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Hello, Artificial Intelligence Chef! Imagine a future where you sit on your couch while a fellow robot operates the TV remote control and changes the channels, another one sings in the kitchen while preparing dinner, a third one cleans the house and there you have that one in your bathroom which flushes after the nature’s call. Artificial intelligence, if (and it will) it evolves, will most probably welcome the next generation of couch potatoes. We already have the cellphones that do a lot of thinking instead of us and in the future robots will do a lot of house chores, administrative tasks and many other things that we ourselves can perform but oh, well, it is better to sit on your back and watch others do things. While the world around is falling into pieces, a robot learns how to cook pizza.
If robots ever rise up and take our jobs, we will be the only ones to blame. PR2 is a cognition enabled autonomous service bot that has been “teaching” itself to cook with the help of videos and recipes on the internet.
This machinery is one of many which are presently used by a complex team of European researchers who aim to make our lives easier by taking some responsibilities off our shoulders, which for some of us pay the rent or those drinks for the night out or those pretty clothes we wear to impress our beloved. The robots are designed to competently perform everyday human-scale manipulation activities “both in human working and living environments”.
PR2, the soon to be robot cook, is currently learning the art of pizza-making. Some of the other android activities include making popcorn and mastering the flip while preparing those perfect pancakes.
Experts have developed a special software which enables the robot to deliver some cookery wisdom to all of us who cannot imagine how the French fries becomes so French when fried. The software is known as Open Ease and it is an online database available to all the aspiring robot cooks around the world. We will soon have a new definition for the concept of master chef. This special program takes instructions for cooking or performing other simple tasks and encodes them into a machine-readable language.
But still, there is a lot of work to be done before an actual robot will be able to cook dinner instead of a human being. Thank the heavens for that, as there is still hope for romantics!
Image Source: flickr.com
