I mean, I get the author's point not to over-hype AI, but the microwave oven is one of the most successful inventions in the past 100 years.
How about ... the Segway? I hear whole cities will be designed around them.
That strikes me as a likely outcome. Many other things have played out similarly.
Ai obviously has solid use cases, it’s just not the whole kitchen.
1.) customers who don't know about the practice, now expect food right away for very cheap price, which bankrupts traditional restaurants that cook from fresh ingredients. An analogy could be off the shelf software or custom software losing sales to vibe coded software
2.) customers who do know about the practice, stops ordering food altogether, due to food issues (prepared ingredients are very low quality, oil could be very dirty) or they could cook prepared food at home in their own microwave for even cheaper. An analogy is programmers coding their own software using vibe coding.
3.) declining quality of food, and less and less people eating out in China. It's gotten so bad that now hotel restaurants, which would be the fine dining options, are setting up food stalls in the street to sell cheap but freshly cooked food, in order to get people into the hotel restaurants. An analogy might be softwares with per seat pricing changing to action based pricing for an initial period.
WheelsAtLarge•2h ago
allears•2h ago
fuzzfactor•1h ago
>Today’s microwave can cook a frozen burrito. Tomorrow’s microwave will be able to cook an entire Thanksgiving Dinner.
Actually it went like that in reverse.
They didn't really mass-market microwaves in the 1970's until they were capable of cooking a whole turkey faster than ever, and then developed free microwave cooking lessons well-attended at appliance stores. Where they demonstrated how to cook a whole Thanksgiving dinner, live. You can't make this up. Smelled wonderful :)
There was a very prevalent attitude that the emerging microwave could be nothing less than a major appliance, and there was not yet a concept for launching anything that was not thought capable of replacing a conventional oven right away.
They weighed about 75 pounds and were naturally big enough to hold a turkey.
This is the kind of microwave ovens that Dire Straits was lamenting about delivering at the time, before they got better gigs, with less stress on the hands & fingers.
Don't ask me how I know . . .
TheAlchemist•2h ago