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"Tokyo homeless people reiterate the whole nature of living in Tokyo in cardboard boxes, they're only slightly smaller than Tokyo apartments, and they have almost as many consumer goods. It's a nightmare of boxes within boxes."
- William Gibson
 |
| Happylife Home | ||
| An automated multi-media home, which provided the good life to its inhabitants. |
Ray Bradbury shared the 50's fascination with gadgets and technology for the home. In 1950, fewer than 10% of homes had televisions. By 1960, over 90% did. In reading the following excerpt, see how quickly Bradbury skips over the intervening generations of technology to get to what people in 1950's really wanted.
| They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them. Their approach sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, lights went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft automaticity |
| Technovelgy from The Illustrated Man,
by Ray Bradbury. Published by Doubleday in 1951 Additional resources -
|
This item is taken from "The Veldt", the first story in the collection.
The single largest difference that I can see between this scenario and the typical vision of the "automated house" of the 21st century is that, for us, control is what we really want. Products like HAL (Home Automated Living) are a set of control devices that allow the user to wirelessly and remotely control the various devices in the home. The vision of technology that Bradbury saw (and feared, which we can deduce from the veiled sarcasm in this passage) is that of a technology that replaces the human touch; the technology provides care for the people.
For more on this topic, see the comments for The Veldt, from the same novel.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Illustrated Man
More Ideas
and Technology by Ray Bradbury
Tech news articles related to The Illustrated Man
Tech news articles related to works by Ray Bradbury
Happylife Home-related
news articles:
- Smart Home Provides Elder Care
- A Smart Home With Cyber Crumbs - Bradbury's Happylife Home?
- RoomRender Futuristic Smart Room
- Space Robot Knows Your Mood
- WellAWARE Passive Sensor Monitoring Of Elderly
- Time For Bradbury's 'Smart Home'?
- LG Smart Home AI Agent
| AI-THu Shapeshifting Transformer Home |
| With Mycotecture, We'll Just Grow The Space Habitats We Need |
| Vast Apartment Living Will Get Even More Vast |
| LiquidView Ersatz Windows, ala Philip K. Dick |
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'... an artificial intelligence equal to the human.'
'Rayno folded up the microterm and tucked it back inside his jumper.'
'Nemourlon armor of reasonable weight resists penetration by most fragments and any bullet that is not both reasonably heavy and fairly high-velocity.'
'Several thousand of them formed the positioning grid on the rubble pile.'
'Its slack walls tightened, bulged, were crossed by ripples and waves of movement.'
'Norman... had never ridden any motorized device that lacked onboard steering and balance systems.'
You will note that HG Wells also figured out the aspect ratio of the future!
'As though a switch had been turned off, the pain stopped...'
'At the ringside opposite them a table had been removed to make room for a large transparent plastic capsule on wheels.'
