Smart House

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

The Smart House is fully automated house controlled by a sophisticated computer AI. Basically, you talk to the house, and tell it what you want, and it does it for you. Turn on the lights, cook breakfast, even draw your bath. Some smart houses will even monitor your vital signs.

The AI often has a human name, and frequently have feminine personalities and voices.

Because A.I. Is a Crapshoot, Smart House A Is have a tendency to go horribly awry. They usually don't become actually evil, but they can become jealously overprotective of their owners. In some instances, they are shown falling in love with their owners or becoming envious of their owners relationships with other humans.

See Cool House and Genius Loci, of which this is a subtrope. May overlap with Sapient House, depending on levels of automation and intelligence.

Examples of Smart House include:


Film

  • Natalie's house in Home Alone 4.
  • Demon Seed features a Smart House AI that impregnates its owner's wife.
  • In the recent Iron Man films, Jarvis the butler is changed to JARVIS, the AI that controls Tony's Smart House.
  • In the 1984 film Electric Dreams another computer who ran the house grew envious of its owner's relationship with the downstairs hottie, and did mean things to him. This was a comedy, though, so it was nothing too drastic.
  • The Trope Namer is the Disney Channel TV-movie Smart House, in which the owners are locked in by the overprotective AI PAT.

Literature

  • Ray Bradbury's story "There Will Come Soft Rains" is about a Smart House that continues to carry out its daily routine after its inhabitants are killed in a nuclear war.
  • In the Doctor Who New Adventures novel The Also People, the People's houses all work like this. There was a scene in a later book where one of the People was at a wedding reception on Earth, and casually let go of her plate in mid air. When it smashed to the ground she said "Sorry, I forgot you have such dumb houses."
  • There is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke about a smart house that murders its owner in a jealous fit after he decides to move to another town (and therefore another house), leading to history's first criminal proceedings against a non-human intelligence. The title? "House Arrest".
  • Nara Oxham's AI-house in Succession.

Live Action TV

  • Wayne Szalinski turned his house into a Smart House in the Honey I Shrunk the Kids TV series. It eventually decides that in order to protect the Szalinskis, it needs to kill them.
  • In the series Eureka, SARAH, the AI that controls Carter's house is stable and helpful, until the brutal military AI that the programmer based her on comes to the surface.
  • Federation starships in Star Trek have some characteristics of Smart Houses, from TNG onward.
  • In one episode of 70s Britcom Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, the rather 'special' protagonist Frank Spencer (Michael Crawford) is a guest at a house where all of the fixtures and fittings are computer-controlled. In his usual inimitable manner Frank manages to completely wreck the place in half an hour.

Western Animation

  • A parody of HAL from 2001 A Space Odyssey in a Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" episode is this. It's the voice of Pierce Brosnan and it falls in love with Marge. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Looney Tunes short Design for Leaving has Daffy outfit Elmer's home with automated labor saving devices that are anything but.
    • The early Chuck Jones cartoon Dog-Gone Modern features two dogs wandering into a "House of Tomorrow" exhibit and interact with, among other things, a robot cleaner that keeps taking their bone. Later remade as House Hunting Mice, with mice characters Hubie and Bertie.
  • Tex Avery's The House of Tomorrow spoofs this trope for all it's worth.
  • In Avengers Earths Mightiest Heroes, the Avenger's Mansion is run by Tony Stark's AI, JARVIS, just like the recent film adaptation.
  • Mickey Mouse Short Mickey's Mechanical House

Webcomics

  • It's standard for characters in Kevin and Kell to live in tree-houses made from hollowed out trees. Fenton's house "Tree" was hit by an intelligence ray and became sentient, resulting in a non-computer-based smart house.