Earlier quoted context omitted.
> since the beginning of the industrial revolution people have been dreaming about robots doing things for us The dream is much older than that, I suspect. There are references to self-weaving looms, self-playing musical organs, self-grinding mills in classical literature, often in descriptions of some sort of idealized utopia or afterlife. But I think some in antiquity would have considered them quite possible in th…
Wonderful, from now on I'll be imagining nymphs powering anything that moves on its own. Thanks, Demeter!
When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
41–50 of 62 posts
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#42The idea that men only started cooking at home less than a century ago is dumb. The idea that most people the world over didn't have loving family units even in prehistory is especially asinine. Also, anyone who expects to be paid for cooking their own food at home is living in their own little bourgeoisie bubble. That's ridiculous. I hope this satire.
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#43I 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, provi…
The flip side of that argument is that the home computers of the 1970s and 1980s (the only computery things that would've been priced comparably to a household appliance) had only tiny amounts of storage available to them (and even that storage was highly impractical for sustained use) - they really were little more than glorified desk calculators. So the widely imagined uses in the kitchen or for other sorts of hous…
I used a word processor on the C64. Spreadsheet software. Paint programs. Vector graphics editors. Ran a BBS, nightly sending email all around the world via Punternet(like fidonet), shared files, ebooks, etc, etc.
While there is more processing power today, outside of a web browser, maybe 70% of the stuff I do on a desktop has not improved with modern computing post 80s.
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 br…
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.)
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#45Kitchen is messy. You can drop eggs on the floor, oil jumping out of stove making everything (including the robots) greasy, the stove knob must be turned in a specific way to make it work---which means there needs to be a human on standby, and that person will need to work extra cleaning the robot as well.
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#46I 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, provi…
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.
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#47As a child in the sixties the only computers we saw on TV were either robots or the Jetsons kitchen computer. So this group decides that the kitchen computer is it. The Jetson's 'kitchen computer' would assemble and cook a complete meal from molecules. Similar to what Cana is doing for beverages.
So it became a fact that consumers wanted kitchen computers. Over a twenty year period multiple company's (mostly big stodgy companies wanting to get in on the hot new computer thing) brought out kitchen computers. I remember software companies for the TRS-80, Apple and IBM PC having recipe database programs.
They all were complete failures. People didn't want kitchen computers. What they wanted was to tell a machine what they wanted for dinner and it would build and cook it. As long as you kept the machine full of water and different molecules it would make Chicken Cordon Bleu one night and Duck a l'Orange the next night Still a neat idea and something I'd like for myself.
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#48Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#49The article has a link to a video about Moley Robotic's $338,000 robotic kitchen. It's quite eye-opening, because the robot appears to be a pair of arms/hands which can grab mise-en-place containers of ingredients, dump them into a saucepan, and stir them painfully slowly. I wonder: - who peels and chops the vegetables etc that go into those containers? - who cleans up the pots and utensils when the robot is done sti…
> - who cleans up the pots and utensils when the robot is done stirring and heating the food?
Exactly. I'd want it the other way round: those are the boring tasks, give them to robots, let me mix and stir and watch and taste.
(Rule of thumb: if it's offstage in a cooking show or recipe tiktok, people want it automated)
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#50I 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, provi…
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.