Future Chef
The Culinary Singularity is Upon Us
In the 2001 film Tortilla Soup, a chef who has just lost his wife is now losing his sense of taste and smell, a disorder called, Anosmia.
Losing your sense of taste and smell as a chef could be a huge blow to your career and in some cases could very well be a career-ending condition.
Over the years I’ve considered this premise just about every day of my life. I like to think about potential problems and the ways I would solve them.
For example, I have been a guitar player for decades and have always considered the possibility of losing a hand, or a few fingers and how I would remedy that situation.
Some kind of augmentation to my hand has always been my theoretical solution to the potential problem.
This idea of augmentation got me thinking about the aforementioned problem of a chef losing their sense of taste and smell and other potential chef-related problems that could be solved by augmentation.
Repairing a lost sense of taste and smell is in my opinion, a bit different than let’s say replacing an appendage with a prosthetic, as taste and smell occur in the brain and are much more complex.
The future that I see involves brain implants similar to what Neuralink and Paradromics have to offer.
These BCIs are said to be able to restore signal pathways in the brain that have been damaged, so in theory, they could restore your sense of taste and smell.
If that chef who lost his senses was able to regain them through a brain implant what else would that open him up to in the future?
If he were to lose his vision it would be very hard to plate his elaborate meals, the implant could probably take care of that as well.
As he aged his body would break down. Could an implant or a fusion of chef and machine prevent aging?
What happens to chefs when humans and machines become one?
When humans merge with AI being a chef is going to become a whole different experience.
Right now we have smart fridges that inventory your groceries, suggest recipes, and even do meal planning. This can all be monitored and controlled by using an app on your phone, but the need for an external device like a phone will become null and void after implants become commonplace.
I have written about robots replacing food service workers before in the piece below but in this situation, the human element is not eliminated it’s just, connected differently.
What Happens to Us?
Every day we hear more and more about the capabilities of artificial intelligence and automation. When we go to the grocery store, we see fewer staff operating registers. Step inside one of Amazons™ warehouses, and you will find Sparrow, Amazon’s latest warehouse robot. This robot leverages computer vision and AI to accurately recognize and process mill…
A chef who is augmented with a brain implant could connect to the smart fridge that is already inventorying the stock and working on the next order.
The information gathered by the smart fridge doesn’t have to be “sent” to the chef because the chef and the kitchen are now "One”. In this case, the culinary singularity is upon us.
We can now assume that the chef is connected to every piece of equipment in the kitchen as everything is more than likely, a smart device.
The ovens know what temperature to set themselves to because they know what the menu is and what the procedure is for cooking those items, the other cooking elements follow suit.
There is no need for tickets because orders come to the chef in a way that we can now only describe as telepathic, and it is in a way, sort of because remember, everything including the augmented human, is connected.
I’m not saying that the pieces of equipment are sentient, but they are aware enough to know how to operate in concert with the rest of the kitchen.
Line cooks no longer need direction or instruction from the chef because they can now read his mind. Chefs are going to love this one as we expect everybody to be able to do this already.
Every customer that comes into the restaurant is augmented with an implant that’s connected to the other implants around them.
This will become very inconvenient for front-of-house staff because they will be bombarded by customers’ opinions and complaints.
That idea works off the assumption that this is going to be like some kind of telepathic Wild West where rogue thoughts run rampant in the heads of others around them.
There has to be some kind of regulatory function in place to stop the chaos or we would all go insane.
With chef augmentation and the culinary singularity, we are talking about something that eventually leads us down the road of transhumanism, where machines appear conscious, and the humanity that we know now could potentially be unrecognizable in the not-so-distant future.
This is a very fun thought experiment, but I want to flip it on its head: what could augmentation to a chef's senses do for a chef? If you had super smelling or super taste, could you better identify contaminants and impurities in your food? Could gourmet purity be kicked up another level? What else might happen with someone who already has a sense of taste or smell, but now has a superhuman ability in that arena?
Interesting read, thank you.