| HN Mirror

A lot of automation isn't what people think of as automation. Is the average supermarket automated? A bit, but not a lot. But 90% of what they are actually selling has been automated in some way. Groceries have been cooked, picked, preserved, packed, shipped or otherwise processed with the help of automation. So regardless how smart an AI becomes it doesn't provide much more value as a cooking robot. We have automated cooking for decades by processing food. But we are still limited by physics, society and need.

AI will probably make music free. But it is already almost free with cheap instruments, recording equipment and distribution. And even before music wasn't that expensive. You can argue that we lose value in not performing it ourselves. That is some impact, but not one that strictly replaces the other. You can choose to have society where you teach music and it will still provide value over AI.

I do realize that the idea is often not that we will have cooking robots, but that AI will change chemistry or biology to where food is something else. Still hard to say if or when that happens, and what impact it would actually have.