I do not dislike pre-prepared dishes because I once mingled among people and worked in agriculture for a while.At that time, I knew that the technology behind pre-prepared dishes is not just about additives; it mainly uses freezing technology.Many science fiction novels have written about freezing people, and after a few hundred years, they can come back to life unchanged. Without this technology, the foundation of “The Three-Body Problem” would be lost. Then, in “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back,” Han Solo was frozen and later revived.Whenever I mention freezing, I think of a classic scene from “The Deer and the Cauldron.”“Your Excellency, the rules of the Imperial Kitchen state that fresh vegetables cannot be served.”Wei Xiaobao asked, “Does that mean they serve outdated dishes?” (I was also puzzled when I read this).“Serving outdated dishes is out of the question. It’s just that there are only one or two months in a year when they are available, so they cannot be served. Otherwise, if the Emperor wants to eat winter bamboo shoots in summer and fava beans in winter, everyone would have to hang themselves.”— Look, because the Qing Dynasty did not have freezing technology, even if there were fava beans, the Emperor could not eat them. What a pity.Actually, the essence is in the following part, where Wei Xiaobao continues, “The Emperor and Empress Dowager are both extremely wise; how could such a thing happen?” This scared the speaker into a cold sweat.This truly made me admire him greatly, but this is a bit far from pre-prepared dishes. Jin Yong just placed his thoughts into the mouth of this little brat, Wei Xiaobao.— Divider, the essence of pre-prepared dishesAs a housewife, there is a saying in Shanghai called “Ma Dazhao.” The homophone means “buy big dishes,” where “big” means washing— it can be seen that a large part of housework is worrying about feeding several mouths.Now, thanks to e-commerce, buying can be done from home— in the future, even opening the door to receive goods will be unnecessary; drones can directly throw them in through the window? Then I observed that the most time-consuming part is washing, which includes picking, washing, and cutting vegetables. The actual cooking does not take much time.As for the final stir-frying and cooking, I think it has already been mostly solved, as shown in the image below.
Automatic noodle cooking machines already exist, and for stir-frying bullfrogs, steaming crabs, and simmering chicken soup— as long as the ingredients are prepared, the robotic arm can grab them, tear them open, adjust the seasoning, and stir; it should not be more difficult than the current welding machines.Among these, the “washing, cutting, and blowing” is the truly most troublesome and complex part. I seem to have written before that in the future, robots should not compete in running but in peeling grapes.Therefore, one idea is to put washing, cutting, and blowing into factories. There are specialized machines for peeling fava beans (I really love eating fava beans), peeling potatoes, and washing pea shoots… All these ingredients should not exceed 10,000 types. In any case, even if there are 10,000 types, I think it would still be much easier than making a universal robot.This is also the path for the J-10 to defeat the Rafale, which is to systematize and use chaotic punches to defeat the master. It is not about creating a humanoid robot that can do everything. In any case, I believe that using humanoid robots to solve all household chores will not be seen within 20 years; as a programmer, I am quite pessimistic about this.The correct approach should be to decompose tasks into modules, extract basic paths from each module, and then work on them separately— this is also the core of modern software engineering, ultimately collaborating to complete tasks through a system.To add one more point, whether in a household or a central kitchen, I believe using a spider robot with eight arms to cook is much more practical than using a humanoid robot with two arms— just like when my mother cooks, she cannot be rushed; if you rush her, she gets angry: “I only have two hands, okay?!”Of course, a spider cooking would look a bit ugly. Imagine another scene, a robot dressed as a maid, or a more amusing one, a robot like the Terminator, standing at the stove peeling fava beans; of course, the latter would be more stylish.What I mean is that such stylish things seem to only be achievable in the beautiful country because they have Musk’s robots, Nvidia’s infinite computing power, and can also recruit programming masters like the three brothers.Everyone will definitely say that I am worshiping foreign things, but I hope this article can be preserved for twenty years and then revisited to see whether my old-fashioned spider cooking machine is more reliable or the American robots are more reliable.At this moment, just like Xie Ruolin in “Infiltration,” leaving half a verse:Summer melts away, rivers overflow, and people may become fish or turtles. For thousands of years of merits and sins, who has ever commented on them?