The Veldt And Bradbury's Visions Of The Future

Robots, virtual reality gaming, colonies in space, and nuclear warfare. All things science fiction writers from the mid-nineteen hundreds, such as Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury have talked about in their stories. However, the situations and technology they describe in these supposedly fictional stories are becoming eerily familiar. Which leaves us wondering - are they just science fiction short stories? Or are they warnings of the future that we have ignored, insisting progress is progress and should not be stopped? Clarke and Bradbury 's visions of the future are becoming unnervingly relevant to the concerns of humanity today, because we have developed technology worthy of their science fiction short stories, and while some people can

Another example of something humans can 't be trusted with is, unfortunately, something most of us use every day and can not stand to be separated from. That 's right - it 's technology. The technology Bradbury describes in his story "The Veldt", is already starting to sound eerily familiar. "Televising home", for example, implies something similar to Skype, and the trail of lights in the hallways can be replicated by our motion sensor lights. However, these small similarities aren 't even scratching the surface of how disturbingly familiar the world of Bradbury 's "The Veldt" is to our own. In "The Veldt", two children, Peter and Wendy Hadley, are being raised in a highly technologic home - the Happylife Home - by their parents. Or rather, the house is raising them. As the mother, Lydia Hadley says, " 'The house is wife and mother now, and nursemaid. '". The children own a room of highly advanced virtual reality, maybe even more than that, where anything they wanted to appear would appear. Peter and Wendy spent all their free time in the room, adn became instantly murderous when their parents, concerned for their children, resolve to shut off the room. As Peter Hadley says to his father near the end of "The Veldt", " 'I wish you were dead! '" This is a case of technology reliance, and more importantly, video game addiction, something that we deny is a serious problem, but have probably been directly affected by or know someone who has. In the article "Will Small Steps for Robots Lead to Giant Leap for Robotkind," by Miles O 'Brien, it describes that we are already using robots to do our dirty work. While our robots are nowhere near as advanced as the ones the Hadleys own, they are on the right track - they are learning to walk and fold towels, even though as Miles O 'Brien in "Will Small Steps for Robots to Giant Leap for Robotkind" states, "It takes about 20 minutes to fold one measly towel.". As for the children 's virtual reality nursery room, we have enough