> But the most unrealistic part of this story is how all the IoT automation continues to work in the absence of the Internet.

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.

> In the living room the voice-clock sang, Connecting to Brand(tm) servers... Connecting to Brand(tm) servers... Connecting to Brand(tm) servers...

Check out Home Assistant.

We're closer to the stove, kind of. At least with things like Tovala. I've never actually met someone with one though.

"as always, 25% of the US population cheered for purification of the planet because Jesus was coming"

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

After the optimism of the 1990s, we're basically back there except now it's three old white men (Netanyahu orchestrated the most recent war to escalate into nuclear threats).

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.

how can bigoted comment-material like this get a pass, while references to other groups are strictly enforced?

Thanks for sharing. Soviet era animation was creepy in its own right. This adaptation doubly so.

This clip is what introduced me to this story.

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.

Where'd the Turkey dinner come from if it's a nuclear wasteland?

All joking aside; an excellent animation

> What will be the first device to bottle up AI and other modern technologies in a package and become widely in-demand

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.

We don't build robots because the "hard/boring part" for the human is often NOT the hard part for the robot.

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

The thing I stumbled over was that the house owner was out mowing the lawn, something that we actually do have robots for nowadays. But then again, I do enjoy a good, meditative lawn mowing.

Only new models of robots are banned, FCC approval of previous devices still stands and therefore we can continue to purchase those models. They will just get additionally out of date.

> 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.”

Amazon Alexa. You're a decade late.

https://www.weaverobotics.com/

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.

It'll be a US or Japanese or South Korean robot since it's not allowed to come from China.

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.

the real problem with household robots is that they are either flimsy toys or dangerous machines, and there's not much in-between. If we were to build a humanoid robot that would just put laundry away (as described in a HN article a few weeks ago), it would need to be strong enough to lift a laundry basket, have advanced control systems to go up and down stairs, and also be safe/reliable/trusted enough not to hurt people or damage property. We can do these things (modulo the trust, probably) but the confluence of all of it gets very expensive very quickly.

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...

There are many ways this could all end, a nuclear war is still on the list.

"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.

you say that like trump wasn't stopped from launching nukes at iran by one of his military advisors.

The original was published as a one page story. It was later reprinted in a longer format.

He also had interesting ideas on shopping malls of all things, hoping that they could turn into places where people would socialize besides shopping and that they should have a maze-like layout so that people could get what he called "enjoyably lost" the way people can exploring cities. The since-closed Horton Plaza mall in San Diego had an odd layout and the architect even claimed inspiration from Bradbury for it.

Maybe it happened while we were sleeping and this is just some radioactive psychedelic dream

The day is young!

> So is The Pedestrian...

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).

As far as we know life is only present on Earth, we presuppose that in the vastness of Cosmos there are other instances of it or that it can re-emerge from almost zero, but the reality is that we simply don't know. So maybe there is a possibility that wiping out all the life on Earth also wipes it from the entire Cosmos, forever.