Robot Chefs 🤖 👨‍🍳

So I just saw a talk by the creator of DoorDash, Tony Xu, and it's so clear to me that the whole economics of food delivery, food preparation, food consumption are going to shift when we all have a home robot that can cook for us. And so, whereas today DoorDash saves people from cooking by preparing the food in ghost kitchens or in restaurants, putting it in plastic trays that are heated, and putting it in somebody's car and driving it to us, I think the future is going to look something like delivery that's automated and powered by AI and could be serviced by DoorDash. But the cooking is happening in our homes because that's the most fresh, most effective way to prepare the ingredients and deliver the healthiest food. A lot of people have what I would call a DoorDash addiction, which is where their kind of cooking skills have totally atrophied. And I've definitely gone through phases in life where I've been like that. And I do wonder if the idea of having a chef available to us 24-7 for the cost of electricity and AI is going to change the way that people exist, because it's kind of like having the magic of a private chef without needing to have somebody in your home lots of kind of intimate periods. So, I mean, today we're already seeing basic gripper robots being able to prepare phenomenal omelettes. But very quickly, I can imagine the set of recipes that they can kind of handle increasing. Honestly, if you could just do steak and eggs for me and wash up the pan afterwards, I think I would just hit that button every day. And if DoorDash is delivering the ingredients or some other service delivering the ingredients, that could be massive. Now, the economics of so many different tasks change when labour is at the price of electricity. And when we have a robot in our homes that can can start to kind of do these tasks that are usually reserved for rich people with stuff and do them affordably, there's so many different services and kind of implications. And what does a kitchen look like? That's not optimised for humans to enjoy and see, but for robots to operate as quickly as possible. Can robots effectively just grind away in the dark and do everything at warp speed once the algorithms are good enough? Can we imagine laundry rooms or utility rooms or places that are catered to robots over time? But I think initially it all needs to kind of interface with the human sphere. So it has to be a kind of four to six foot tall object with at least two arms and certain kinds of grippers and things like that. But there's so many things that today involve labour and that we kind of export to other services. And the reason DoorDash is so big is because people don't want to cook their food and because people don't want to go to the supermarket. And I think that that is could be viewed as laziness, but it could also be viewed as humans kind of learning to move as much labour as they can onto a system instead of doing it all themselves. This this this really shifts, though, when the labour can occur in the home autonomously without people involved. And I just really wonder how the economics will shift once we have ubiquitous home robots over the next 10 years. The other task that I think is kind of related to this is like this this dream that's always been there of your fridge, anticipating your needs and placing the orders and cooking the meals. I mean, if you can just express as you would to a private chef, I'm looking to get higher protein, lower carb set of meals for myself and my partner and my children. There's so many decisions that have to go into that. And I think the robot closes the loop on that full set of decisions where Instacart and DoorDash have kind of started the logistics improvements. I think that the complete picture around what food we put into our bodies might get shifted when we can mix AI