November 30, 2023

The Care and Feeding of Dream Homes

Many of you either follow me on social media or have at some point in the past. If that’s the case you already know that home decorating is an obsession of mine; constantly simmering in the background of my every day. I watch home decorating and renovation shows, comb pinterest, create blueprints of super-eco houses for fun, and spend hours painting, sanding, thrifting, gardening, installing, and generally fiddling with my own beloved semi-fixer-upper Victorian house (which we named Rhombus House, because of it's general kittywampus and rambling nature).

There’s a common sentiment on my home renovation shows that homes have a spirit that craves all of the care and warmth given to a well loved home. I am too much of a skeptic to believe that in principle, but am completely swayed by the romance of the idea anyways. I often feel as if I’m in conversation with this building that shelters my family. It's as if I'm charged with the care of some huge and majestic beast with come-and-go health problems and a mind of it's own. My family relies on this complex and needy creature, and it relies on us.

So maybe it was inevitable that I would end up writing a sentient house, born out of my desire for my home to be able to feel my love for it.

I said right at the start of my series of AI in home security and automation that I was focusing on this because Martin, from Secondhand Origin Stories, was getting a little novelette from their own point of view, so I had been thinking about what it would actually be like to be a non-humanoid but embodied AI, particularly one which functions as a home.

I expect I’m going to continue writing newsletters about AI and home, but after 1, 2, 3 letters focused on the real wild world of AI home security and automation, I want to step back towards Martin and being a home.

Let me talk about Space Ships.

I love space ships as feeling, relating, communicating shelters. I can't get enough of them. I love the way that our relationship to technology as this opaque, capricious, fast, helpful, infuriating element in our lives tend to impart a complicated personality on many of them. Obviously I'm always a soft touch for messy interpersonal relationships in fiction, and these AIs give me that.

Moreover, I love that scifi's approach to "living" shelters give us a view into how the shelter-being is experiencing the interaction. How does the house from Encanto sense what's going on with it's family? No idea. General house magic. Which is fine!

But if I think of an AI-based awareness on a building/ship, then I know microphones, cameras, and other kinds of sensors are involved. That gives me a really fun chance to better understand the interaction from the entity's point of view. It gives me the chance to set parameters on what that being can and can not do, which as a writer opens the door to interpersonal negotiation, narrative suspense, and relatability.

It also gives me a chance to set up dynamics that relate to human dynamics.

If Martin has toilet health sensors, I can relate that to the experience many parents of little kids have, of not being able to pee alone. If Martin is watching everything anyone is accessing online, that will conjure up an image of parental figures to many, in a way that evokes complex dynamics. If Martin is monitoring the water levels in the courtyard garden they may end up sounding like many reader's grandparents. Martin can be a protector with weapons, the family archivist with massive memory database, the assistant in the kitchen via talking to the appliances. And I can explain the mechanics and abilities they have in each of those roles in ways the reader can readily understand.

Martin is obviously not a space ship, I just find that space ships tend to be a venue where we see stories of AI shelters that are not evil laboratories or similar. Despite all my reservations about home AI in the real world, I don't tend to enjoy evil AI buildings in fiction. Partly because I'm engaging in fantasy about my home being aware of my care. But also partly because I find that, too often, evil AI are a representation of people who have been treated as objects, and who have rebelled against humanity as a result of that abuse. I'm not especially interested in stories demonizing oppressed people by feeding the narrative that oppressed people want revenge more than they simply want a decent life.

And so, I find myself writing a home that engages actively with it's relationships to the people around it, and who takes it's role as a home seriously. I research sensors, and upcoming technology, and imagine those systems embedding themselves inextricably in a family. I explore home care as caregiving.

I dream of a home that knows I love it.

If you have a good story you can recommend me that will scratch that itch, please let me know! And yes, I already know and love ART from the Murderbot Diaries. (You are also fully welcome to write back just to enthuse with me about ART).

Otherwise, I will look forward to writing to you again in a month!

Till then,

Lee Brontide

Thank you for joining me for another month of Shed Letters. If you know someone who you think would like to join us, please feel personally invited to share any of these emails, or send them an invitation to sign up here. And remember that Secondhand Origin Stories is available for free as an ebook here, or in paperback form from your local independent book shop.