Ray Bradbury is often credited with the gift of prophecy. What most people mean by this is that he had an uncanny understanding of fear. The Martian Chronicles, a series of short stories first published together in 1950, is the most compact expression of his gift. Its penultimate chapter, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” is barely a story; it is just a description of what we would now call a “smart house,” left behind after an atomic blast has destroyed San Francisco. Its four occupants, a husband, wife, and two children, have been dead for months—incinerated in the side yard—but the house carries on as if nothing has gone wrong. Every morning the alarm rings, the self-cooking stove makes breakfast, the self-guided vacuum cleans the rugs. In the afternoon the automatic sprinklers water what remains of the lawn, and in the evening the house produces martinis, cigars, and other entertainment. For a time, it does not seem to matter that there is no one there to enjoy the service. “The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs,” Bradbury writes. “But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.” At night, the walls whir and buzz, preparing for the next day, while “the city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.”
Of course, even the most elegant machines eventually fail. One summer evening a tree falls on the house, starting a grease fire in the kitchen. The fire spreads rapidly. Try as it might, the house cannot save itself from destruction. In its death throes, it attempts to perform all of its functions at once.
Choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.
“There Will Come Soft Rains” is Bradbury at his best. Although he was an inconsistent stylist and a middling storyteller, he knew how to draw a sharp scene in a few strokes. He didn’t need any more than that to convey the frantic anxiety of post-war American life, the crazy-making suspicion that in our national race for progress, we had misplaced our purpose, “emphasizing machines instead of how to run machines.” And the story remains interesting because the kind of thing it describes, a house equipped with autonomously run gadgets, does exist now, and its governing force is artificial intelligence. If you fear the future, it is easy to look on “There Will Come Soft Rains” as prophecy.
But what would it actually be like to live in Bradbury’s house? This question is more or less what the tech reporter Joanna Stern seeks to answer in I Am Not a Robot, the result of her year-long experiment in letting A.I. direct her life. “What would I find out when every part of life had AI intertwined with it?” Stern asks. “No more marketing hype, vague pleasantries, or dystopian hand-wringing. I wanted real, tangible answers.” For Stern, this means testing a lot of products and allowing A.I. to mediate her interactions with “health care, work, entertainment, relationships, therapy, travel, sex, you name it.” She only has one rule: “If something was useful, I kept it. If it wasn’t, I dropped it.”
Most of these experiments end inevitably in disappointment. Stern discovers that automation may unburden her of certain responsibilities, but it doesn’t improve the quality of her life. A.I. toothbrushes, A.I. cooking assistants, A.I. glasses—they promise to optimize everything from personal hygiene to hobbies to sense perception, but none manages to deliver. The toothbrush only directs her to more dental products; the cookbook only dishes up slop; the glasses are too easily broken. The Bradbury house, where such devices run effortlessly—maybe a little too effortlessly—is just a fantasy. In reality, even when these devices work as intended, many of them make daily life noticeably worse.
The most instructive example is Stern’s experience with Waymo, the self-driving taxi service. She spends a week testing the cars with her family in Phoenix, where the wide roads and permissive government have allowed the company to establish an outsized presence. As part of the stunt, Stern hires a photographer to take pictures of the car driving around with her and the kids in the back seat. All goes well until the photographer leans out the passenger window of his car to get a better shot of the Waymo. The taxi, unable to process this new information, brakes sharply and attempts to pull over. Only there is no shoulder. The car is left stuck halfway on the highway, halfway off, with a full family of terrified passengers inside.
Later, Stern asks Waymo’s chief product officer, Saswat Panigrahi, what went wrong. His response is not encouraging: the car detected an unknown object and acted defensively. There is perverse logic to this behavior. Almost since the beginning, Waymo has been the subject of controversy, so the company has responded by attempting to make its products hyper-focused on safety. But because A.I. systems lack the ability to think as a human being would, making judgements and decisions based on practical contingencies, this means that the cars behave with a mechanical paranoia. Avoiding hitting pedestrians becomes the ultimate goal, no matter the cost, even if it means endangering its passengers. The car is not designed for its occupants; it is designed to minimize liability.
Panigrahi defends Waymo as a high-minded effort to reduce traffic fatalities, but Stern is skeptical. After speaking to him, she interviews Phil Koopman, who studies traffic data at Carnegie Mellon. The company, he says, advertises its vehicles as safer than human-driven cars, but this is based on a misrepresentation of the statistics. In fact, no one can say for sure whether Waymo is any safer than traditional cars. Autonomous vehicles have not been around long enough; there isn’t enough data to analyze. And, even if Waymo were safer in one way, it is just as likely to be dangerous in another.
“Robotaxis also make mistakes; they make mistakes for different reasons,” he says. “They don’t get drunk, but they have software defects. They have gaps in the training data. People are really good at ‘What the heck is that?’ Machine learning can be terrible at that.”
The most depressing of Stern’s experiments is when she allows A.I. to compose her bedtime stories. Just like a student feeding an essay prompt into Claude, she asks her personal chatbot to write stories about a family of hamsters for her son. “The stories were easier, sure, but also flatter, less alive,” she writes. “Over time, my own creativity began to wilt.” Even when she swears off using A.I. to write the stories, she finds that she cannot help herself. It has become habit. She admits that “outsourcing imagination comes with a cost.”
Stern interviews a lot of experts working on A.I., and most seem excited about the prospect of machines imitating and eventually replacing their human creators. Almost to a man (there are very few women in this field), they tell her that the shift is just around the corner. Stern notes that this optimism is sustained by a near-constant revision of timelines. In 2016, Geoffrey Hinton, the cognitive scientist whose work helped make A.I. possible, predicted that A.I. radiologists would imminently replace human ones: “It’s just completely obvious within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.” By 2023, that had not happened. Hinton said that he was still “completely right,” only on a longer timeline. “I believe that in 10 years they’ll be routinely used to give a second opinion and maybe in 15 years they’ll be so good at giving opinions that the doctor’s opinion will be the second one,” he said. In 2033, he will have a chance to revisit these predictions again.
There’s a grating hubris in many of these predictions. Stern interviews Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, who tells her that because of his product, “I would bet that there is more genuine human connection in the future, not less.” He is talking about ChatGPT. As with so many of his other predictions, Altman comes up short on details, leaving Stern again skeptical. Ultimately, she settles on a middle position between optimism and despair. It is bleak in its own way. A.I., “like social media before it,” Sterns writes, “could quietly pull us apart—this time not just from other people, but from ourselves. It could make us even dumber, even more reliant on technology. Actually, let me just say it: It will do those things.”
Social media is an interesting point of comparison. Its changing place in American life is the subject of Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s Story of Your Life. Jezer-Morton, who blogs about the Internet for The Cut, observes a generational shift in the way that most people interact with social media. Its early adopters, Gen X and Millennials, were inveterate posters who used Facebook, Twitter, and the like essentially as online scrapbooks. The younger generations have not been so profligate in their self-expression. Over the decades, Jezer-Morton writes, social media users have divided into two classes: influencers and consumers. Both are hopelessly hooked. And getting out without getting offline entirely is very difficult, maybe impossible. Everyone is “swimming in the same flow of information, trying to latch on to a stable sense of self against a very strong current.”
Like Stern, Jezer-Morton offers no solutions, only observations. She finds that like A.I., social media promises to improve the quality of people’s lives, but it cannot deliver. But the way in which it fails is different. A.I. dangles the fulfillment of the desire for convenience; social media claims it can satiate the desire for happiness. Of course, all it can do is offer an image of happiness, without offering any clue about how to attain it. And, increasingly, Jezer-Morton writes, that image is the same one. She, too, makes a pilgrimage to Phoenix, a city that people travel to because it reminds them of Instagram: a “neutral-hued look that is simultaneously tonally minimalist and materially maximalist—a veneer of stylistic constraint painted over an absolutely complete commitment to consumer culture.” Although this look is boring and flat, many people crave it, she writes, because of a desire for conformity: “visually conforming spaces that are easily legible on Instagram are still the most appealing places to take pictures, precisely because they make easy work out of taking pictures that look ‘correct.’”
But there is nothing beneath the image. That’s the whole point. Jezer-Morton compares scrolling on Instagram to using ChatGPT to write a college essay. Just as the student who skips over what he thinks of as the unnecessary step of prose composition to arrive at his convincing “argument” ends up missing the point of writing, so too do social media users find themselves deceived by the decontextualized evidence of a felicity to which they cannot themselves even aspire. “They’ll have the right answers but none of the skills needed to reach those answers by themselves,” Jezer-Morton writes. “Instagram shows us what evidence of family happiness looks like, but without any information about what it takes to create it.”
Smooth, effortless, empty—it puts me back in mind of Bradbury’s house. “There Will Come Soft Rains” takes its title from the poem by Sara Teasdale, which a mechanical voice reads aloud in an empty living room.
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.
Teasdale wrote the poem during the First World War, when it appeared that European civilization would wipe itself out, as indeed it did. With all the people gone, the natural world remains, indifferent to our disappearance, just as joyous as before. Bradbury twists that sentiment cruelly. We build machines to replace us, and replace us they do. Once we are gone, the machines persist, acting out a mockery of human ritual. They are not like the frogs singing or robins whistling: their indifference is cold, metallic. They don’t notice that we are gone because they never noticed we were there in the first place.
In the story, every morning the house calls out the date to no one in particular. This time, as I was re-reading it, I felt an odd prickle in the back of my neck. Maybe Bradbury did have a touch of the prophetic about him after all. “There Will Come Soft Rains” takes place on August 4, 2026.
