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.
The fine motor skill and expert timing are a given in automation, so let’s start by assuming the chef is not doing the physical work. And if we are trying to recreate the experience of eating at this chefs restaurant, then we aren’t taking them any food to improvise with, we will just eat one or two of the dishes they have already designed - so you may be picturing something more complicated than what would actually do the job.
> The fine motor skill and expert timing are a given in automation
I'm not convinced. For example, robots are absolutely terrible at handling cloth tasks (for example, folding laundry). I suspect that handling food, which has complex and unique (depending on ripeness etc.) physical responses to manipulation isn't much easier. Just try to give some in theory simple slicing tasks (such as - slicing an onion or a chicken fillet) to a 7 year old and see how well he does. The robot is no better.
I'm not talking about the robot you bought off Amazon. Robots do surgery and manufacturing these days, they are a little more capable than a 7 year old.
So if a machine does the physical work and if the chef has designed the dishes and likely needs to adjust them to account for differences in ingredients as well as tasting during the process to get feedback, is this actually fully automated?
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.