Posted by pmg101 4 days ago
In addition to "There Will Come Soft Rains" we have short stories like Stephen Vincent Benét’s "By the Waters of Babylon."
In that story, society has been bombed back to the stone age. Even religion is a stone age recreation. Something like hot and cold running water seems like it must come from gods’ magic.
This short story was particularly meaningful for me when I read it in school. I lived the same distance from New York City as the protagonist. And this was during the last days of the Soviet Union, which had placed my small hometown on its top 10 places to bomb list.
In Walter M. Miller Jr.'s book A Canticle for Liebowitz, we’re back in society that's recreating itself, with the Catholic Church acting as a centralizing force again, as after the fall of Rome and European plagues. Monks discover, collect, copy, and maintain shreds of texts.
Apart from increasing society-level anxiety, that focus on the dramatization of nuclear war is considered to have turned people away from nuclear power. Imagine the different potential outcomes had our authors not been so talented. You can go back to Plato’s Republic for explanations of why sad music, for example, is bad for society. But maybe the real effect was on swaying public opinion, protest movements, regulations, and where people choose to focus their productive talents.
Quite the reverse. That people say that the fear of war (nuclear or not) is "quaint" means that the wealthy and privileged first world has forgotten about war and that's not a normal state of affairs. The 18th and 19th centuries were wracked by war after war between major powers, culminating in the First World War ("the war to end all wars" remember?) and then Second World War in the first half of the 20th century. It was very surprising to everyone that another global war hadn't materialized by the 1980s.
Fear not, military rearmament spending worldwide has shot upwards as nations prepare for the inevitable wars to see who will be the new global top dog. We are all about to re-learn some old lessons, albeit at a heavy cost.
Apart from perceptions, however real they were ... the hundreds of silos and missiles and thosaunds of bombs, whoever built them (names??) made a shit-ton of money (on both sides). 'Defense' spending relies on the manufacture of fears.
No more nuclear duck and cover drills; no more fallout shelters scattered around cities.
Look at the history of that clock and tell me if you think it's a useful timepiece.
Maybe this is a bit, but just a bit, better (though backward looking): https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the+bomb%2Cnuc...
With modern hydrogen bombs, they are largely a farce anyway. Still, we are only one misinterpreted event away from nuclear escalation. The fact that Russia hasn't used a tactical nuke against Ukraine yet is a miracle and largely thanks to China:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/07/11/asia-pacific/ch...
I think under Biden, there were two safeguards: China + Biden threatening to sink the black sea fleet in retaliation. But yeah, Trump's primary international strategy is: whatever lines 'me and my bro's pockets'. If anything, his policies have been a message to many countries that it's probably better to get your own nukes in case the US has you in their crosshairs.
Every person who died of preventable illness because they couldn't afford healthcare? Death by capitalism. Every dude who puts a bullet in their head because of financial strain? Death by capitalism. Every person who's ever died of complications of malnutrition while their country exports food (the U.K., large swathes of Africa).
Numbers are meaningless when you don't put them in context.
Placing people in a cage and not allowing them to grow food or provide for themselves is similarly murder, not "failing to assign resources"
Your language is worthy of HR layoff talk, but used to describe mass human death, the forced control of dictators to prevent people from having the basic freedom to care for themselves.
Further, placing this in the context of "oh it capitalism also resulted in massive deaths thus we shan't be critical of the dictators doing it" is, uh, much much worse.
You mean, those who were forcibly starved by their government, those who were forcibly murdered and displaced by their government, and those who were put into forced labor "re-education" work camps by their government.
I'm not talking about the baseline of human problems and suffering that is everywhere -- that's not communism's fault. Communism is responsible for the large increase in death rate following a country's fall to it, and especially for the murders it commits (literally shooting, hanging, decapitating, working to death in gulags, etc., as well as imprisoning and persecuting dissidents and mass theft of peoples' property leading to mass poverty).
The vast power communist leaders hold always corrupts them and turns them into monsters.
> go over to the west and count up all the people who died of preventable means
> Death by capitalism.
You might as well say that everyone in a family who had a preventable death experienced "death by family". Or that everyone with an employer who had a preventable death experienced "death by employer".
It's not other people's job to prevent a given person's misfortune.
> Every person who's ever died of complications of malnutrition while their country exports food
That's due to government corruption more than anything else. Government officials should be held accountable and prosecuted.
like, that's literally the argument you're making. You're not just implying it, you're saying it.
seems like a pretty bad faith argument, IMHO.
No. Everyone is going to die sooner or later.
I'm talking about wrongful deaths. It is wrong for a government to kill people for any reason other than conviction of murder. The Bolsheviks, Red Giard, and Stasi straight up murdered people because they owned means of production, disagreed with communism, or tried to escape to a different country. That us evil.
I know that most of the early deaths under communism were due to starvation, what GP calls "misallocation of resources". Thats a fancy term for stealing. Violation of private property - literally taking people's land and things - is evil and it's also directly responsible for the massive famines that happened under communism.
The longer I live, the more I'm convinced that the idea of communism arises because of envy, and not understanding that wealth doesn't just "exist" statically such that it can be fairly (re)distributed.
The real value is what people sell - either food, clothes, houses, and goods/services. By solving the wrong problem, Communism messes up the motivation to work, produce, and sell. And so everyone becomes far more equal - but poor and starving (except political leaders, they usually do far better than the populace... they're "more equal" than others).
It's an evil idea.
... and I am having trouble understanding why all this needs to be said again. Where the heck is the idea that communism is good coming from? The harrowing biographies and memoirs of those who lived under it are out there - all the content dying, famine, fear, the KGB banging on front doors at 3am to "disappear" people (who return 10 years later and talk about torture, prisons, guards authorized to do "anything" to prisoners, and gulags), the learned willing ignorance ("the less you know, the better you sleep").
I had a Russian co-worker over for dinner once who lived through the tail end of the Soviet Union. "The less you know, the better you sleep" is a quote from him.
If you disagree, I'm curious what government types you think collectivization and central planning can be accomplished with besides those that directly take charge of those things.
You are collapsing three different questions into one illogical conclusion, leaning heavily on one of the least successful examples of collectivization in the history of mankind. One could use your line of reasoning to argue that because there are bad capitalist countries with authoritarian governments, who do indeed go door to door and murder its citizenry as political suppression, capitalism itself is bad. But they still wouldn’t be logically correct.
I don't mean that things are fine, just that Nuclear annihilation is less of a concern than some make it out to be.
We are in a period of strategic instability and an arms race that is unlike anything we have seen in the last 50 years. You can quibble with the specifics all you want, but I don’t think anyone can argue that we are at a lesser risk of nuclear war that we were, say, 20 or 30 years ago
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/03/military-officials-ousted-r...
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2024/10...
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/07/11/asia-pacific/ch...
What if they did it? They would be a paria politically, but countries would still buy their oil/gas because they need it and it's cheap, nobody would start nuking Russia over Ukraine [1], and using tactical nukes against nations that don't have them would become much more acceptable.
It is kind of telling that China has to be the ones reigning them in, which is a good sign that they are replacing the US as the world's superpower, which also comes with maintaining some stability in important markets, erm, countries.
Aside from that our best hope is that the functional Russian arsenal is much smaller than Russian claims due to the lack of maintenance, corruption, etc.
[1] Trump would just have a phone call with Putin and then parrot whatever narrative the Kremlin has. For France and UK, nukes are purely for self-protection, so they would only trigger a counter-attack if Russian nukes appear to be coming towards them (so it's probably better for Russia to avoid The Netherlands and Belgium too).
The moment you use them, you lose their value as a deterrance anymore.
If they used nukes in Ukraine, the strategic deterrence against other nations with nukes would still be in place.
They didn't use them against Ukraine because of many other reasons, e.g. because they would have taken Kiev in days, it didn't make sense to make land that you want to conquer radioactive, and the political fallout would be too big.
I think now they won't do it because China is too important to them and China made it clear that using tactical nukes is out of the question.
No it wouldn't be a deterrance anymore again other nations, it will be an actual threat. If they actually do show they are willing to use them in any capacity, esp over Ukraine which is agression they started, other countries cannot just ignore it or bow down to Russia. It also not a deterrance to nuclear powers in the first place and in the second, it becomes an existential threat again.
As for why they didn't use it in Ukraine is primary because they have never done so. The political fallout will be suicide, there is no other option.
I don't see how China fits in with the tactical nukes thing. Your position of "Russia could have nuked, they just didn't want nuclear fallout, political fallout and China being mean" instead of "they didn't nuke because it will be unprecedented and consequeunces will be dire bodering on absolute destruction" seems weak to me.
The shelling of Mauripol in Ukraine at the beginning of the current war was roughly equivalent to Hiroshima in explosive yield. It had a lot more destructive power though, since it was distributed across a huge amount of explosions, and blast damage falls approximately with the square of distance to center of explosion.
Mauripol in 2022 was not a place you wanted to be in. When a bomb falls on top of you, it makes no difference if it is small nuclear or large conventional, you very much die anyway.
I'm not trying to make war seem nice or sell the idea that the world is heading in a great direction, I'm trying to make the point that nuclear annihilation is less of a threat today than before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War:_A_Scenario
The scenario she presents is fictional, but it’s all based on current nuclear arsenals and response protocols. While what I’ve read of it certainly makes it seem like a worst-case scenario in a “nearly everything that can go wrong does” sense, it’s disturbing how relatively few things going wrong it actually takes—in a span of under two hours—to reach “civilizational collapse” level outcomes.
Imagine climate change causing a drought in South Asia leading to conflicts between India, China and Pakistan that escalates into a nuclear war. Imagine if the regular wars in Ukraine and the Middle East ends up with Russia or Israel using a nuke. Imagine if Facebook boomers vote someone batshit crazy into office and drops a nuke on a long time hostile state just for TV ratings…
On the one hand, one of the major nuclear powers is embroiled in a war in Europe. Which is extremely bad news and clearly makes the probability of nuclear war increase.
On the other hand, we're getting better and better at targeting, which means much smaller warheads can get the job done. We have little use for 50MT behemoths any more (excepting doomsday weapons).
I personally don't have the here-nor-there to say otherwise, but it does seem likely that the type of device doesn't really change the outcome.
"Complete and total global nuclear exchange" is not so bad when there are 50 100Kt nukes, and is really, really bad when there are 10,000 10Mt nukes. And we've drastically reduced both the number of nuclear weapons and their average yield since the cold war (https://fas.org/initiative/status-world-nuclear-forces/). Which is great news!
I'm no expert, but from a little reading it seems all-out nuclear war would be not just survivable for the species, but not even that bad for most of humanity comparing to disasters of yore. South America, Oceania, much of Asia, and Africa would be ~fine.
So, since we saw first-hand what devices of ballpark 20KT yield did to an urban environment, numerically most of the operational US nuclear weapons are around 100KT (margin of error and all that)[1]. So, yeah, better targeting, smaller warheads, yada yada. Still one-shot/one-kill for an entire city and the surrounding area. I mean, McNamara could handwave with statements like "optimistically, only millions dead" (paraphrased), but I don't think that kind of thinking has aged well.
That said, things are not worse because the Big Three have Big Bombs (or don't). It's because the strategic landscape has changed. One of the big 3 is lead by a guy who thinks nuclear weapons are just like big hand grenades or something and that negotiation is a zero-sum game. Another bit three leader is maybe just holding on to power by his teeth (or not...who knows) and came of age in the 'nuclear war is winnable' era. And there are more players at the table. Israel has nukes. North Korea. France and the UK. And India and Pakistan. South Africa had them before, and could again. And Iran will get them at some point, sooner or later. And we're apparently going to give the Saudis all the required tooling and expertise required, though there's apparently a firm pinky-swear no weapons will come of it. So we aren't looking at a 'simple' US/USSR cold war, with some Chinese spice in the mix. We have regional power, some of them not known for long-term stability, some with extremely volatile regional situations, with the ability to knock over the apple cart.
So what is the escalation/deescalation path if, say, KYI has a real bender one night and decides that NK nukes Seoul? Or Tokyo? Or what if they just pull a June 1950 and march all the way to Pusan conventionally? Do we nuke Pyongyang? All their nuclear facilities (the ones we know about)? Or glass over the whole place? And what then does China do, us having set off a nuke in their literal back yard on top of their Little Buddy? Under such circumstances, I do not expect the current administration to take a measured step back and say "we need to think this through...".
Uncertainty. That's why a lot of us (who lived in the Cold War) think things look a little shakier than usual.
[1] To head off the inevitable "well ackshually...": Yes, the big players still have big bombs. I haven't been involved in this area in a while so things have probably changed a bit, but we still have some of the big boys in the 300KT+ range sitting on Minutemans for old times sake. I assume the Russians still have a bunch of their 1/2 to 1MT devices in silos. And the Chinese were pretty proud of their absurdly large 4MT+ devices, supposedly still in service.
>It seems quaint now,
There was a very real likelihood only a few months back that there would be a nuclear exchange starting in Iran. In fact it seemed as if 'the plane was in the air' at one point. We're astonishingly close to these scenarios but I feel the powers that be (governments, media, etc) aren't prioritising the discussion due to other agendas.
The most powerful people in our society continue to build fallout shelters however.
Indeed he takes some other significant cues from Bradbury - who faced a similar, if less poignant, Road to Damascus moment upon learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
For example, the concept of 'Booklegging' is lifted wholesale from Fahrenheit 451, published a few years prior. Bradbury has oft-cited political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book, and Miller makes his views very clear by the time we encounter the flanderised Atheist in the final third of Canticle - reinforcing his core theme of the juxtaposition of scientific progress and moral wisdom, and the shared thematic motif expressed by Montag in Fahrenheit 451 that the books of the past have messages that can save society from its own destruction.
As such, it is clear to me that the fear of war - and the trendy nihilism imbued by the then innovative atomic variant - doesn't so much affect mid-century fiction as the cultural and societal upheaval seen as the Baby Boomers assumed their place as the generation in ascension. In many ways this echoed the post-WW1 Brideshead Revisted era of England, merely substituting a surplus of capital for a dearth of inheritors.
Thus, while both can be read as atomic jeremiads, they are more appropriately realised as treatises to the social and political mores at the time. The scare for the average American wasn't so much Nuclear as it was 'Red' - something that can be seen in the stubborn cargo-culting of very American Institutions and Practices in the post-apocalyptic canon. As can be seen across the US Sci-Fi Canon, preservation of self is often secondary to the preservation of American Exceptionalism; be it via an ICBM or the stochastic terrorism of McCarthy.
I remember aspects of their modern existence also being problematic (IIRC a house in florida with lots of windows doesn’t fare well without AC)
Meanwhile, after 70 years we're still no closer to a safe long term solution for nuclear waste. Every new and untested nuclear reactor design falls into the same pro-innovation bias of failing to address it's own unintended consequences. Like the utterly wild and rarely estimated cost of decommissioning older plants.
The issues with renewables and nuclear waste are similar. The general solutions have been known for decades, but progress has been slow, as people have been unwilling to commit to them.
That's completely the wrong take. The toxic positivity you speak of is what will actually get the world destroyed, while the rest of us are working over years and decades to prevent and repair the damage that colonizer/rape culture inflicts upon humanity and the natural world.
I'm troubled that yours is the top comment, and that I'm seeing ostrich head in the sand sentiment spreading so widely among young people. Your bio says that you are a university professor. Is this really what you're teaching?
If I misinterpreted your comment, then please clarify.
“Canticle” blew my 14 year old mind. Really sad ending but the mutations really got under my skin.
Didn’t Plato call sad music a “false construction” when outlining justice?
After reading Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, I'm surprised we as a species are still around.
The boomer generation covers 18 years. While such drills may have been common for those in school during the 1950s, I suspect it was much less by the 1960s.
I don't think we're going to make it.
For anyone curious, there's a Tiny Desk Concert of songs from the album at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9PoZ0Vcb_s and an interview, in English, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcQbB7Dc83U
London Grammar @ KEXP ranks pretty high.
But the most unrealistic part of this story is how all the IoT automation continues to work in the absence of the Internet.
"Bluetooth device connected"
"Bluetooth device connected"
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 no one has really come up with an alternative: home assistant is good, but it's not for the non-techy.
I will squarely blame IPv4 for some of this: NAT has meant that the key application people might want to use is broken by default (remote device access) without mediation servers.
No, practicality is not the main reason these unnecessary connections are added. The main reasons are 1. to sell and enforce subscriptions and 2. to collect and sell data.
Is it just easier to get your car seat warmers to work when they can connect to the internet and make sure you're paid up?
It is much, much easier to do things when central server is around. This is especially true for embedded devices which have limited resources and cannot be updated easily and safely. Close all the incoming ports and the chances of your device joining the botnet fall dramatically. Keep that port open and you'll see yourself mentioned all over the net in the context of "horrible security, don't buy".
The only hope is multi-vendor systems which connect to central hub - zigbee, matter, etc.. - but sadly they not very popular, as wifi is everywhere, access is cheap (the chip can found for under $1 today), and hub-based are harder to get started with.
Being tied to the internet happens because manufacturers want to be able to watch your usage, sell you ads, and make you buy more stuff from them when they decided your existing hardware is "too old" and shouldn't be supported anymore.
Not a luddite but, aside from a couple of Alexas, just no need for any IoT.
Egomaniacs seem to always be the problem, but when one pops up in a country, the people, whether they have a choice or not, protect/ignore them. Your disposable remark, to me, is the key. Most need to wake to this fact and at least talk about it. (As for Hal Lindsay, he's just like any other nutjob author who uses grains of some truth to create fear and anxiety to promote his narrative.)
The sirens still exist, but the test schedule has slowed dramatically.
This is the big mistake that so many people make: assuming that these folks are behaving irrationally, or somehow focused on something other than what is best for humanity or their own country.
The unfortunate truth is that these people are actually behaving rationally, and doing what they believe is in the best interest of their own country or even society at large. They are doing their best.
And, if you were thinking coolly and clearly, you would likely do the same things in their shoes.
This doesn't at all mean we're doomed - in fact quite the opposite. These are hard things to navigate (nukes, AI, etc) but we're up to the task and will come out the other side much better off.
Some members of the Trump administration / military say a specific goal is to bring about Armageddon, and have not been fired for it:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran...
Other religious fanatics outside the gov’t take a more circumspect public stand on this particular holy war, but aim to use the Supreme Court to convert the US into a religious dictatorship.
Here’s a primary source; an interview with the defense secretary’s pastor:
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/06/nx-s1-5822558/pastor-doug-wil...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/...
Interesting qualifier for anything Iran
Neither the "Christian" nationalists nor The Guardian seem to know much about the actual history of the crusades. Its interesting how people with opposite ideological lenses unite in believing the same myths.
And it would have happened for real if not for one man's refusal to push the button: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
That overhanging fear has been replaced by climate change and political instability but the foundations for it still remain.
What do you find unreasonably hateful in the statement?
But I agree that adding the whiteness status of the men doesn't add to the story. The distinguishing characteristics of the men were they were rich and powerful. There are many people in the United States who despite their whiteness, suffer injustice, lived in poverty, and are oppressed by powerful interests.
The above does not erase the fact that systemic racism impacts Black and Hispanic Americans significantly to this day, and work to mitigate this should continue.
There are many Indians and Pakistanis who do consider themselves white. I'm unaware of a prominent white identity movement within China, but I don't have total certainty.
"About four-in-ten U.S. adults believe humanity is ‘living in the end times’"
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/08/about-fou...
"Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats to believe they will be taken up in the biblical Rapture, according to a new YouGov poll."
"The September 23 poll of 4,041 U.S. adults found that 63 percent of Republicans said they would be more likely to be taken up, compared with 40 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of independents. "
https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-more-likely-to-believe-...
> In the 2016 presidential election, exit polls reported that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump
> Evangelicals generally view the Middle East through a dispensationalist biblical framework and strongly support Israel. Often perceived as the most vocal supporters of Christian Zionism in the West, they believe that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews and that the U.S. will be blessed if it blesses Israel. The establishment of the State of Israel was seen by many American Protestants as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, reinforcing their commitment to Zionism as a religious duty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism_in_the_United_S...
Anecdotally; Growing up in the NorthWest USA, I knew entirely too many (crazy to my mind yet considered perfectly "normal" by most "average" folk back then) people in the 1980s who genuinely believed that Revelations' "rain fire from the Heavens" in the bible meant "Nuclear War" and Jesus would arrive momentarily thereafter "leading a host of angels" to "rapture the faithful" and/or "smite the wicked" who survived that initial "rain of heavenly fire".
What scares me even more than that kinda craziness bein' way more common back then than it should'a been is that too many (still crazy people IMHO) still believe such madness today and some of those people are in charge of (or at least in positions of significant power) entire nations with huge stockpiles of WMDs at their disposal.
First Laughing Man Incident - Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2024)
Third Impact - Neon Genesis Evangelion (2015)
Fourth Corporate War - Cyberpunk (2022)
Geisel Library Walk - Rainbows End (2025)
2020 Tokyo Olympics - Akira (2020)Very good timing, not for walking houses and sharding of consensus reality with ubiquitous AR, but for physical destruction of books to speed up scanning.
Manned mission to the Moon by giant gun - Jules Verne (1865 ish).
Manned trip around Saturn by comet - Jules Verne (1877).
Time traveller sets off to the future - H.G. Wells (1894)
Martian invasion of Earth - War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1905)
Global telephone network reaches as many connections as a human brain and wakes up - Dial 'F' for Frankenstein, Arthur C Clarke (December 1, 1975)
Birth of Dr Susan Calvin, founding of US Robotics & Mechanical Men, development of 'Positronic Brain' - Asimov's robot stories (1982 and after)
British space station under construction - The Outward Urge by John Wyndham (1994)
Portal to parallel universes - Sliders (1994)
Doctor Samuel Beckett steps into the Quantum Leap Accelerator and vanishes - Quantum Leap (1995)
Skynet becomes self-aware - Terminator 2 Judgement Day (August 29, 1997. at 02:14 am Eastern Time)
HAL 9000 AI computer operational (1997), first human voyage to Jupiter system (2001), first landing on Europa and alien life discovered (2010) - Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey
Moon leaves Earth Orbit after nuclear waste explosion, taking human-occupied Lunar colony with it - Space:1999 (13 September 1999)
Efficient international flight, using Zeppelins and blimps - Rudyard Kipling (2000)
Global climate disaster - The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Replicants - Bladerunner (2016)
Keanu Reeves smuggles digital information in his brain - Johnny Mnemonic (2021)
Arnold Schwarzenegger kills to survive in a typical American TV show - The Running Man (2025)
Woman relifed into robot, rich people discover workers' rights - Fritz Lang's Metropolis (2026)
First colony mission to Mars, 100 colonists on the largest spaceship ever built - Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (2026)
Tibetan monks finish listing all the names of God, stars start going out - The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke (when computers were rentable and could print 1000 names per second)
and many more: https://scifi.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_of_fictional_future_e...
2001: A Space Odyssey (2001)
Johnny Neumonic (movie, 1995)
This story happens to describe events on Earth, but it's part of the same chronology as the rest of the Martian Chronicles stories. The story The Million-Year Picnic describes the same war from the perspective of a family who escaped to Mars.
As an aside, later editions of the book advanced all the dates by 31 years; those editions put this story in August 2057 instead.
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.
We'll see this post again on that date!
All joking aside; an excellent animation
And why on earth was that dad mowing when the house was able to take care of it?
How do you know that will not happen in the future?
A hugely different society might look more like past than the present.
The people in that world moved pretty far beyond cellphones in a couple hundred years, and that’s okay. I’m sure you’ve noticed there aren’t a lot of phone booths around anymore…
In the United State police's defence once I was walking all by myself at 3 in the morning in Mountain View, peeking and crouching among the bushes for good shots with my camera. A police car approached me. It ended up being a non-threatening conversation. It was early 2002. All in all quite surprising given my brown skin and then long beard.
He gets the cops called on him regularly. It's insane.
God, I love Bradbury.
Burgess Meredith Reads Ray Bradbury, 1962: https://dn720300.ca.archive.org/0/items/meredith-bradbury/01...
Edit: Ray Bradbury read by Leonard Nimoy, 1975 https://archive.org/download/bradbury-nimoy/1-There%20Will%2...
Thus far, the only notable robots are little disks which vacuum up floors (and they're getting outlawed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104371 ) and some innovations just haven't become widespread (an uncle of mine piped his home for a central vacuum system, compleat w/ a switch at each connection for on/off) --- I really can't recall a device with widespread demand since DVD and then Blueray players (or maybe the Wii? the PS2 counts as a DVD player arguably). I don't know anyone who has done more than read about "Smart Mirrors" for example....
What will be the first device to bottle up AI and other modern technologies in a package and become widely in-demand/distributed?
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.
I've always thought it would be cool to have transparent doors so you could see inside without needing to open the doors. Obviously, most people do not have "neat" fridge interiors and would be considered ugly and not a good look. But having those cool spy room windows that go frosted or mirrored or some other opaque look with the flip of a switch could solve that. Which tech is less expensive: dimming glass or cameras and monitors?
They're just less efficient and more likely to break. In a commercial environment that's worth it to show off the contents, but the trade off is different in a domestic setting.
Such refrigerators are available for commercial applications --- where the on-going energy usage is offset by the need for customer access, but it would be a huge impact on one's electric bill.
E.g. when iOS introduced "ask apps to not track", 96% of users clicked "do not track": https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o...
If consumers didn't care, companies wouldn't go to extreme lengths to hide the fact that they are tracking you, and to invent craxier and crazier dark patterns to trick you into giving up your data.
This is common for useless products, like smart glasses or pendant-style AI devices. When consumers have clear utility, however, most give away privacy quite willingly.
Exhibits 1, 2, and 3; "Smart" phones, "Smart" watches, and pretty much 90% or so of "apps" people install on either from their respective "app stores".
Especially these days when pretty nearly the entire advertising industry has a whole library of "dark patterns" and psychological trickery they've effectively outright "weaponized" against the "consumer class".
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...
But the generalization of behaviors is also a large problem. Pick and place is mostly solved I believe, but translating your housework to pick and place in your apartment is still a bit off.
Sure, for each individual situation one can imagine a safeguard but being in close proximity to unpredictable humans means there are unlimited edge cases... if a humanoid robot is strong enough to do something useful it is also strong enough to be dangerous.
My son would adore a humanoid robot around the house, but could I leave him unsupervised around it?
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-chess-playing-robot-grabs-and...
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
I feel like the only person in the world who doesn't mind doing dishes. When we lived in the city, I feel like most of my friends would rather have an in-unit dishwasher than in-unit laundry. For me, doing dishes feels almost meditative.
(But I do hate folding/putting away clothes.)
It's also not like I'm lacking for dishes that need hand washing anyway either: very large sauce pans, pots and chopping boards aren't fitting in the dishwasher anyway.
I built a cart/track system that went from the basement to the outside via the bulkhead. It fulfilled that work pattern in some regards, but it also made it hard to use those stairs manually [0] so it also impeded getting things done. The design that kept the cart level used up way too much of the vertical space. The next version of this idea will be aimed chiefly at heavy things (with the commensurate work to tie down etc), and go through two transitions horizontal-sloped-horizontal,
[0] and yes blocking an exit is fire hazard I know I know
> 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.
Now some may ask why anyone would need a sign for such an obvious status. But my parents are boomers, and they maintain a pipeline of dishes such that Dad licks his plate clean, then they are scraped into trash, then rinsed in the sink, then placed in the dishwasher. So perhaps the dishwasher may only be cutting grease and sanitizing, but to the uninitiated, we are thankful for that magnet-sign to tell us whether the dishes are clean, or just look that way.
They also rinse and clean many things before putting them in the trash or recycling. They don't even drink sugary sodas, but every Diet Coke can is meticulously restored to pristine metallic gleam before Dad stomps and crushes them.
I was pleased to augment Mom's magnet collection by traveling to Europe via London. Now there is an official TfL notice on her refrigerator to "MIND THE GAP".
What people really want is to have purpose, not pleasure.
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.
Nowadays, they are just more expensive and inferior to the Roborock ones though. But thanks to the wonder of protectionism soon the customer won't be able to pick the better product.
Also I think a better policy than blocking Chinese imports (which is probably not sustainable anyway) would be to require that the software be audited and comply with regulations. Same rules and regulations should apply to robots from all countries.
Then, casual auditing of the hardware/software would suffice to make sure they weren't bundling other types of product. And the main concern would boil down to data collection by Chinese services - for which the US Software industry could step in with alternatives. And then rather than merely banning "Chinese services", a US GDPR would go a long way towards setting general rules to alleviate the specific concerns regarding data collection / abuse. It would then be up to Chinese companies whether to comply or not.
We've been missing these general approaches because our domestic surveillance industry wants to continue abusing the market, and has stymied any such regulation that would encourage competition with them. But these are the types of general approaches we actually need, rather than simplistic import bans and other ham-fisted protectionism.
Are you a commie? Everybody knows the free-market self-corrects itself if you are not performant enough or good enough, and that personal greed and egoism are the best proxy for society well-being. Nurture them and you will get the best possible society!
(yeah, I'm being sarcastic)
The admin seems to have a tendency to fearmonger over China and then ban or tariff globally. Allies don't exist apparently.
Aren't our only "allies" Russia and North Korea now?
I find the presence of a microphone sufficiently creepy that that was a non-starter for me, and I didn't pay attention after the initial launch.