Houses of tomorrow: A more hopeful vision of domesticity, or a dystopian nightmare?

In the future, will we find a better way to live, or will our homes be taken over by surveillance and despotic appliances?

Imagine, if you can, a small, bluish room. Wires, screens, sensors. A few keepsakes from the old world. The room’s fleshy inhabitant, confined indoors by a zoonotic pandemic, greenwashes a data-mining company from her bed. The government has made it illegal for her to step outside.

So much for the home of 2021! What about the home of 2050? Might it offer a more hopeful vision of domesticity than the dystopian nightmare some of us have been living through these past couple of years? Or are we inexorably sliding into a world of surveillance and atomisation, climate crisis and...