zlacker

>>redshi+(OP)
I think its interesting to see these ideas just be unable to predict the true scale of miniaturization of personal computing. They still saw the kitchen computer as some kind of appliance or something built-in to the home. Meanwhile most of us do have kitchen computers; a ton of people look to their phones or tablets for many of the tasks these early kitchen computers were planned to do. Keeping track of meals, providing recipes, keeping track of inventories, ordering groceries and meals, etc. is all commonly done with kitchen computers these days.

Its just we don't call them kitchen computers. We call them smartphones and tablets, and they're even more embedded in our lives than many of these 1970s futurists could even imagine.

And yet at the same time we're still nearly as far off from truly completely automating the kitchen. I still don't have a machine that I walk up to and it can make me a wide variety of meals with little to no interaction on my part.

>>vel0ci+Qhd
Exactly. I've worked in manufacturing automation long enough to know that the equipment needed to generate the huge variety of food even a mediocre cook can prepare would fill multiple kitchens. Automation equipment that's safe and reliable tends to be very big in relation to the items it operates on.

>>zwieba+Tid
One could imagine something like an industrial robot arm that can swap implements being able to manage a relatively large variety of recipes given some staple ingredients in a limited amount of space, but it would be tremendously complex to build and cost more than an industrial robot arm. Keeping it clean and well maintained would be a nontrivial effort, even if the arm includes programming to clean up after itself.

Probably like a billion dollars to develop the first prototype, and each copy would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, maybe eeking down into the tens of thousands of dollars range if they work really well and become inexplicably popular. Even then it would be up to the customer to keep it stocked with ingredients in a specially designed containers in the included pantry and refrigerator.

It's really the same reason McDonalds never really went through with that fully automated restaurant threat. A person can do the same job for minimum wage, so the robot will never be cost efficient unless someone else does all of the R&D for you, and even then it's highly dependent on being low maintenance.

>>jandre+qod
Articulated robot arm sounds like the most flexible solution. Trickiest part here would be safety - any robot with the power to chop, grind, cut would also have to have a good safety system or be enclosed.

Right now I'm thinking about tasks I don't enjoy: chopping onions, peeling carrots or potatoes, anything where I have to touch meat. All those would require very advanced sensing. Come to think it, that last one brings up the important topic of food safety and sanitation, the whole thing would have to be able to withstand a washdown.

>>zwieba+gtd
Not to mention the risk of fire if something goes wrong in the cooking process. (Or, less directly, the risk of getting sick from improperly-cooked food.)

>>drewze+7Jd
If I wasn’t so tired and literally dropping off to sleep right now, I could make a decent argument that cooking requires AGI. Driving in our complex urban environments too for that matter.

>>jamiek+GFe
Adjusted Gross Income? (Not meaning to be obtuse, but I'm not familiar with the acronym in this context.)