I do not disagree with you, apart from one minor point: I think the amount of “creative aspect” in routine, cookbook cooking, hairdressing etc is underestimated. Eg. in cooking the kind and quality of the ingredients must be continuously assessed, and decent cooks taste their food while cooking to ensure a good final result.
“Artificial taste” not only seems rather difficult, but also does not have much development priority… yes, good cooks should be safe for a while yet.
Your machine may not be able to “taste”, but it can check various properties like color, opacity, pH, viscosity, temperature and other chemical properties … and what’s more, it can check them continuously and track their evolution. Combined with a good enough up-front design (setting ideal ranges for those), and it should be able to get close enough to the way a cook would adapt.
I believe that’s pretty close to what happens in food factories making things like ice cream or canned soup etc. - though they probably have tasters too, just to be sure.
Automation isn’t about making a machine that does what a human does, the same way. Planes don’t flap their wings, cars don’t have legs, meat grinders don’t have an arm wielding a butcher’s knife—machines don’t need to be able to taste to replace most of what a cook does. If there are some sub-steps that machines are particularly poor at, there may be a workaround, for example ensuring more homogeneity in the ingredients than a human cook would need, or using a dedicated human to do only that step (tasting, for example).
Eg. in cooking the kind and quality of the ingredients must be continuously assessed, and decent cooks taste their food while cooking to ensure a good final result.
Commercial cooks do not, in fact, taste everything they make. Not even close.
I do not disagree with you, apart from one minor point: I think the amount of “creative aspect” in routine, cookbook cooking, hairdressing etc is underestimated. Eg. in cooking the kind and quality of the ingredients must be continuously assessed, and decent cooks taste their food while cooking to ensure a good final result.
“Artificial taste” not only seems rather difficult, but also does not have much development priority… yes, good cooks should be safe for a while yet.
Your machine may not be able to “taste”, but it can check various properties like color, opacity, pH, viscosity, temperature and other chemical properties … and what’s more, it can check them continuously and track their evolution. Combined with a good enough up-front design (setting ideal ranges for those), and it should be able to get close enough to the way a cook would adapt.
I believe that’s pretty close to what happens in food factories making things like ice cream or canned soup etc. - though they probably have tasters too, just to be sure.
Automation isn’t about making a machine that does what a human does, the same way. Planes don’t flap their wings, cars don’t have legs, meat grinders don’t have an arm wielding a butcher’s knife—machines don’t need to be able to taste to replace most of what a cook does. If there are some sub-steps that machines are particularly poor at, there may be a workaround, for example ensuring more homogeneity in the ingredients than a human cook would need, or using a dedicated human to do only that step (tasting, for example).
Commercial cooks do not, in fact, taste everything they make. Not even close.
In a lot of work, people are willing to sacrifice quality to get cheapness and convenience.