I thought that “There Will Come Soft Rains” was a great read, much like lots of Bradbury’s other works. It takes place in the year 2026 and showcases a home full of technology that performs all day-to-day tasks for its residents. It tells the date, the time, makes breakfast, opens the garage, etc. This house is extremely advanced, yet there is only one problem. It is not able to realize that everyone who lived there had been killed by a nuclear bomb. I thought that this was a good representation that no matter how much technology is able to improve, it still needs humans to guide it to perform the way it is supposed to. Technology is mindless and almost completely dependent on human interaction and programming to work the way it was intended to.
I think that Bradbury did a great job of predicting the evolution of technology and the extent to which humans would depend on certain parts of technology to live. Also, I thought that this part of the poem was a great thing to tie in with the rest of the story:
“And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.”
The house still continuing to operate as if there were still people living in it far after they were gone is a great representation of the poem. Eventually, the house catches on fire, and even though it has so many safety mechanisms equipped to put out the fire, it cannot save itself, which I thought was ironic in a way. All in all, “There Will Come Soft Rains” is a good illustration of the idea that as we spend more and more time evolving and using technology, it becomes more and more a part of our lives that we depend on daily.
