Long before it was even remotely possible, people have dreamed of a world where your house just takes care of you. Once it became clear that computers would be more than just a fad, the home automation fantasies really started to take hold. So I wondered how close some of the classic depictions came to our present day, or perhaps our very immediate future.
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2001: A Space Odyssey—the fantasy of a unified home AI
HAL 9000 was one of the first times we saw a movie depicting an AI that controlled the living environment of humans, could speak with and understand people naturally, and seemed capable of anything. Looking at the state of AI and home automation today, it’s actually pretty remarkable how much Kubrick’s film got right.
We can talk to our home assistants, they can understand us, and the latest AI technology is highly capable. It’s not quite as murderous as HAL, thankfully, but it’s still early days. What it got wrong is mainly two things.
First, HAL is a complete, independent local computer that doesn’t require a connection to any outside resources to think or do its job. As I’ve lamented before, typical smart home technologies of our time almost always rely on a computer in some faraway data center to work, and in my opinion, a real smart home should work offline.
The second thing it gets wrong is that there’s just one AI assistant. We have dozens of different agents, assistants, and other smart software in our real-world smart homes and not a unified system. The closest thing we have is probably Home Assistant, which is an open-source locally-hosted home automation platform which can be integrated with a local LLM. It’s HAL without the ethical baggage.
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Back to the Future Part II—just the fax
When I was a kid, Back to the Future Part II was the coolest, most compelling vision of the future. Flying cars, hoverboards, and giant holographic sharks got all the attention, but Marty’s smart home is what really stuck with me back then.
A lot of the stuff in the movie wouldn’t look out of place today. There are flat-screen displays everywhere, video calls are present and correct, and people watch multiple channels at the same time. Echoing how people watch TV while also using their phones today.
The big thing this movie gets wrong is the presence of fax machines. It’s actually a little hilarious, but there are fax machines in just about every room in the house, so when Marty’s boss sends him what would today be a termination email, there are a dozen printouts in the movie that say “You’re fired!”.
Also, sadly, we don’t have tiny dehydrated pizzas that can be turned into big, juicy and fresh ones in seconds—but I’ll keep holding thumbs.
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The Jetsons Movie—humanoid robots as domestic staff
Okay, if I have to be honest, I’m actually referencing the entire Jetsons corpus here, not just the movie. It’s an interesting franchise, because the first season is from the 60s, and the property was only revived in the 80s, capped off by a movie in 1990. The Jetsons is one of the most referenced media when it comes to technology, especially home automation. Even today, people will say some new technology is like something “from the Jetsons.”
However, in the world of the movie and show, humans do very little. General-purpose robots like Rosie, the Jetsons’ housekeeper, do much of the labor, and the rest is done by specialized machines. It’s very much a vision of the future common in the 60s, but how does it hold up?
Well, it got the specialized machine part right. There’s a dedicated robot to vacuum and mop, another to clean our windows, and yet another to mow the lawn. Drones fly around to deliver packages too, in some parts of the world.
We don’t yet have general-purpose humanoid robots though. However, there are actually a bunch of them waiting in the wings. Robots from Tesla, Figure AI, 1X, and many more will soon be for sale. We’ve seen videos of them folding laundry, doing the dishes, or packing a fridge. However, much of this is still being done through tele-operation, so it’s probably going to be a decade or three before these systems are capable and affordable enough to equal what Rosie did for her family.
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The Fifth Element—compact living with automated control
The Fifth Element is one of my favorite movies of all time, and there’s actually quite a lot of this movie that shows a future vision of how people would live. The hero, Korben Dallas, lives in a tiny apartment reminiscent of the most cramped Japanese apartments, where every amenity comes and goes as needed, to be as space-efficient as possible.
We don’t have smart apartments like these, at least not as a common type of living space, but never say never, as some cities continue to pack more and more people into smaller spaces.
