What Reading Bradbury Teaches Us About AI
Why literary analysis is the secret to staying human in an AI world
Today is August 4, 2025 — one year ahead of the setting for Ray Bradbury's haunting short story "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains."
(The original title published in The Martian Chronicles included the date. Later republications removed it to read only “There Will Come Soft Rains.”)
I first read this story as part of my master’s degree in creative writing. It was part of an anthology called “The Story and Its Writer.” If you are a fan of fiction in any way, I encourage picking it up. Not only is it a small library of great short fiction, but it includes analysis, interviews, and letters from many of the authors as addendums to the stories.
Bradbury’s futuristic tale provides a fascinating lens into the minds of the past and our imagination of the future. They act as record-keeping mechanisms. Reading this story is like saying to oneself; Here is what our greatest thinkers imagined 75 years ago — how does it match up with reality?
It's a popular social media trend to authoritatively state that we are "living in a dystopia." In that vein, I think it's useful to revisit these imagined stories of what our world may look like when we hand over the reins of our daily lives to machines.
In Bradbury's story, a mechanical house continues its cheerful routine — making breakfast, cleaning, announcing schedules — while its family exists only as shadows burned into the wall by nuclear fire. "Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o 'clock!" it says to no one. The reader sees silhouettes of a man mowing the lawn, a woman picking up flowers, and children playing catch with a ball suspended in midair — never to come down.
The house doesn't know they're gone. It simply carries on, as programmed, its announcements echoing through empty rooms.
There's something both touching and terrible about Bradbury's anthropomorphism here. When a dying dog appears, mechanical mice clean up after it "angrily" — automated maintenance continuing its tasks. Pancakes are made for the animal but remain out of reach. When "Mrs. Mclellan" isn't present to select her nightly poem, the house chooses Sara Teasdale's "There Will Come Soft Rains":
“There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone."
The poem suggests what Bradbury knew: nature doesn't care about our technological marvels. The rains will come whether we're here or not.
Bradbury’s ability to create a haunting scene doesn’t end there. When a fire eventually comes for the house itself, it “screams,” “shudders,” and “tries to save itself.” The stove makes breakfasts “at a psychopathic rate,” but in the end, all that is left is a robotic voice announcing the next day’s date. "Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is..."
This anthropomorphism will not be lost on the crowd that has debated whether or not to treat AI “like it is human” over the last three years. My favorite part in all of this is the term “psychopathic.” The concept of a robot house losing its mind would have been so insanely foreign to readers of the 1950s. However, on the actual August 4, 2025 - a year before the setting of his story — we already say that our machines “hallucinate.”
A small stepping stone on the way to “psychopathic.”
But of course, the house doesn't actually worry or fight — and it isn’t actually “losing its mind.” It just follows code. All that sophisticated automation, humanity's great technological achievement, and yet it means nothing without us there to give it purpose.
As I set the timer on my coffee machine each night, I'm struck by both the similarities and differences between this world and ours. We don't yet have mechanically powered mice cleaning up our messes, but we do have Roombas. We don't yet have houses that speak to us all day, but we do have AI-powered systems happy to make decisions for us.
We are still alive — unlike the family in the story — but it's not hard to imagine a world where our sophisticated tools continue their programmed tasks while we become increasingly absent from our own lives.
That's the power of fiction: it teaches us to read between the lines, to question what sounds sophisticated but may be hollow, to recognize patterns that seem intelligent but lack true understanding. As my friend
points out, these are precisely the skills we need as AI becomes more prevalent in our daily lives.If you want to stay human, read fiction. Practice literary analysis. Stare at the trees and imagine. Then write it down, close your notebook, put it away — and read it a year later.
Take a moment today to read this story. Notice the similarities and differences, and use Bradbury's imagination as a touchpoint for understanding our world.