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[WillowLuman]

I include the arts under meaning and intellectual/spiritual/human discovery

[Max White]

Eh, I'm sure some people just want to make sushi for others, and that is it. /discovery, you get sushi now!

[WillowLuman]

I'm sure the "handcrafted" version of every job will still survive in some form or another, as skilled labor is a form of art. Certainly robots won't do our cuisine for us. Maybe just our lowest fastfood/microwave/factory cooking, but not our cuisine.

[Frumple]

It would be kinda' interesting to see cooks regulated to a sort of performance art, once machines are categorically better at preparing food in regards to taste, presentation, and nutrition. And hell, probably cost, too. "Look at the quaint person in a chef outfit trying to cook as good as a cookbot! Isn't it neat?" "Yes honey, that's very interesting, but very wasteful and it still doesn't taste all that good. Give the street performer a quarter and let's go home."

I'm sure the "handcrafted" version of every job will still survive in some form or another, as skilled labor is a form of art. Certainly robots won't do our cuisine for us. Maybe just our lowest fastfood/microwave/factory cooking, but not our cuisine.

... why not? Anything a cook can do, a machine will be able to soon enough, if they're not already able to. It's fundamentally motion, timing, and naught else -- and that can be programmed. And once it can be programmed and the means of replicating it by way of automation made sufficiently inexpensive, the preparer of cuisine will become cost inefficient, if not outright obsolete. Though once they're cost inefficient, they might as well be obsolete, heh.

[Graknorke]

Because robots are not good at making things that look pretty. At least, not from non-uniform materials, and in different ways each time.

[Max White]

It would be kinda' interesting to see cooks regulated to a sort of performance art, once machines are categorically better at preparing food in regards to taste, presentation, and nutrition. And hell, probably cost, too. "Look at the quaint person in a chef outfit trying to cook as good as a cookbot! Isn't it neat?" "Yes honey, that's very interesting, but very wasteful and it still doesn't taste all that good. Give the street performer a quarter and let's go home."

I think it is less the case that the robots would quickly get better than humans in such a human-ish field, but rather there is nothing else for the humans to actually do, the economy can support them doing nothing, so in the search for fulfillment enough people just start cooking as an art, for the fun of it. That way you can go out and eat for free and enjoy amazing meals, while the chefs have no need for payment as robots take care of their needs.

[Frumple]

Because robots are not good at making things that look pretty. At least, not from non-uniform materials, and in different ways each time.

... are you sure? Because I've seen some pretty consistently neat stuff come out of procedural generation already, and we're still really only just starting to break into that stuff. I don't quite see a reason why it would be terribly difficult to apply the same methodology to gastronomy, especially as techniques built for such are further developed.

Take a networked series of cookbots that can track failed attempts between them and keep a database of successful ones and I'd rather imagine you'd have something that pretty easily surpasses most of what man can do in short order. Especially if you get really fancy and have stuff like on the fly chemical and structural analysis, where you end up with machines able to literally identify (as opposed to basically make incredibly good guesses) what is, and how to make things with, ideal taste and texture. Not that'd you actually need to go that far (motion studies of active chefs and input recipes/preparation methods with built-in variances -- within particular tolerances to adjust to different tastes -- would likely be enough), but still.

[WillowLuman]

Except that requires advanced AI. Machines cannot innovate. Being able to do "art" is something they won't recognize anytime soon. Any art "produced" by a machine does so only insofar as the designer/artist uses it as a tool. The true artist is the writer of the random generation algorithm, not the algorithm itself.

[Frumple]

Perhaps, but that still leaves the chef working the stove without much to do

[WillowLuman]

The chef can taste their food from the perspective of a human.

For a machine to do so with the same degree of subtlety, you'd have to make a sentient AI, able to replicate the cultural and instinctual factors that affect human taste.

[scrdest]

Also, you could have an actual human chef handling how how the food should be preparated and presented, and the machinery just replicating that.

[notquitethere]

Whatever else you might say for or against potential cookbots, they'd be an unnecessary energy expenditure for most meals. I can see the possibilities for restaurants, but at least while there's limited and expensive electricity it won't be worthwhile for most people.

[Helgoland]

Ehm... Machines can innovate. Just look at simulated annealing - it's basically random deviations from a pre-set standard, with larger deviations being less likely, and subsequent evaluation of the result.
So that's my idea for a cookbot with the capacity to innovate: A given recipe is altered along some rules derived from real-life chefs, then evaluated by human tasters. The results become part of the database, and the process is repeated.

Maybe one day, critics will be the only human element in food preparation. The consequence would make for a good sci-fi premise: The only field in which humans are innately superior to machines is being assholes.

[Max White]

Evolution isn't exactly the same process as innovation. Evolution is like water, it always flows downwards, but that doesn't mean it always finds the lowest point. It won't flow up the side of a basin to reach the floor, and in the same way evolution will rarely follow a path that is less well adapted in the short term, but can branch into something more well adapted in the long term. It is for this reason that we are full of all these biological redundancies and poor design choices as a species. I imagine your food creation method would be much the same, you would get a very refined dish, and it would change over time to suit shifts in cultural taste, but you would rarely, if ever see the kind of brand new innovation that is so indicative of human design.

[Helgoland]

The algorithm (look it up, it's a thing that's being used) is designed to come up with the perfect solution, albeit slowly. The

kind of brand new innovation that is so indicative of human design

the very large deviation from what seems sensible is exactly why it works.

Further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing