"The Veldt" by Ray Bradbury (1950)

"The Veldt"

Bonus:

Everyone is so pink!

Summary: Children program the holodeck to eat their parents for taking it away.

Commentary: The devil is in the details, and the little details are both the strongest and weakest part of this story.

“Matter of fact, we’re thinking of turning the whole house off for about a month. Live sort of a carefree one-for-all existence.”

“That sounds dreadful! Would I have to tie my own shoes instead of letting the shoe tier do it?

And brush my own teeth and comb my hair and give myself a bath?”

“It would be fun for a change, don’t you think?”

“No, it would be horrid. I didn’t like it when you took out the picture painter last month.”

“That’s because I wanted you to learn to paint all by yourself, son.”

“I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?”

While the "nursery" (a psychically programmed holodeck) is the focus of the story, I think all the other gadgets that are mentioned in passing are really what's interesting/depressing here. The kids don't even want to paint or anything anymore, let along brush their own teeth.

I'd insert anti-AI rant here, but I don't think you even need to go that far. There are plenty of things that we used to know how to do 50 years ago that we mostly lost 5 or 10 or 20 years before AI. Cooking/baking from scratch, basic crafts like sewing, writing a letter, doing math on paper. I'm not trading in my calculator or my search engine, but I do think there's some value in being able to sit down and actually, physically do things.

On the other hand:

“Walls, Lydia, remember; crystal walls, that’s all they are. Oh, they look real, I must admit—Africa in your parlor—but it’s all dimensional, superreactionary, supersensitive color film and mental tape film behind glass screens. It’s all odorophonics and sonics, Lydia. Here’s my handkerchief.”

So the whole thing is what sounds like a hologram (though without using the term), sounds, and a smell-o-vision. But then at the end, it's strongly implied the lions eat them. I'd have accepted "don't worry, they're not really lions, just disguised 50s technobabble about them being tiny bumpercars with projectors or something and they somehow manage to eat them anyway, but the fact that the nursery supposedly has no real parts at all (although you'd think it'd at least have the ability to raise the floor to make steps or chairs or something) makes the ending kind of iffy. Maybe the parents are just so dependent on their smart house they're ignorant of how it works.

3/5 good prose, interesting details, spotty world building.