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There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

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Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#251

Post by schiffern »

paulorlando wrote: post #201

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 co…

  >It seems quaint now,
It goes up and down. Some days I wish it seemed more quaint.

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#252

Post by rob74 »

armagon wrote: post #177

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...

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#253

Post by CTDOCodebases »

jhbadger wrote: post #128
CTDOCodebases wrote: post #87

I liked Ray Bradbury's thoughts on the internet when it first came into existence

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 think the maze thing is a strategy that mall operators use to trap shoppers in them and encourage them to spend more.

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#254

Post by mindslight »

bombcar wrote: post #140
WillAdams wrote: post #98

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…

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 hou…

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 use those stairs manually [0] so it also 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

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#255

Post by SoftTalker »

mindslight wrote: post #215
armagon wrote: post #177

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?

I've got a neighbor who I'm pretty sure would still be out there.

Mine would be... at 8:30pm... on a Sunday... running the Dixie Chopper.

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#256

Post by dbspin »

paulorlando wrote: post #201

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 co…

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.

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#257

Post by pimlottc »

vulcan01 wrote: post #197
jrsdav wrote: post #175

"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…

This poem is in the short story.

I think they mean it hasn't been discussed in the comments

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#258

Post by XorNot »

troyvit wrote: post #150
thrtythreeforty wrote: post #134

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.

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#259

Post by billiam »

paulorlando wrote: post #201

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 co…

Quaint? We are the closest we've ever been to nuclear annihilation, according to the experts: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/
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