Sitting alone on the riverside, my neighbor is immersed in viewing our familiar corner of Taipei through the perspective of the drone he’s piloting. Looking down through virtual reality (VR) glasses, he’s unaware of his physical body, disappointing my dog, who has loped over to greet him. My neighbor is in his own virtual world, isolated from our shared world or other individuals. This image of immersion as isolating is prevalent in popular culture (like the frenzy over internet addiction) as well as in science fiction (SF), from as early as E. M. Forster’s 1909 short story “The Machine Stops,” which presciently envisions a future of humanity partitioned into honey-comb cells, constantly communicating with and surveilled by the titular entity. The story opens, “Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee…There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds.” Though connected through the unassailable Machine’s network of what resembles a social media world, they disdain personal contact, not even raising their own children. Their interactions are short and distanced, physically and emotionally, for “the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people.” Aside from the one rebellious character, humans in Forster’s future seem content to stay isolated in their cells, without access to nature nor one another, absorbed in the Machine’s world. But could technological immersion [...] 

Smart homes in speculative fiction (SF) range from the ominously sinister to the strategically life-saving, revealing our hopes and fears for science: possibilities we envision for artificial intelligence (AI), yet also dangers of such technology. Within these narratives, we can also see the cracks in our conceptions, where it may be time to rethink our assumptions about intelligence, ethics, motives. The epitome of the midcentury techno-utopian dream is [...]