People could all make their own breads, if they had more times, but it’d require more ovens working simultaneously instead of fewer big ovens. It would also take more time for humanity, collectively. And even if everyone had a big oven like those in bakeries, while they could make big stocks of bread for a long time, this would result in everyone eating bread of lesser quality because bread goes bad with time. Having a skilled minority cooking a lot of bread every day in big ovens is just better.

This is not an ode to capitalism or any specific economic system, socialist or communist systems can have bakers to, I guess, tho the ownership of bakeries and boss-employee relationship between them must be rethought or abolished in these cases. All I’m saying is, when thinking up a new and revolutionary economic system, one must always account for bakers.

And sure, robots could bake, maybe. But I don’t think they should. Or rather, I think human-made bread and pastries should always exist, because they create variatons and originalities that are interesting. And if human-made bread becomes a luxury commodity and the common people only have access to robot bread, this’d be a tragedy, so better keep the djinni in a bottle and not let robots bake.

  • GoldenSpamfish@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    Robots do bake. Actually, a lot of the food you eat is partly made by machines. It’s how we aren’t all starving right now, and why famines are so much less common. As good as handmade bread is, it couldn’t feed 8 billion people. We have bread loaves in the supermarket made by machines, and we are better off for it.