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Comment by AlphaGeekZulu | Hacker News Reader

"Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn."

Bradbury describes the fully automated smart home, but its technology does obviously not extend into the garden exterior. Funny - that in reality robot vacuum cleaners and robot mowers were actually among the first gadgets in automated smart homes.

I perceive this as a flaw in the story. The author had a very prophetic vision of technology in the future, and with the silhouettes on the wall he produced a strong emotional image, but he didn't realize the contradiction.

Except, of course, if he envisioned manual lawn mowing as a future leisure activity!

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> Bradbury describes the fully automated smart home, but its technology does obviously not extend into the garden exterior.

In the 7th to last paragraph, second sentence, he lists the automated processes still going, including "cutting the lawn by remote-control mower".

People still cook in houses with microwaves and wash dishes despite owning dishwashers

Cooking is pretty different to lawn mowing here, you still can't replicate the output of a cooked meal with any easily available combination of home appliances and robotics (let alone just microwaves). I think a large chunk of people would probably stop cooking if that was possible.

Well I enjoy mowing my lawn (with a mechanic mower of course). Anything but the office chair and monitor.

Boy, I hope somebody got fired for that blunder!

Yeah. All they needed back then was a healthy dose of some of those new chemical fertilizer/herbicides to broadcast onto their monoculture non-native grass lawns. They could look forward to the smell of fresh-cut grass while they enjoyed snorting the exhaust from their leaded gasoline lawnmowers and edgers. They could have the nicest, greenest lawn on the block and be the envy of all their neighbors.

Later on, like their neighbors, they can stumble thru the last years of their lives with Parkinsons or other chemically-induced afflictions or just slowly waste away with internal cancers while their lead-addled offspring elect criminal pedophiles and imbeciles to lead the whole country - backwards.

Man, I need to go to sleep. I do agree with your analysis though.

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