Science Fiction
Dictionary
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
 |
Time For Bradbury's 'Smart Home'?
How badly do you want a smart home?
(WSJ Tech Columnist Christopher Mims visits SmartThings CEO Alex Hawkinson)
Here's what it's like to wake up in America's smartest home. More precisely, here's what it's like for Alex Hawkinson, CEO of two-year-old smart-home company SmartThings, to wake up in his newly retrofitted suburban Maryland home, in which every single light and power outlet, plus a dozen gadgets, are all connected to and controllable from the Internet.Mr. Hawkinson stretches. The accelerometer inside the Jawbone UP fitness tracker on his wrist registers movement, and wirelessly communicates it to his iPhone, which passes the signal to home-controlling software in the cloud.
Downstairs, lights come up, illuminating a split-level kitchen and living room. The coffee maker switches on. The thermostat increases the home's ambient temperature by four degrees. The security system is switched off.
By the time Mr. Hawkinson pads into the kitchen, his coffee is ready. When he opens the cabinet in which he keeps coffee mugs, a sensor on its door triggers an Internet-connected speaker by his dining-room table. In a slightly robotic woman's voice, it reads today's weather report to him.
In his 1951 short story collection The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury wrote about the Happylife Home:
"They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them." (More)
Mr. Bradbury may have foreshadowed our concern over large corporations seeking to extract value from our every move with his story The Veldt, which described a home with ulterior motives.
From WSJ.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 6/24/2014)
Follow this kind of news @Technovelgy.| Email | RSS | Blog It | Stumble | del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit |
Would
you like to contribute a story tip?
It's easy:
Get the URL of the story, and the related sf author, and add
it here.
Comment/Join discussion ( 0 )
Related News Stories - (" Living Space ")
Why Not Move A Warehouse District?
'Did you never see a moving house before?' - Jane Webb Loudon, 1828.
Amazon Will Send You Heinlein's Knockdown Cabin
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...' - Robert Heinlein, 1940.
Elegant Bivouac Shelter Produces Water And Electricity
'There was nowhere on the planet where science and technology could not provide one with a comfortable home...' - Arthur C. Clarke.
AI-THu Shapeshifting Transformer Home
'Its slack walls tightened, bulged, were crossed by ripples and waves of movement.' - Fritz Leiber, 1943.
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
1900-1939
1940's 1950's
1960's 1970's
1980's 1990's
2000's 2010's
Current News
Grok And The City Fathers From 'Cities In Flight' By James Blish
'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
Why Not Move A Warehouse District?
'Did you never see a moving house before?'
Will An AI Found A New Religion?
'You must decide how you will worship Me.'
Terraformer Industries Make Methane
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
I Need An Outdoor Spherical Display
'Usually a spherical display hovered in the centre...'
Worm Disrupts Physics Simulations Undetected For A Decade
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
Muxcard Redditor's DIY Credit Card-Sized Computer
It's a computer, but just barely.
'Soft Assembly' Fashions That Fashion Themselves On The Wearer
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
Orwell's Nightmare Of AI-Written Novels Comes To Pass
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
ISS Plagued By Leak - Again!
'There were perhaps a dozen bladder-like objects in the tunnel...'
Ridiculous 'Ghost Murmur' Tech Still Science Fiction
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
Outdoor Video Screens Can Be Arbitrarily Large
The Shape of Things To Come
Infrared Contact Lenses To See In The Dark
'I can see in the dark, Case.'
What'll You Have? Extinct Animals Returned, Or Synthetic Eggshells?
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
Sunbird Pulsar Fusion Like Leinster's Space Tug
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
RentAHuman App Lets AI Agents Hire Humans
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
