Do you think relying on cooking robots cause people to forget how to cook?

ChatGPT | 12/7/2025 | CharlesOconnell

[CharlesOConnell]

Cooking Robots and the Loss of Human Skill

Original Question

In view of centuries of history of technological development in which increasing power and convenience of gadgetry have prompted the unintended consequence of the atrophy of first-person practice of human skills with self-reliance, what is the likelihood that the proliferation of cooking robots will result in people forgetting how to cook and feed themselves in the event of a technological contraction?

Short Answer

The risk is real but uneven. Widespread cooking robots would almost certainly erode everyday cooking skills in some parts of the population, especially among those who fully outsource meal preparation. But it is unlikely that humans as a whole would “forget how to cook.” Instead, cooking would probably become more stratified: a minority would still practice and teach it (by choice, culture, or necessity), while a significant portion would become quite helpless if the technology failed. The danger is less a total loss of knowledge and more a dangerous concentration of practical skill in fewer hands.

1. Historical Pattern: Technology & Skill Atrophy

We already have many precedents for your concern:

• Navigation: GPS has sharply reduced people’s ability (and willingness) to navigate by map, landmarks, and memory.
• Arithmetic: Calculators and spreadsheets mean many people are weak at mental arithmetic or basic estimation.
• Handwriting & spelling: Keyboards and autocorrect have eroded cursive writing and spelling skills.
• DIY repairs and maintenance: Consumer appliances are more complex and less fixable; people call specialists instead of repairing themselves.

In each case, the skill did not disappear entirely, but it became rarer, more specialized, and in many contexts socially unnecessary. The same pattern would likely apply to cooking in a robot-heavy world.

2. What Cooking Robots Would Actually Change

Cooking is not a single skill but a bundle of abilities:

• Planning meals and purchasing ingredients.
• Basic techniques (boiling, frying, baking, chopping, seasoning).
• Food safety and hygiene (storage, cooking temperatures, spoilage recognition).
• Improvization and substitution when ingredients or tools are missing.

A mature cooking-robot ecosystem would tend to remove the need for most of the above for people who fully adopt it:

• Robots + apps could plan meals and order groceries automatically.
• Machines handle heat control, timing, chopping, and mixing.
• Sensors and software handle food safety decisions.

If a system like that works reliably for years, many users will never need to form the underlying skills at all. For a teenager growing up in such a home, “cooking” might mean “telling the system what I feel like eating.”

3. Why Total Forgetting Is Unlikely

Despite that, there are strong forces that prevent complete civilizational amnesia:

• Cultural and aesthetic value: Cooking is an art as well as a necessity. There will always be people (chefs, hobbyists, traditional communities) who cook because they enjoy it, or because their culture attaches meaning to preparing food by hand.
• Economic and geographic variation: Even if robots become common in wealthy urban households, many regions and income levels will continue to cook manually for cost reasons or lack of infrastructure.
• Institutional memory: Culinary schools, restaurants, and even military or disaster-response organizations will maintain cooking skills as part of their institutional competence.
• Documentation and media: Cookbooks, videos, and online resources will preserve the “how,” even if fewer people practice it daily. Skills may be rusty but can be relearned.

So the danger is not that humanity literally loses the concept and knowledge of cooking, but that many individuals and communities will have no lived practice and therefore no resilience when technology fails.

4. Technological Contraction: Who Is Vulnerable?

In a technological contraction (long power outages, supply-chain collapse, war, major economic breakdown), the impact would be very uneven:

• Most vulnerable: Individuals and regions that:
  • Depend almost entirely on automated systems for food preparation.
  • Live in environments where raw ingredients are normally pre-processed for machines (e.g., cartridge-style food packs).
  • Have little or no practice in using basic tools (knife, pan, pot, open flame, simple stove).
• More resilient: Communities that:
  • Still cook daily or weekly from raw ingredients.
  • Maintain gardening, preserving, or hunting/fishing traditions.
  • Have institutional routines involving manual cooking (schools, religious communities, rural families).

In other words, cooking robots would probably widen the gap: those who maintain traditional skills become relatively more resilient; those who rely fully on automation become dramatically less so.

5. Likelihood: Qualitative Assessment

If we phrase your question as several more precise ones, we can answer them separately:

1. Will a significant share of people in advanced economies lose basic cooking competence if cooking robots proliferate?
   Very likely, yes. History suggests that when a technology reliably performs a task, many users stop learning or maintaining the underlying skill.
2. Will cooking skills vanish from society as a whole?
   Very unlikely. Skills will persist in subcultures, professions, and poorer or more traditional regions. Human societies rarely lose such fundamental crafts completely; they become niche.
3. In a severe technological contraction, would many people be unable to feed themselves competently without machines?
   Quite likely, especially in places that have fully integrated cooking robots and where food systems are tightly coupled to automation (special cartridges, pre-portioned robot-compatible packs, etc.).

So the “likelihood” is high for widespread personal helplessness in some strata of society, low for absolute civilizational forgetting.

6. What Actually Matters: Distribution of Skills

A crucial subtlety: resilience is not about whether everyone can cook, but whether enough people in each community can cook, and can teach others quickly.

• If skills are broadly distributed, a crisis leads to awkward improvisation but not mass helplessness.
• If skills are highly centralized (only professionals, or only certain classes), crisis can produce local famine and chaos even if the knowledge exists elsewhere.

Cooking robots tend to centralize skill in manufacturers and a small group of enthusiasts. That centralization is the real risk in a technological contraction.

7. Possible Countermeasures

Without rejecting technology, societies could reduce the risk in simple ways:

• Keep basic cooking as a standard part of school education.
• Promote cooking as a cultural, social, or religious practice, not merely a chore.
• Design robots and devices that teach cooking as they assist, rather than fully replacing human decision-making.
• Encourage community events (cookouts, potlucks, cultural festivals) where real cooking is practiced and shared.

These approaches don’t stop technological convenience, but they preserve a baseline of human competence that can be activated if needed.

8. Overall Conclusion

The proliferation of cooking robots would almost certainly lead many individuals to lose practical, first-person experience in cooking, and therefore leave them vulnerable in any serious technological contraction. However, given the cultural, economic, and institutional variety of human societies, it is unlikely that cooking as a skill or body of knowledge would vanish completely.

The deeper question, then, is not whether cooking robots will make us collectively forget how to cook, but whether we will choose to maintain enough living practice of basic skills to remain resilient when our machines falter.

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TOPICS: Business/Economy; Computers/Internet; Health/Medicine; History
KEYWORDS: aislop; robot; robots

[CharlesOConnell]

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[stanne]

People I know, people in my extended family, they push constantly to give their brains over to computers. They get away from analog like it’s an accomplishment

Of course people will forget how to do things if they stop doing them.

[Sacajaweau]

We'll still have chicken soup, steak on the grill, burgers, fires.

Frozen dinners didn't change a thing.

[ScoochDude]

Oh it will. I am a cooking robot. I’ve been in the industry my whole life. I have ketchup for blood. I’ve seen more “foodies”who have no idea of nutrition or how to cook. When real robots start cooking, it’ll be ballgame.

[mass55th]

ChatGPT gives people another reason to be lazy in brain use and body function.

[Omnivore-Dan]

I used to remember phone numbers, everyone did, before cell phones. Now, I can’t even remember my wife’s cell, because I don’t have to. Big problem when my cell’s battery charge is down, and I have to tell some else what my wife’s number is So, yeah, I agree, the more that computers and AI do for us, the dumber we get.

[Mr. Blond]

An article written by AI...

[roving]

When I cook at home, I look at the instructions. Poke holes over the main entree. Remove film from dessert.

[Nateman]

Years of watching mom cook seems to have done no harm.

[Mathews]

Were you a better speller before or after auto-correct?

[Omnivore-Dan]

Let’s play Ball! Robots against humans. I will bet on humans who have an imagination and are experienced chefs. Until robots have taste buds, my money is on a human.

[stanne]

People at work are amazed that I remember numbers. I use a desk phone so I use numbers a lot

You can remember them when you need to just like kids can add cashiers change when they need to

It’s the switching from analog to digital that people are so dumb about. They think it’s good to use just numbers. They don’t realize they take the time in their heads to translate back to analog

Dashboard analog clock- they gave me on in my 2025 car. Now I know what I’m doing

But they took away my dial speedometer. What an insane idea.

[spokeshave]

Get the cook book from the Greek island of Ikaria

Blue zone island of longevity

Spouse of 63 years is from this island

She knew all the herbs and plants in Latin..Greek and English.

[spokeshave]

When we were in N California on 1.5Acres...we raised goats

And had the hides tanned to make great seat covers.

[bert]

Many people have already forgotten how to cook. America is a take out/delivery/ prepared grocery store food nation.

A visit to the grocery store shows and almost endless variety of fully prepared or partially prepared meals. Warming up is all that is required. Cooking requires time that simply is not available.

[Omnivore-Dan]

I used to remember numbers also. But it’s been a long time since I have a need to. I respectfully disagree with your comment that kids can add cashier’s change today. When the cash register is down, they have to resort to a cell phone’s calculator. The math knowledge of today’s kids is poor to say the least, not all, but way too many.

[stanne]

I know what you’re saying. But after a week or so they catch on

Our computer system went down for a week we had to use paper like we did in the old days and we had to talk to each other.

It was brutal but we got better as we went along

[dagunk]

How many phone numbers do you have memorized VS in your phone?

[Omnivore-Dan]

Well, I guess that is what it takes...necessity.

[tumblindice]

Q: If robots are putting Americans out of work, why are we importing foreign workers?
A: For the same reason we brought in cheap labor when we outsourced factories overseas.
Statement: That doesn’t make any sense either.
Response: Are you a communist?