Originally posted by: rasczak
How lazy can you be? Open package, place in microwave, enter time and wait? You're not looking for an easy way to cook, you're looking for a slave. Go get married already.
Except the markup on ready-made meals is crazy, and there's enough sodium there to kill a moose.
Thus, modify this:
Originally posted by: TheInternet1980
Machines + instantaneous, delicious food > human effort/care
to this:
Machines + instantaneous,
cheap, delicious food > human effort/care
Originally posted by: Hayabusa Rider
Originally posted by: TheInternet1980
Machines + instantaneous, delicious food > human effort/care
No, but you don't get the point. You ask for freedom to become a slave. You won't understand that either. You wish to become the sum total of what your machines can do for you. You don't understand that the kitchen for uncounted generations has been the focus of home social life. You worry about increasing your sloth at the sacrifice of your humanity.
This is what you ask to become.
I'll pass.
If we could truly become the sum total of what our machines could do for us.....wow, that would be incredible. Our capabilities could grow exponentially, especially as artificial intelligence becomes more capable.
And it's possible to have a social life outside of the kitchen. Cooking as a group merely gives people an excuse to engage in some activity in one location. Is is possible to do this without the pretext of food preparation and consumption. If food were prepared by some machine, then it is still quite possible to engage in some social activity, and perhaps do something more.....productive than the mundane act of preparing a fuel source.
That's my take on it, at any rate. Food = fuel. There's no ritual or social act during the refining of crude oil into gasoline, nor is there anything special about putting the fuel into your car. Likewise, making food, and eating it, really isn't anything special. Just something else that needs to get done.
Point is though, the freedom gained by independence from the need to prepare food doesn't necessarily mean that one
must become some kind of slave, or that it will detract from a person. If that's the argument, then you could also say that the use of automation in any aspect of our lives is a bad thing. Heck, doing laundry might have at one time been a social occasion, as women would gather around a single water source to spend hours cleaning clothing manually. Should we do away with washing machines, and go back to the "good old days" of hard manual labor?
Or working fields - men, often enslaved, could come up with lovely songs of misery and anguish as they toiled away for hours in unpleasant conditions. Now we have the sounds of diesel-fueled machinery. Bring back the old, or embrace the new?