Okay, here's the deal: Luddite No iCar shudders at the thought of the inevitable iCar and has made herself heard (and will continue to do so) in her other blog, but she has accepted the fact that progress will march on, with or without her. By virtue of her presence here, she has accepted, albeit with the help of her 12-year-old brainiac sprout, the coming of the iCar, manufactured by Apple/VW or even some young upstart car-computer manufacturer upstaging The Big Apple Corporation.
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She may even end up driving a knockoff/generic version of the iCar, though she will refrain from standing in long lines to purchase one at twice the reasonable price. In fact, she will wait so long to fall into cultural lockstep that she will be able to dicker for a year-old model at the Volkswagen dealership or pick up one used on eBay Motors.
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Ray Bradbury's 1950 cautionary cold war tale "August 2026" There Will Come Soft Rains" offers all techheads a warning about depending too much on technology that does everything for them except wipe their...or, maybe that too.
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In this short story, the main character is a fully automatized house that continues its routine of tending to the McClellan family's needs, days after the mother, father, and two children have been vaporized to burnt shadows by a Hiroshima-like bomb that has been dropped on their California town by a non-specified enemy.
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Software that runs tech gadgets is rather stupid and not at all intuitive, at least in a human sense; instead of saying, "Oh! My masters are dead! Time to par-TEE with the other houses on the block," our hero iHouse simply continues soldiering on. iHouse does not question, "Why? Why are all my people no longer here"? It just does its chores until it can no longer do so and eventually explodes and burns up with its owners.
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Tut, tut.
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Of course, in 1950, when he published this story, Bradbury seemed more concerned and preoccupied with the possibility of The Bomb coming to a town near him, but Bradbury's iHouse itself is an interesting study of technology's overall societal impact, such as more leisure time, increased wealth (at least for some), and a sharp rise in obesity rates (more on this in a later post).
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With August 27th's rumor of an iCar going viral throughout the internet and September 6th's "Apple Event," this phantom vehicle has been a topic of heated discussion on various forums: Engadget, MacForums, and MacRumors.
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For those who are excited by the prospect, one might pause and take a lesson from this excerpt from Bradbury's short story"August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains":
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In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o'clock! as if it were afraid nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!
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In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunnyside up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.
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"Today is August 4, 2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling., "in the city of Allendale, California." It repeated the date three times for memory's sake. "Today is Mr. Featherstone's birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita's marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills."
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Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.
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Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o'clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one! But no doors slammed, no carpets took the soft tread of rubber heels. It was raining outside. The weather box on the fron door sang quietly: "Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today..." And the rain tapped on the empty house, echoing.
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Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. After a long wait the door swung down again.
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At eight-thirty the eggs were shriveled and the toast was like stone. An aluminum wedge scraped them down a metal throat which digested and flushed them away to the distant sea. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and emerged twinkling dry.
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Nine-fifteen, sang the clock, time to clean.
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Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were acrawl with the small cleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached runners, kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust.Then, like mysterious invaders, they popped into their burrows. Their pink electric eye faded. The house was clean.
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Ten o'clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave of a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.
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Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titantic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hand raised to catch a ball which never came down.
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The five spots of paint--the man, the woman, the children, the ball--remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.
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The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.
The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.
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Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace. How carefully it had inquired, "Who goes there? What's the password?" and, getting no answer from the lonely foxes and whining cats, it had shut up its windows and drawn shades in an old-maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia (1).
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From Bradbury's fictional iHouse--the real future version might very well be called the iAppleHaus--one can extrapolate some of the characteristics that might be found in an iCar, a topic for a future post.
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(1) Excerpt from Ray Bradbury's "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains." Originally published in Collier's, 6 May 1950.
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