Summary
A lot of historical sci-fi has some form of smart home in it. They may not say “smart home,” but the basic idea is the same: home automation. I thought, “how close have we come to these predictions of what the homes of the future will be?” So I tried to pick a variety of stories, and this is how we stack up.
Ray Bradbury is of course one of the old masters of sci-fi, and has a huge body of work, but inThere Will Come Soft Rainshe tells the rather depressing story of an automated house that keeps going through the motions, despite everyone being dead thanks to a nuclear armageddon.
Downer premise aside, the house itself has some interesting parallels to our smart homes of today. For one thing, there are little robotic “mice” that come out of the wall to clean up the place, which is pretty much analogous to modern robot vacuums and mops.
Eufy L60 Robot Vacuum
There’s also a home assistant that reminds the inhabitants to pay their bills, or that it’s time to go to work. There are little machines for everything, from cooking food to card game tables that come out of the walls for the daily bridge tournaments the now-deceased families seemed to play.
It’s more likely that we’ll get some specialized and some more general-purpose robotic systems to do some of this stuff, but highly-specific doohickeys in every wall is a stretch. Still, for a story published in 1950, it gets a lot right! Also, the story is set in 2026…
Smart House – the 1999 Disney Film
In 1999, Disney released a film calledSmart Housethat tells the story of a family that wins a smart home in a competition. Here’s atrailerso you can get the premise:
The house’s AI, “PAT”, learns from the occupants, and eventually develops a personality, which leads to the main conflicts in the story, but the actual house itself is full of motorized closets and other automations that lets PAT take care of business. There’s a wall that’s basically a giant TV screen, and security shutters on every window.
There’s a holographic projector, so PAT can take on a human form and other technologies that are moreStar Trekthan Roomba. Most of the Disney Smart House is still complete science fiction, except perhaps for PAT. We definitely have the technology to have an AI system with personality and similar apparent intelligence.With local AI like DeepSeekand the rise of agentic AI, the software part of this 1999 vision of the future is pretty much already here.
The Jetsons
TheJetsonscartoon is literally the thing people have compared high-tech inventions to for decades. You’ll often read something is “Like The Jetson” or “The Jetsons is becoming real.” and so are we there?
In the world of The Jetsons every little thing is automated, which is not at all how things are as I write this, but Rosie their household robot is probably the first thing to be real. Yes, we have robot vacuums, but humanoid household and worker robots are soon going to be something you see in the wild, in addition to other more utilitarian designs.
The rest of the show’s smart home automation is unlikely to ever be practical, or even desirable.
Back to the Future Part II
This is one of my favorite movies of all time, and when I was a kid in the 90s this depiction of the year 2015 seemed so plausible.There’s a whole sequence where we visit Marty McFly’s future home, and it’s packed with smart home stuff.
The biometric lock and voice activated lights are definitely something we have today, but we don’t yet have screens where our windows should be. Ironically, they have regular photos in frames, whereas many people are using digital photo frames these days.
I do like the little garden of fruit and veg that drops down from the kitchen ceiling, and indoor smart gardens are definitely a thing these days, minus the motorized theatrics. I don’t know about you, but my house is definitely saturated in large and small screens, and while I’m not watching six channels at once (or live TV) people these days do watch TV while also scrolling on their phones. Many modern TVs even have a picture-in-picture feature where you can cast your phone to the screen so you don’t have to look down.
Sadly, the food rehydratornever became real, and I don’t even have a single fax machine in my house, but just about everything with a screen I own can make video calls one way or another. So, on average, I think most of the stuff in BTTF 2 is already true. At least when it comes to smart home technology.
Apart from the idea that we’d have every little thing automated by special machines (which might come true one day, maybe?) most of these sci-fi smart homes seem to get the basic idea right. Give a home some form of governing intelligence and it can make your life easier. Just don’t make it homicidal. That seems to be the tricky part, but so far we’ve managed!
