily modified, but I think it adds to the whole thing. Soviet artists had an uncanny talent for making everything that's unsettling even more so.
One thing which I find striking here is that a modern home and attendant conveniences roughly embodies 10--15 horsepower of effort, or the work of 40 or so full time house staff.
Thus far, the only notable robots are little disks which vacuum up floors (and they're getting outlawed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104371 ) and some innovations just haven't become widespread (an uncle of mine piped his home for a central vacuum system, compleat w/ a switch at each connection for on/off) --- I really can't recall a device with widespread demand since DVD and then Blueray players (or maybe the Wii? the PS2 counts as a DVD player arguably). I don't know anyone who has done more than read about "Smart Mirrors" for example....
What will be the first device to bottle up AI and other modern technologies in a package and become widely in-demand/distributed?
> What will be the first device to bottle up AI and other modern technologies in a package and become widely in-demand
One problem I see is that corporations insist on collecting and reselling our data. As a result, a lot of people are reticent to get much automation. They seem to accept it with TVs, but other devices - it's just too much of an intrusion.
I say "a lot of people" but I don't know how many people it is, exactly.
There was recently a bit of a controversy with a refrigerator that had a big monitor on the door. That could actually be a cool feature: it could show you what's inside before you open the door. You could access it remotely if you're at the store and trying to remember if you have milk at home. But of course, the company started putting ads on it, and undoubtedly they're selling your data.
> it could show you what's inside before you open the door
I've always thought it would be cool to have transparent doors so you could see inside without needing to open the doors. Obviously, most people do not have "neat" fridge interiors and would be considered ugly and not a good look. But having those cool spy room windows that go frosted or mirrored or some other opaque look with the flip of a switch could solve that. Which tech is less expensive: dimming glass or cameras and monitors?
I wonder if you could use two sheets of glass, and have a double-paned system. Maybe even with vacuum or some gas that's an even poorer conductor of heat than air in it.
Bars, restaurants and supermarkets have glass fronted refrigerators and freezers the world over, and yes, most are double glazed.
They're just less efficient and more likely to break. In a commercial environment that's worth it to show off the contents, but the trade off is different in a domestic setting.
This is one for windows --- unfortunately, even the best such windows have a markedly lower R-factor than the much less expensive typical door construction.
Such refrigerators are available for commercial applications --- where the on-going energy usage is offset by the need for customer access, but it would be a huge impact on one's electric bill.
I hate that I'm being an advertisement for the corporate appliance dystopia. I'm sure it's somehow loaded with a whole bunch of surveillance, ads, and other anti-features. And I'm pretty sure it was from a brand where repair parts are essentially nonexistent. But I was shopping for appliances recently and I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a fridge like this. I think the shaded glass was based on an LCD mechanism.
As far as I can tell, many “regular” people do care and alter buying decisions based on privacy concerns. They use words like “creepy” instead of technical ones, but the underlying discomfort is the same.
I doubt the vast majority of people objecting to ads are doing it because creepy privacy invading reasons compared to just simply who would actually want ads running on a screen on the fridge? Who would actually just stand in front of the fridge watching an ad? Unless they really do something stupid like keep the fridge locked until the ad finishes, but really, who do they think is going to pay attention to it?
This is common for useless products, like smart glasses or pendant-style AI devices. When consumers have clear utility, however, most give away privacy quite willingly.
> When consumers have clear utility, however, most give away privacy quite willingly.
Exhibits 1, 2, and 3; "Smart" phones, "Smart" watches, and pretty much 90% or so of "apps" people install on either from their respective "app stores".
If consumers didn't care, companies wouldn't go to extreme lengths to hide the fact that they are tracking you, and to invent craxier and crazier dark patterns to trick you into giving up your data.
> A screen with an ad on it is objectionable enough, even if the ad is untargeted.
Especially these days when pretty nearly the entire advertising industry has a whole library of "dark patterns" and psychological trickery they've effectively outright "weaponized" against the "consumer class".
the real problem with household robots is that they are either flimsy toys or dangerous machines, and there's not much in-between. If we were to build a humanoid robot that would just put laundry away (as described in a HN article a few weeks ago), it would need to be strong enough to lift a laundry basket, have advanced control systems to go up and down stairs, and also be safe/reliable/trusted enough not to hurt people or damage property. We can do these things (modulo the trust, probably) but the confluence of all of it gets very expensive very quickly.
People want Rosie from the Jetsons, but the compute power required would be astronomical, the mechanical systems would need maintenance, and there would be real safety concerns.
With LLMs, we've got the wisecracking figured out...
It's not expensive, it's an unsolved problem, the main issue for many years has been the modeling of cloth behavior. They already have a folding robot that means they have solved a significant chunk of it.
But the generalization of behaviors is also a large problem. Pick and place is mostly solved I believe, but translating your housework to pick and place in your apartment is still a bit off.
I'm not convinced safety is solved: given how often LLM's hallucinate and automated cars get confused, what happens when something unusual happens and the robot thinks a person's arm needs to be "folded" and breaks it? Or a person's clothing looks like the wall and a robot tries to move their arm through a person's chest?
Sure, for each individual situation one can imagine a safeguard but being in close proximity to unpredictable humans means there are unlimited edge cases... if a humanoid robot is strong enough to do something useful it is also strong enough to be dangerous.
The thing I stumbled over was that the house owner was out mowing the lawn, something that we actually do have robots for nowadays.
But then again, I do enjoy a good, meditative lawn mowing.
We don't build robots because the "hard/boring part" for the human is often NOT the hard part for the robot.
Take the dishwasher, for example, loading it is very hard for a robot, but easy and quick for a human. Washing the dishes is boring for the human, but a robot gets a sort of sick and twisted pleasure from cycling that dirty water around for hours on end.
In fact, we've removed some labor-saving features of houses (laundry chutes went away decades ago, and only recently has "laundry on the bedroom floor" become somewhat standard) for "safety".
I feel like the only person in the world who doesn't mind doing dishes. When we lived in the city, I feel like most of my friends would rather have an in-unit dishwasher than in-unit laundry. For me, doing dishes feels almost meditative.
Doing dishes by hand takes only slightly longer than loading and unloading a dishwasher. Especially modern dishwashers which don't really dry the dishes so you have to hand dry at least some of them before putting them away.
That may be the case but the dishwasher uses less power and water then you do washing dishes.
It's also not like I'm lacking for dishes that need hand washing anyway either: very large sauce pans, pots and chopping boards aren't fitting in the dishwasher anyway.
I'd love a dumbwaiter simply for a place to queue items "this needs to get put away downstairs (next time I am downstairs)" etc. Instead I just use the shelf next to the stairs. Which doesn't work if I'm already carrying something to bring up/down stairs, and that pattern makes it so I'm likely to forget even when my hands are free.
I built a cart/track system that went from the basement to the outside via the bulkhead. It fulfilled that work pattern in some regards, but it also made it hard to pass through those stairs manually [0] so it kind of impeded getting things done. The design that kept the cart level used up way too much of the vertical space. The next version of this idea will be aimed chiefly at heavy things (with the commensurate work to tie down etc), and go through two transitions horizontal-sloped-horizontal,
[0] and yes blocking an exit is fire hazard I know I know
Only new models of robots are banned, FCC approval of previous devices still stands and therefore we can continue to purchase those models. They will just get additionally out of date.
> However, the US ban only covers new advanced robot models, not existing products that have already received FCC equipment authorization for sale in the US. The "action does not impact a consumer’s continued use of devices they previously acquired," the FCC says. "Nor does it prevent retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market relevant models approved previously.”
And Toyota robotics has been trying to solve loading dishwashers for at least 7 years.
And that's all the housework required really, vacuuming, mopping, dishwasher un/loading, picking random stuff off the floor, dusting is another minor thing to have done.
The vast majority of labor has already been solved with dishwashers and washing machines and dryers, electric ovens and stoves.
Loading dishwashers has been solved. Instead of moving the dishes from the storage place to the cleaning place, you just make them both the same place.
I do know at least one couple who have two dishwashers and just alternate which is being used for loading dirty dishes and which is being accessed for clean.
My mother loves fridge magnets, and there was a functional magnet on the dishwasher. It consisted of two oblong wooden signs connected by a chain. The top had a magnet and the bottom dangler was reversible. The top read "DISHES ARE", and you could swap the bottom to read "CLEAN" or "DIRTY"
Now some may ask why anyone would need a sign for such an obvious status. But my parents are boomers, and they maintain a pipeline of dishes such that Dad licks his plate clean, then they are scraped into trash, then rinsed in the sink, then placed in the dishwasher. So perhaps the dishwasher may only be cutting grease and sanitizing, but to the uninitiated, we are thankful for that magnet-sign to tell us whether the dishes are clean, or just look that way.
They also rinse and clean many things before putting them in the trash or recycling. They don't even drink sugary sodas, but every Diet Coke can is meticulously restored to pristine metallic gleam before Dad stomps and crushes them.
I was pleased to augment Mom's magnet collection by traveling to Europe via London. Now there is an official TfL notice on her refrigerator to "MIND THE GAP".
Roomba made some of the first robotic vacuum cleaners and they were based in the US.
Nowadays, they are just more expensive and inferior to the Roborock ones though. But thanks to the wonder of protectionism soon the customer won't be able to pick the better product.
What's "better" for the individual is not necessarily better for the society.
Also I think a better policy than blocking Chinese imports (which is probably not sustainable anyway) would be to require that the software be audited and comply with regulations. Same rules and regulations should apply to robots from all countries.
> What's "better" for the individual is not necessarily better for the society.
Are you a commie? Everybody knows the free-market self-corrects itself if you are not performant enough or good enough, and that personal greed and egoism are the best proxy for society well-being. Nurture them and you will get the best possible society!
There are many ways this could all end, a nuclear war is still on the list.
"Wireheaded by social media so hard you're unemployable" is at least as plausible as a city-scale antipersonel drone strike; even Ukraine's strikes against Russia are around 1200-1800/day.
I suspect the real answer is that between decoys and Russian intel agencies hiding him, and his grip on power that currently means he's going to be in range of useful air defence and a good bunker even if it's literally the last system Russia has left, they likely literally cannot at the present time.
(Not that it changes what I just wrote, but IIRC most of the Russian personel losses are short-range (20 km) antipersonel drones, the long-range stuff is currently targetting materiel, logistics, and whatever you count oil as, in so doing they only incidentally hit people).
That dog scene wrecked me. Last living thing in the house, and the system just cleans it up like it’s another mess. No mourning, no pause. Just efficiency.
I thought this might have been the one about the lush (but dangerous!) Venusian rainforest!
(In Bradbury's time, we knew Venus was covered in thick clouds, and could only speculate about what might be beneath the clouds. Clouds = rain = lush vegetation?)
Same, seeing the title and having not read Bradbury for a long time I was thinking either The Veldt or that one (The Long Rain). I did remember it on reading, though, and it's an unsettling feeling.
I accidentally started a reread of Octiva Butler's Parable of the Sower in late 2024 (I'd read it many years ago, but forgot the timeline). It was eerie...
It impressive how prescient the technology feels. I mean in 2020 I would have thought the fully automated kitchen and the voice that asks which poem one wants to hear as fanciful, now it's kinda tech demo level.
this version seems to be missing large sections compared to the other posted version, like how the mice throughly clean up the debris after the dog's entrance, the dog smelling food through the kitchen door and scratching at it, etc etc
It's interesting to look at the short a story and see where we are still behind on home automation. We still don't have robot firefighting or accurate robot cooking, for example.
My impression was that it had happened several days to a few weeks prior. Enough time for the house through ordinary daily activity to largely exhaust its water reserves. Of course most of today's actual houses don't keep that much on hand, but it sounds like this one had a sizable store at one point.
"There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone."
- Sara Teasdale, 1918
Didn't see the inspiration for Bradbury mentioned here. I love this poem. There's also a great song-rendition of it by The Three D's, a folk group popular in the 50's.
It is really an anti-war poem rather than anti-humanity or about nature in general. Sara Teasdale was forced to write her sentiments obliquely. From Wikipedia:
> "The Sedition Act of 1918 enacted two months before the original publication of "There Will Come Soft Rains" made it a criminal offense to "willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States" and forced Teasdale to express her opposition to World War I "obliquely" in what might appear to be a pastoral poem."
If you think about it, Bradbury's story is also anti-war.
He also had interesting ideas on shopping malls of all things, hoping that they could turn into places where people would socialize besides shopping and that they should have a maze-like layout so that people could get what he called "enjoyably lost" the way people can exploring cities. The since-closed Horton Plaza mall in San Diego had an odd layout and the architect even claimed inspiration from Bradbury for it.
I'm sure that's why mall owners like it but Bradbury was advocating it from the angle of discovering cool alleys with little shops and restaurants like you can in an old chaotic city like Rome.
I spent years of my childhood in Horton Plaza, as well as Seaport Village, Mission Valley Center, and Fashion Valley.
I would say that we never felt “trapped” by Horton’s layout. There were plenty of clearly-marked exits around the perimeter. But the maze features were remarkable and unique for us.
There were bridge walkways with an incline of half a level. There were asymmetrical stairways. The perimeter of stores was not square. There were many levels and elevators. There were no particular “anchor stores” like the big department stores, although the multiplex theater was a focal point.
Elements that kept us inside included food and the aroma of food. Just thinking back to 1989 in Horton, I can practically smell the warm pretzels, cinnamon rolls, and candy stores. There were benches and places to sit. There were sculptures and bold colors and the Jessop’s Clock. Santa Claus and his elves every Christmas. We were in the heart of downtown, but crime was unheard-of and mall rats did not bother us. It was a place to walk around and share family experiences. Perhaps we were the mall rats.
As far as we know life is only present on Earth, we presuppose that in the vastness of Cosmos there are other instances of it or that it can re-emerge from almost zero, but the reality is that we simply don't know. So maybe there is a possibility that wiping out all the life on Earth also wipes it from the entire Cosmos, forever.
The comment was paraphrasing the message of the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains" (which Bradbury used for the title of his story), which is exactly about this: that Nature won't know or care when we're gone.
As long as "it" happens before we poison or otherwise harm our planet beyond some "tipping point" after which Earth becomes "inhospitable" to most/all "complex" life in general.
> Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.
You got downvoted for paraphrasing the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains", from which Bradbury took the title of his story.
I supposed that's to be expected online. Small consolation, but at least some of us understood you :)
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Fun to witness all the things it got right, which we can now remark wasn't close at all. The dystopian robotic future exists somewhere in a Chinese factory if anywhere at all.
In addition to "There Will Come Soft Rains" we have short stories like Stephen Vincent Benét’s "By the Waters of Babylon."
In that story, society has been bombed back to the stone age. Even religion is a stone age recreation. Something like hot and cold running water seems like it must come from gods’ magic.
This short story was particularly meaningful for me when I read it in school. I lived the same distance from New York City as the protagonist. And this was during the last days of the Soviet Union, which had placed my small hometown on its top 10 places to bomb list.
In Walter M. Miller Jr.'s book A Canticle for Liebowitz, we’re back in society that's recreating itself, with the Catholic Church acting as a centralizing force again, as after the fall of Rome and European plagues. Monks discover, collect, copy, and maintain shreds of texts.
Apart from increasing society-level anxiety, that focus on the dramatization of nuclear war is considered to have turned people away from nuclear power. Imagine the different potential outcomes had our authors not been so talented. You can go back to Plato’s Republic for explanations of why sad music, for example, is bad for society. But maybe the real effect was on swaying public opinion, protest movements, regulations, and where people choose to focus their productive talents.
I don't mean that things are fine, just that Nuclear annihilation is less of a concern than some make it out to be.
After reading Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, I'm surprised we as a species are still around.
Indeed he takes some other significant cues from Bradbury - who faced a similar, if less poignant, Road to Damascus moment upon learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
For example, the concept of 'Booklegging' is lifted wholesale from Fahrenheit 451, published a few years prior. Bradbury has oft-cited political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book, and Miller makes his views very clear by the time we encounter the flanderised Atheist in the final third of Canticle - reinforcing his core theme of the juxtaposition of scientific progress and moral wisdom, and the shared thematic motif expressed by Montag in Fahrenheit 451 that the books of the past have messages that can save society from its own destruction.
As such, it is clear to me that the fear of war - and the trendy nihilism imbued by the then innovative atomic variant - doesn't so much affect mid-century fiction as the cultural and societal upheaval seen as the Baby Boomers assumed their place as the generation in ascension. In many ways this echoed the post-WW1 Brideshead Revisted era of England, merely substituting a surplus of capital for a dearth of inheritors.
Thus, while both can be read as atomic jeremiads, they are more appropriately realised as treatises to the social and political mores at the time. The scare for the average American wasn't so much Nuclear as it was 'Red' - something that can be seen in the stubborn cargo-culting of very American Institutions and Practices in the post-apocalyptic canon. As can be seen across the US Sci-Fi Canon, preservation of self is often secondary to the preservation of American Exceptionalism; be it via an ICBM or the stochastic terrorism of McCarthy.
Meanwhile, after 70 years we're still no closer to a safe long term solution for nuclear waste. Every new and untested nuclear reactor design falls into the same pro-innovation bias of failing to address it's own unintended consequences. Like the utterly wild and rarely estimated cost of decommissioning older plants.
But the most unrealistic part of this story is how all the IoT automation continues to work in the absence of the Internet.
It's actually one way this story about the apocalypse is more hopeful than the present day. We don't need the internet to make most of the things in that story work, but in our timeline we'd add it anyway to get and sell those good analytics.
And no one has really come up with an alternative: home assistant is good, but it's not for the non-techy.
I will squarely blame IPv4 for some of this: NAT has meant that the key application people might want to use is broken by default (remote device access) without mediation servers.
Not a luddite but, aside from a couple of Alexas, just no need for any IoT.
Egomaniacs seem to always be the problem, but when one pops up in a country, the people, whether they have a choice or not, protect/ignore them. Your disposable remark, to me, is the key. Most need to wake to this fact and at least talk about it. (As for Hal Lindsay, he's just like any other nutjob author who uses grains of some truth to create fear and anxiety to promote his narrative.)
The sirens still exist, but the test schedule has slowed dramatically.
Some members of the Trump administration / military say a specific goal is to bring about Armageddon, and have not been fired for it:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran...
Other religious fanatics outside the gov’t take a more circumspect public stand on this particular holy war, but aim to use the Supreme Court to convert the US into a religious dictatorship.
Here’s a primary source; an interview with the defense secretary’s pastor:
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/06/nx-s1-5822558/pastor-doug-wil...
And it would have happened for real if not for one man's refusal to push the button: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
That overhanging fear has been replaced by climate change and political instability but the foundations for it still remain.
What do you find unreasonably hateful in the statement?
But I agree that adding the whiteness status of the men doesn't add to the story. The distinguishing characteristics of the men were they were rich and powerful. There are many people in the United States who despite their whiteness, suffer injustice, lived in poverty, and are oppressed by powerful interests.
The above does not erase the fact that systemic racism impacts Black and Hispanic Americans significantly to this day, and work to mitigate this should continue.
"About four-in-ten U.S. adults believe humanity is ‘living in the end times’"
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/08/about-fou...
"Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats to believe they will be taken up in the biblical Rapture, according to a new YouGov poll."
"The September 23 poll of 4,041 U.S. adults found that 63 percent of Republicans said they would be more likely to be taken up, compared with 40 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of independents. "
https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-more-likely-to-believe-...
> In the 2016 presidential election, exit polls reported that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump
> Evangelicals generally view the Middle East through a dispensationalist biblical framework and strongly support Israel. Often perceived as the most vocal supporters of Christian Zionism in the West, they believe that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews and that the U.S. will be blessed if it blesses Israel. The establishment of the State of Israel was seen by many American Protestants as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, reinforcing their commitment to Zionism as a religious duty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism_in_the_United_S...
Anecdotally; Growing up in the NorthWest USA, I knew entirely too many (crazy to my mind yet considered perfectly "normal" by most "average" folk back then) people in the 1980s who genuinely believed that Revelations' "rain fire from the Heavens" in the bible meant "Nuclear War" and Jesus would arrive momentarily thereafter "leading a host of angels" to "rapture the faithful" and/or "smite the wicked" who survived that initial "rain of heavenly fire".
What scares me even more than that kinda craziness bein' way more common back then than it should'a been is that too many (still crazy people IMHO) still believe such madness today and some of those people are in charge of (or at least in positions of significant power) entire nations with huge stockpiles of WMDs at their disposal.
And why on earth was that dad mowing when the house was able to take care of it?
This adaptation is heavily modified, but I think it adds to the whole thing. Soviet artists had an uncanny talent for making everything that's unsettling even more so.
We'll see this post again on that date!
All joking aside; an excellent animation
Thus far, the only notable robots are little disks which vacuum up floors (and they're getting outlawed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104371 ) and some innovations just haven't become widespread (an uncle of mine piped his home for a central vacuum system, compleat w/ a switch at each connection for on/off) --- I really can't recall a device with widespread demand since DVD and then Blueray players (or maybe the Wii? the PS2 counts as a DVD player arguably). I don't know anyone who has done more than read about "Smart Mirrors" for example....
What will be the first device to bottle up AI and other modern technologies in a package and become widely in-demand/distributed?
One problem I see is that corporations insist on collecting and reselling our data. As a result, a lot of people are reticent to get much automation. They seem to accept it with TVs, but other devices - it's just too much of an intrusion.
I say "a lot of people" but I don't know how many people it is, exactly.
There was recently a bit of a controversy with a refrigerator that had a big monitor on the door. That could actually be a cool feature: it could show you what's inside before you open the door. You could access it remotely if you're at the store and trying to remember if you have milk at home. But of course, the company started putting ads on it, and undoubtedly they're selling your data.
I've always thought it would be cool to have transparent doors so you could see inside without needing to open the doors. Obviously, most people do not have "neat" fridge interiors and would be considered ugly and not a good look. But having those cool spy room windows that go frosted or mirrored or some other opaque look with the flip of a switch could solve that. Which tech is less expensive: dimming glass or cameras and monitors?
They're just less efficient and more likely to break. In a commercial environment that's worth it to show off the contents, but the trade off is different in a domestic setting.
Such refrigerators are available for commercial applications --- where the on-going energy usage is offset by the need for customer access, but it would be a huge impact on one's electric bill.
This is common for useless products, like smart glasses or pendant-style AI devices. When consumers have clear utility, however, most give away privacy quite willingly.
Exhibits 1, 2, and 3; "Smart" phones, "Smart" watches, and pretty much 90% or so of "apps" people install on either from their respective "app stores".
E.g. when iOS introduced "ask apps to not track", 96% of users clicked "do not track": https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o...
If consumers didn't care, companies wouldn't go to extreme lengths to hide the fact that they are tracking you, and to invent craxier and crazier dark patterns to trick you into giving up your data.
Especially these days when pretty nearly the entire advertising industry has a whole library of "dark patterns" and psychological trickery they've effectively outright "weaponized" against the "consumer class".
People want Rosie from the Jetsons, but the compute power required would be astronomical, the mechanical systems would need maintenance, and there would be real safety concerns.
With LLMs, we've got the wisecracking figured out...
But the generalization of behaviors is also a large problem. Pick and place is mostly solved I believe, but translating your housework to pick and place in your apartment is still a bit off.
Sure, for each individual situation one can imagine a safeguard but being in close proximity to unpredictable humans means there are unlimited edge cases... if a humanoid robot is strong enough to do something useful it is also strong enough to be dangerous.
My son would adore a humanoid robot around the house, but could I leave him unsupervised around it?
Take the dishwasher, for example, loading it is very hard for a robot, but easy and quick for a human. Washing the dishes is boring for the human, but a robot gets a sort of sick and twisted pleasure from cycling that dirty water around for hours on end.
In fact, we've removed some labor-saving features of houses (laundry chutes went away decades ago, and only recently has "laundry on the bedroom floor" become somewhat standard) for "safety".
MAKE DUMBWAITERS GREAT AGAIN
I feel like the only person in the world who doesn't mind doing dishes. When we lived in the city, I feel like most of my friends would rather have an in-unit dishwasher than in-unit laundry. For me, doing dishes feels almost meditative.
(But I do hate folding/putting away clothes.)
It's also not like I'm lacking for dishes that need hand washing anyway either: very large sauce pans, pots and chopping boards aren't fitting in the dishwasher anyway.
I built a cart/track system that went from the basement to the outside via the bulkhead. It fulfilled that work pattern in some regards, but it also made it hard to pass through those stairs manually [0] so it kind of impeded getting things done. The design that kept the cart level used up way too much of the vertical space. The next version of this idea will be aimed chiefly at heavy things (with the commensurate work to tie down etc), and go through two transitions horizontal-sloped-horizontal,
[0] and yes blocking an exit is fire hazard I know I know
> However, the US ban only covers new advanced robot models, not existing products that have already received FCC equipment authorization for sale in the US. The "action does not impact a consumer’s continued use of devices they previously acquired," the FCC says. "Nor does it prevent retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market relevant models approved previously.”
And Toyota robotics has been trying to solve loading dishwashers for at least 7 years.
And that's all the housework required really, vacuuming, mopping, dishwasher un/loading, picking random stuff off the floor, dusting is another minor thing to have done.
The vast majority of labor has already been solved with dishwashers and washing machines and dryers, electric ovens and stoves.
Now some may ask why anyone would need a sign for such an obvious status. But my parents are boomers, and they maintain a pipeline of dishes such that Dad licks his plate clean, then they are scraped into trash, then rinsed in the sink, then placed in the dishwasher. So perhaps the dishwasher may only be cutting grease and sanitizing, but to the uninitiated, we are thankful for that magnet-sign to tell us whether the dishes are clean, or just look that way.
They also rinse and clean many things before putting them in the trash or recycling. They don't even drink sugary sodas, but every Diet Coke can is meticulously restored to pristine metallic gleam before Dad stomps and crushes them.
I was pleased to augment Mom's magnet collection by traveling to Europe via London. Now there is an official TfL notice on her refrigerator to "MIND THE GAP".
I'd be in favor of Apple entering that market.
I think they'll be a huge first-mover advantage because of the Chinese blockade preventing cheap clones.
Nowadays, they are just more expensive and inferior to the Roborock ones though. But thanks to the wonder of protectionism soon the customer won't be able to pick the better product.
Also I think a better policy than blocking Chinese imports (which is probably not sustainable anyway) would be to require that the software be audited and comply with regulations. Same rules and regulations should apply to robots from all countries.
Are you a commie? Everybody knows the free-market self-corrects itself if you are not performant enough or good enough, and that personal greed and egoism are the best proxy for society well-being. Nurture them and you will get the best possible society!
(yeah, I'm being sarcastic)
The admin seems to have a tendency to fearmonger over China and then ban or tariff globally. Allies don't exist apparently.
Aren't our only "allies" Russia and North Korea now?
I find the presence of a microphone sufficiently creepy that that was a non-starter for me, and I didn't pay attention after the initial launch.
https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles/XMinusO...
I one of the reasons I liked the story was the embedded poetry. It adds a mindful stillness that creates a poignancy.
Drives home the point how few anticipated that batteries would advance so much.
"Wireheaded by social media so hard you're unemployable" is at least as plausible as a city-scale antipersonel drone strike; even Ukraine's strikes against Russia are around 1200-1800/day.
I suspect the real answer is that between decoys and Russian intel agencies hiding him, and his grip on power that currently means he's going to be in range of useful air defence and a good bunker even if it's literally the last system Russia has left, they likely literally cannot at the present time.
(Not that it changes what I just wrote, but IIRC most of the Russian personel losses are short-range (20 km) antipersonel drones, the long-range stuff is currently targetting materiel, logistics, and whatever you count oil as, in so doing they only incidentally hit people).
(In Bradbury's time, we knew Venus was covered in thick clouds, and could only speculate about what might be beneath the clouds. Clouds = rain = lush vegetation?)
over and over, “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is …”
Nice.
And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone."
- Sara Teasdale, 1918
Didn't see the inspiration for Bradbury mentioned here. I love this poem. There's also a great song-rendition of it by The Three D's, a folk group popular in the 50's.
https://youtu.be/mTEUrdKehSg
> "The Sedition Act of 1918 enacted two months before the original publication of "There Will Come Soft Rains" made it a criminal offense to "willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States" and forced Teasdale to express her opposition to World War I "obliquely" in what might appear to be a pastoral poem."
If you think about it, Bradbury's story is also anti-war.
I would say that we never felt “trapped” by Horton’s layout. There were plenty of clearly-marked exits around the perimeter. But the maze features were remarkable and unique for us.
There were bridge walkways with an incline of half a level. There were asymmetrical stairways. The perimeter of stores was not square. There were many levels and elevators. There were no particular “anchor stores” like the big department stores, although the multiplex theater was a focal point.
Elements that kept us inside included food and the aroma of food. Just thinking back to 1989 in Horton, I can practically smell the warm pretzels, cinnamon rolls, and candy stores. There were benches and places to sit. There were sculptures and bold colors and the Jessop’s Clock. Santa Claus and his elves every Christmas. We were in the heart of downtown, but crime was unheard-of and mall rats did not bother us. It was a place to walk around and share family experiences. Perhaps we were the mall rats.
Amazing story, though.
We have phones to do that for us.
As long as "it" happens before we poison or otherwise harm our planet beyond some "tipping point" after which Earth becomes "inhospitable" to most/all "complex" life in general.
You got downvoted for paraphrasing the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains", from which Bradbury took the title of his story.
I supposed that's to be expected online. Small consolation, but at least some of us understood you :)
It's set in November, not August, and another 27 years further in the future (at least the version currently linked to on the front page).
Is it not in the original?