One of the characteristics of good science fiction writing is the ability to talk about our world in a world that doesn't look much like it. For example, most dystopian movies today, while science fiction, take pieces from 2016 America and extrapolate possibilities. Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" (and the entire Martian Chronicles, in fact) does a great job at exploring our world in a fictional future. 

"There Will Come Soft Rains" explores the idea of what would happen to all of our "things" if a catastrophic event, like a nuclear strike, were to occur. The automated house, which is at the center of "There Will Come Soft Rains," acts as the main character in a human-less story. This house, despite the fact that the shadows of its owners are silhouetted on the side of the wall because of the blast ("The five spots of paint—the man, the woman, the children, the ball—remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.") continued about its daily activities of making food, cleaning, reading and entertaining. However, all of these activities are meaningless because the humans for which these things were designed are not present anymore. 

Bradbury explores the idea that all the advances we make as a society mean nothing if we humans destroy ourselves.