Soft Rains Reflection

It seemed like this story took the idea of how mankind has been becoming increasingly dependent on technology for many aspects of our lives, and brought it to a whole new level of overwhelming dependence in an apocalyptic environment.

A lot of the technologies referenced in the story seemed like plausible extensions of what we already depend on in real life, such as appliances cooking in the kitchen and electronic generated alarms, but they became extended in a way that the technologies operated self-sufficiently (without humans initiating the actions).

This already occurs, not in such an extreme extent, when we pre-program devices to do something. For instance, setting an alarm, setting a TV to sleep at a certain time, setting a microwave to heat for a certain length of time, etc. They are self-sufficient after being programmed, which essentially was probably how that "smart house" was initially created in the story.

The content of the story seemed like a reference to an idealized house that was programmed to execute all necessary or desired tasks at certain times, which turned into sort of a dystopian sort of environment. Ultimately it seemed as if it could have been that the technology was the demise of humankind and of itself.

Generally I feel like technologies are extremely useful and helpful when executing tasks in our daily lives, but the whole artificial intelligence part, where the technologies "make decisions" on its own based on factors is a little disconcerting. Even though that's basically what all of programming and technology comes down to, not in such literal terms of "making decisions," but for instance the "if then" methodology with programming and that sort of thing. So I'm not sure, I have mixed feelings.