Artificial Intelligence and Making Bread

One of the things I have been doing since retiring is baking bread. I love some fresh bread and I want to avoid artificial ingredients in my food. That doesn’t mean I feel the need for a little artificial help in the process. Enter bread machines. Right now I have two machines I am using.

The machine on the right does the whole thing. I put in the ingredients, set a few settings, press start and in a few hours I have a loaf of baked bread. It’s not a particularly smart machine. It’s mostly some steps on a set of timers.

It does a pretty good job but its limited. The bread is a simple boxy shape but it makes for reasonable sandwiches. It doesn’t do sourdough bread and it doesn’t do anything but a standard boxy loaf of bread.

The machine on the left is called the sourdough sidekick and all it does is manage sourdough starter. That leaves a lot of work for the baker, me, to do to bake bread but it gives me a lot of options. This machine is smarter though.

Managing sourdough requires some maintenance work that I have no interest in doing. Some people name their starter and treat it almost like a pet. I have no interest in that. So the sourdough sidekick handles the part of sourdough that I am not interested in doing so I can focus on the parts I am interesting in doing.

SO what is smart about it? Well, I can tell it how much starter I want and when I want it and it will feed and careful the starter I have in order to have it ready for me. It has to balance water, flour, and temperature for me. There is an app that lets me monitor the process.

This does what I want from AI. It handles the boring part and lets me do the hands on and creative parts that I enjoy doing. The first machine gives me bread but does so in a rather boring fashion. If all food was to me was fuel that would be fine. But there is an art to food as well. There is some creativity involved. The hands on aspect of working the dough gives me a certain satisfaction.

What I want from AI is not to replace the things I like to do but to enable me to do things that I like to do. The sidekick has made baking sourdough more doable for me by taking care of the work I don’t have time and interest to do.

I feel like a lot of AI usage is mostly about replacing people when what I want it to do is enable people. I’ve read several people saying things like they don’t want AI to create art or music but rather do the laundry and house keeping so that they have time to create art or music..

I can understand how companies want to replace people and save money. I think that many of us would rather see AI saving time to enable people. Much of what regular people want AI to do requires hardware like my sourdough Sidekick. It seems like the people behind artificial intelligence are only interested in software modulinos though.  Hardware is hard.

We’re seeing more and more pushback against AI. I believe that is largely because of the use cases it is being promoted for. We really need to combine hardware and software to solve problems that make it hard for people to do they things they want to do.