Goalposts

Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?

2020 Decemberjamil7

About whether cooking is easy to automate, as argued in a thread on abolishing work.

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.

A machine takes a wide variety of ingredients, fresh or preserved, and cooks something that tastes really good, like a professional chef.

Has this happened?

Yes 9 (8%)Not sure 34 (28%)No 77 (64%)

Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.