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> I don't think 30 years will see a machine that can make dinner by gathering ingredients from a supermarket, driving home, and preparing the meal.

Really? Why not? Once or twice, if we cherry-pick its performance, or reliably?

This is really surprising to me.



I mean reliably, the same way a human does. I can make a lasagne tonight, or lobster risotto, or whatever. I can decide on a thing, buy ingredients, chop things, get that lobster out of the shells, find the right recipe, substitute according to taste, and loads of other things that are somewhat related to making food. I can wash the pan I need, improvise a stove lighter if the igniter fails, etc.

We might be able to make machines to do each of those tasks, but that's not the answer. I might do 100,000 things in an average week. Clearly we aren't going to build 100,000 bespoke CNNs and LSTMs. To worry about superhuman AI, we probably have to figure out how to make one or a few machines that aren't gloried deep fryers.


> Clearly we aren't going to build 100,000 bespoke CNNs and LSTMs.

I get what you mean, but I don't think we should assume this.


It won't be a single machine. It will be multiple systems. And it's not that far away. Probably only 15 years.

And it will be a great boon. Quality of meals will go up and costs will go down. The restaurant market will shrink but not completely disappear.

But McDonald's will certainly die, as there'll be no need to sacrifice quality and nutrition to get speed and convenience. In fact, a table at McDonald's will be an inconvenient booth.


McDonalds is that machine. All you need is to make the trucks that distribute the ingredients self driving and you have it.


It's not the machine I was describing. It's not a machine but a group of people. And it's certainly not elevating quality or nutrition. It doesn't produce food I'd want to serve to my nieces on a regular basis or that I'd want them know about.




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