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.
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.
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.
Its still interesting though that it seems like in the 70's they were still expecting there would be some centralized computer in charge of it all while in reality computing got so small and so cheap its found its way to each appliance on its own.
Also, if you are feeling froggy, their cloud sync API is pretty easy to reverse engineer (it's a super basic REST service) so you can build on top of it or write little utilities if needed.
Having all my recipes in the same format is so nice and I can edit a recipe if I want to tweak it or if I find out that what a recipe called for wasn't quite right. Like the icing I make for my red velvet cupcakes called for an insane amount of powered sugar (aka confectioners sugar) and so I edited the recipe so next time I wouldn't over-buy the sugar. Same with tweaking the flavor profile, cook times, etc. And I can add things I always have to look up like sous vide temp/time, I just have a "Sous Vide Steak" "recipe" that has the times in the body of the instructions.
Self-driving cars is one area where I could see a bigger shift: a dangerous activity that could perhaps be done better by machines, if the environment is adapted to prevent show-stopping accidents.
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 this life, if only their construction and the underlying principles were understood. That work, in the physics sense, can captured and redirected by machinery is an ancient realization. Around 20 AD a Greek poet (Antipater of Thessalonica) made a passing reference to how machines had already freed people from the toil of grinding grain by harnessing nature's power:
> Hold back your hand from the mill, you grinding girls; even if the cockcrow heralds the dawn, sleep on. For Demeter has imposed the labours of your hands on the nymphs, who leaping down upon the topmost part of the wheel, rotate its axle; with encircling cogs, it turns the hollow weight of the Nisyrian millstones. If we learn to feast toil-free on the fruits of the earth, we taste again the golden age.
Like Roombas. No pets, children, floorstanding houseplants, rugs, clothes left on the floor, etc.
For self-driving cars: no non-powered vehicles or pedestrians, no variant uses of the road, no road surface problems.
And what exactly would that environment look like to those outside of a car?
- who peels and chops the vegetables etc that go into those containers?
- who cleans up the pots and utensils when the robot is done stirring and heating the food?
Ideally there would be another $300,000 robot for each of those two tasks, but I suspect the answer is that your (human) housekeeper is needed.
The video is worth watching just to laugh at how unbelievably slowly this $338,000 marvel is at stirring the contents of a saucepan.
The elevator pitch for Moley could be "Juicero, but for pasta"
> - 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)
As 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.
Even Apple wasn't immune.
https://www.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/a2origi...
None of this really changed until VisiCalc came along.
When I opened the page, I saw a cookie banner, untoggled all toggles that were togglable and clicked "Reject all cookies". The cookie dialog said that there will be only functional cookies and they won't contain any personal information. How nice, I thought, Internet is changing for the better. I also can enjoy the privileges of EU citizens.
But then - just out of curiosity - I decided to see what cookies are left in my browser. Imagine my surprise when I saw 6 (six) cookies. Those included:
- an UUID with name 'stripe_mid' expiring in a year
- OptanonConsent, which, I assume, represents chosen settings and contains UUID in 'consentId' field. This UUID is set when the page is loaded. I guess they store your preferences on the server and not in cookies as I thought. Obviously, you can be tracked with this cookie as the identifier seems to be unique.
- user_geoip_fallback and user_geoip, both of which contain an IP address
To check that the dialog indeed doesn't work, I deleted all cookies except for cookies related to the consent dialog, and reloaded the page. Stripe and geoip cookies have been set again.
It turns out that you shouldn't trust cookie dialogs from that third-party company which you often see on different sites. They are either broken or intentionally deceive a user.
First touch screen 27" AIO for recipes, balancing the household budget, watching videos, playing games, , video conferencing with family & work
Second touch screen 27" AIO for recipes, balancing the household budget, watching videos, video conferencing with family & work
Over-powered VR computer running the other touch screen
Smart dashboard AKA iPad that shows video feeds from security cameras, google calendars, weather forecast, location of phones, wallets, cats and other household information, plus "the funnies" from various news websites
Task specific computers:
A collection of iPads for handling multiple recipes and unit conversion
Device specific computers in the kitchen/dining room area:
Coffee robot AKA Jura J9
Water filter AKA ION Smart Filter
Plant monitoring AKA Raspbery Pi with a bunch of sensors
Not computerised:
The meal plan, which is simply scribbled on to a couple of rectangular glass white boards mounted to the end of a cabinet and clearly visible
What I have found lacking in my experience is not the concept of the kitchen computer, but the software to drive it. So much proposed software is lacking in the UX & UI area that most apps border on the useless.
The 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.
There are better low hanging fruit to be had in the automation/robot domains, if you think about it.
Kitchen 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.
