Imagine you’ve just got home after a long day at work – you’re on your own and you need something to eat. You say what you’d like to eat – to the room – and 45 minutes later you’re eating it.
No, you don’t have servants and you’re not staying at a hotel. And this isn’t a scene from a science fiction film. This is – quite possibly – now.
You’ve probably heard all the fuss about the new kid on the tech block – ChatGPT – a new online tool which can answer your questions in a more direct way than just ‘Googling it’. And it’s pretty capable – just type in your question and within a few seconds an answer appears on your screen.
Right now you can ask it to write computer code, speak to it in any number of languages (and it’ll reply in them) and get it to do your homework.
It’s pretty impressive, but what has it got to do with cooking I hear you say. Well, right now you can ask it to find a recipe for you and one will magically appear. If you don’t like that one, you can always ask it to try again (or ‘regenerate’). But in the future it will probably be a lot more capable…
This is how: ChatGPT and its fellow ‘Generative Pre-Trained Transformers’ will soon connect up to an array of other devices (and services) and be able to tell those other devices to do things. Like, for example ‘travel back in time and terminate the mother of the leader of the future Resistance‘ or ‘find me a recipe for this meal I want to eat tonight, check if we have all the ingredients, buy the ones we’re missing and get them delivered in the next thirty minutes’.
The first one is a bit of a stretch for a short while yet (we hope), but the second one…
A member of the Total Knife Care team happened to be at a farmer’s market recently where, in conversation with one of the market team, found out this team member was – on the side – a bit of an expert on AI, and specifically in connecting it up – via an ‘API’ – to other internet services. He then described the scenario outlined above. It was just a question of ‘getting ChatGPT to talk to a grocery delivery service’. How hard could it be? We’ll find out, but I suspect it won’t really be that hard.
The only downside is that – as things are currently – you’d have to cook the meal yourself. This will certainly change too. In all our musings about the future of cooking (like here and here) we featured a set of robotic ‘arms’ on a gantry suspended above what looked like a normal kitchen. These would learn the movements demonstrated by a human chef and simply replicate them. The only downside – you’d have to make sure the ingredients and utensils were in exactly the right place, otherwise all hell would break loose.
But with Elon Musk’s expected release of the Tesla Optimus robot at some point in the next few years, maybe the day when you can just sit down and put your feet up while the meal is cooked for you is not that far away.
By the way…
Right now Chat GPT is great at finding recipes for people who can’t eat certain things. If for example you can’t eat gluten or anything with milk or eggs in, just tell ChatGPT to find your favourite meal but without these and five seconds later you’ll have the recipe. Then you’ll have to go to the supermarket to buy all the missing ingredients…
And in case you were wondering… a human wrote this article.
