As information technology advances and infiltrates more and more of our daily activities, it's natural to wonder: When will the reality catch up to the science fiction vision of the "automated house"?

Over the past 30 years, intelligence has been embedded in even the most mundane devices. For example, it was unthinkable a couple of generations ago that we would be able to control the cooling and heating of our houses simply by pushing a few buttons. But with programmable thermostats, we can even set the temperature in advance for the furnace and central air conditioning systems to adjust their output at different times of day and different days of the week.

That's just one small example that most of us now take for granted. But there's been remarkable progress over the past few decades. Nowhere has rising affluence and technology converged to impact the quality of our lives to a greater extent than in the removal of drudgery from household tasks.

Soon after the beginning of the industrial revolution, technology began to replace human labor in our homes. Dishwashers, microwave ovens, washing machines, clothes dryers, and automatic-drip coffeemakers have replaced or simplified many of the tasks that once consumed people's time and effort.

Appliance technology, food science, and materials engineering combined with electric, gas, and telecommunications utilities utterly transform the work done in the home and free up hundreds of millions of people for other work.

But the current reality still falls well short of the vision of a home in which robots take over all of the activities involved in maintaining a household.

When, if ever, will we realize this vision?

Let's examine the latest developments and explore their implications.

It's safe to say that a lot of smart people are devoting a lot of resources to moving us closer to the day when automation will take care of any domestic chores we choose to delegate.

Consider for example, the technology embodied in Microsoft's remarkable "Home of the Future" prototype at the company's Bellevue, Washington, campus. When Newsweek's Michael Rogers visited the home, he found that it was humming with new technologies. For example, the refrigerator makes use of "smart tags" that will be attached to most consumer products in another decade or so. As Rogers explains, these tiny radio frequency chips...