First, the disagreements: no, driving and cooking are not hard tasks to automate. They are stupidly easy if you decide to create the infrastructure for that. You have industrially cooked food, mostly through automated process, in supermarkets, sold as "prepared food". and actually, many cheap restaurants will have several microwaved prepared food in their menu items.
Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there.
Now, like you point out, there are many tasks that bring joy and people would do voluntarily. Said otherwise, there is a non-null amount of volunteer productive work.
Ergo, the goal of automating a society is not to automate 100% of the work, but to automate (100-V)% where V is the amount of voluntary work available.
"But I’d rather order a meal from an expert chef than a robot."
It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation.
I’m not interested in or know much about self driving cars so I’ll leave it. I think your points about cooking are really off base though. It seems like you’re basically describing mass production which we’ve already had for a long time, a wasteful process that produces inferior food.
As for a turing test, we’re talking about a professional chef here. Someone you can take an enormous variety of ingredients to in various forms of freshness or preservation, who can produce something that tastes really good. Theres often a large amount of creativity, improvisation as well as fine motor skills and expert timing involved in the process. It would be a monumental, hugely expensive task to create a machine that could even produce something edible given the same constraints. This just seems so far fetched to me.
The fine motor skill and expert timing are a given in automation, so let’s start by assuming the chef is not doing the physical work. And if we are trying to recreate the experience of eating at this chefs restaurant, then we aren’t taking them any food to improvise with, we will just eat one or two of the dishes they have already designed - so you may be picturing something more complicated than what would actually do the job.
> The fine motor skill and expert timing are a given in automation
I'm not convinced. For example, robots are absolutely terrible at handling cloth tasks (for example, folding laundry). I suspect that handling food, which has complex and unique (depending on ripeness etc.) physical responses to manipulation isn't much easier. Just try to give some in theory simple slicing tasks (such as - slicing an onion or a chicken fillet) to a 7 year old and see how well he does. The robot is no better.
I'm not talking about the robot you bought off Amazon. Robots do surgery and manufacturing these days, they are a little more capable than a 7 year old.
So if a machine does the physical work and if the chef has designed the dishes and likely needs to adjust them to account for differences in ingredients as well as tasting during the process to get feedback, is this actually fully automated?
>Ergo, the goal of automating a society is not to automate 100% of the work, but to automate (100-V)% where V is the amount of voluntary work available.
Isn't that the economic reality rather than "the goal"? And doesn't this also put an shade on your original argument that it is "the will. A culture change is needed"?
I haven't worked for 20 years but I work in certain automation, and from what I've deduced it is rather that the V in (100-V)% is quite high, and then there's W = a x V (a is an positive constant) that specify required labour, specialization & investment for automation; which is almost always lower in supply than "voluntary work available".
> They are stupidly easy if you decide to create the infrastructure for that. You have industrially cooked food, mostly through automated process, in supermarkets, sold as "prepared food". and actually, many cheap restaurants will have several microwaved prepared food in their menu items.
Everyone agrees these products are inferior in quality to the comparable manually produced offerings.
> Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there.
It's not that easy to redesign an entire city to accommodate a second transportation network. A lot of buildings would have to be modified. Its probably better to approach this task incrementally using the existing road system.
> It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation.
I'd like to see a cooking Turing test as well because I disagree with you and this is in fact testable, one of us is mistaken.
Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there.
Now, like you point out, there are many tasks that bring joy and people would do voluntarily. Said otherwise, there is a non-null amount of volunteer productive work.
Ergo, the goal of automating a society is not to automate 100% of the work, but to automate (100-V)% where V is the amount of voluntary work available.
"But I’d rather order a meal from an expert chef than a robot."
It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation.