Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set today (2026-08-04)

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 those American evangelicals are still cheering on the apocalypse, but they're even more entrenched in politics and the judiciary. Some major decisions during the two Trump admins were made entirely based on Rapture accelerationism, e.g. moving the US embassy to Jerusalem to fulfill Biblical prophecy.

Come now, this is A) not true B) anti-religious bigotry.

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.

All joking aside; an excellent animation

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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...

"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.

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).

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.