Opinion If a robot can make every plate of food perfect in taste, what will be left for human beings to argue about?

After being made to perform open-heart surgery, assemble cars, build houses, steer traffic, clean up messes and mind babies and pets, robots will now be made to taste food. The scientists at Cambridge University who are developing a robot chef claim that the machine is being given the ability to “taste” so that it can determine whether or not the food it has prepared is “enjoyable”. But considering that human beings can rarely agree on what tastes good and what doesn’t — one man’s delicious Lakhavi biryani is another’s bland mess — what objective standards are there for a robot to perform this task?

A quick tour of social media will make clear the near impossibility of the robot’s task: Take, for instance, the Great Indian Mango Debate that breaks out on Twitter every summer without fail. What should the AI chef do in the face of such polarised opinions? Should it use an Alphonso to make the mango cheesecake, and risk alienating Dassehri and Langda fanatics? It could even be argued that chasing this dream of a perfectly enjoyable meal cooked by AI will end up depriving human beings of that most cherished of conversational topics: Complaining about food. Put food-tasting robots in charge of meals and no longer will there be opportunities to sling an over-seasoned soup back to the kitchen.

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Then there is the larger question of whether or not every meal even needs to be “enjoyable”. After all, there is something to be said for a bland or milky chai — to take one example — that ends up sharpening one’s appreciation of a cup that has just the right ratio of tea, sugar and milk. Indeed, a robot chef might serve plate after plate of “enjoyable” food, but if there’s nothing against which to measure the joy it gives the human who eats it, everything would be mere bland perfection.

This column first appeared in the print edition on May 7, 2022, under the title ‘Underdone idea’.