The Threat of the Digital Age - "There Will Come Soft Rains"

(Google Images: EC Comics & Ray Bradbury)

How should we feel about the post-apocalyptic story of the AI house in “There Will Come Soft Rains”? Does the story hit us differently now that we’re in a digital age?

Now the truth of the matter is that the story can be read in several ways. While I realize that type of analysis is eye-rolling, I believe “There Will Come Soft Rains” is a more difficult story to decipher due to its ambiguity. Answering the digital threat question would’ve been much easier with “The Machine Stops.” The story only gives us a sequence of events and their descriptions. We, as the readers, are left to decipher the story on our own. Yet to my surprise, many people in class expressed how they felt sad reading the story. However, I believed this story rang a scarier tone than a sad one for me.

The initial premise of the story is about how the essence of humanity is boiled down to an artificial intelligence house that follows the routine of a family -- a glimpse of what was and will never be again. Many found this tidbit depressing. A house is left all alone to continue on in pure bliss until its inevitable downfall: We pity its loneliness. We even see a sad sick dog draw its last breath, never to be seen again. We learn that the children had their own playroom, the mother had a hobby of listening to the poems from her favorite poet, and the family ate a “standard American” breakfast.

Yet, if the house was the sole survivor of a nuclear explosion, we can imply that humans have more or less outdone themselves. They’ve created objects that not only fail to protect their human creators but also manage to outlive its purpose. Technology has already become too powerful. We’ve given technology permission to run our lives. We’ll forget how to cook, how to remember things, or even how to write nicely. The reason I find the post-apocalyptic tech genre so threatening is due to its proximity to our age. We currently have self-driving cars to AI assistants like the Google Home, Alexa, or Siri. Considering that Ray Bradbury wrote the story in 1950 leads me to believe our lives are scarier than ever before. One man’s fictional story is turning into reality. While a nuclear attack is one of the last worries on my list, the idea of a house knowing everything about you isn’t too far away. August 2026 is now a measly six years away and could very well be the time frame needed to create an independent intelligent household.

The schedule of the house alone proves the monotony of humanity’s day-to-day life. We’ve become robots ourselves -- and, in all honesty, bad ones. Perhaps all forms of technology failed, would I survive? Have I relied on technology so much that I would end up stranded in the middle of the highway if my car broke down and I couldn’t search up a solution or contact help? Scratch that idea, I would die eating the wrong plant. The advance in technology isn’t what we should fear, per se, but what happens to us as we rely on it. Do we really want the last essence of humanity represented by a robot bird cawing from a pile of rubble?