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.

[frank ballenger]

New Boston Blue scene with Donnie Wahlberg as Danny Reagan, asked if he cooks on a gas stove or an electric stove.

“Microwave.”

[stanne]

Oh they’re using calculators for simple math

That’s very bad

[frank ballenger]

Yummy banquet for the 2001 guys....

https://www.google.com/search?q=images+food+given+to+2001+a+Space+Odyssey+astronauts&sca_esv=3b156faec67ec414&udm=2&biw=1318&bih=670&ei=KwA2aaqCGYfEp84PvLyykA0&ved=0ahUKEwjqw9ngw6yRAxUH4skDHTyeDNIQ4dUDCBI&oq=images+food+given+to+2001+a+Space+Odyssey+astronauts&gs_lp=Egtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZyI0aW1hZ2VzIGZvb2QgZ2l2ZW4gdG8gMjAwMSBhIFNwYWNlIE9keXNzZXkgYXN0cm9uYXV0c0gAUABYAHAAeACQAQCYAQCgAQCqAQC4AQzIAQCYAgCgAgCYAwCSBwCgBwCyBwC4BwDCBwDIBwCACAE&sclient=gws-wiz-img

[Larry Lucido]

Hey, what do I know about cooking a robot?

[Colorado Doug]

Very few women know how to cook anyway.

[stanne]

I use my calculator for household and at work

But kids need to learn basic math in their heads, at least on paper they need it for their development. For logic etc

They get to college and their engineering scholarship gets taken away. The jig is up. They can’t do math. I’ve seen it.

The people in good programs, their parents would not allow calculators.

[discostu]

Cooking is a skill that’s gone up and down in human history. So replicators or whatever might cause another down. Kind of like the shutdown made another up. But so what. If the bots are good at it then it really doesn’t matter. People who like to cook will cook. People who don’t fill figure out ways around it.

[MayflowerMadam]

“Many people have already forgotten how to cook.”

And some of us are sick and tired of it. That’s why God made cruises.

When I remember the feasts I used to put together, and how much I enjoyed it, I get exhausted just thinking about it.

[Dr. Sivana]

My brother-in-law went to a top diesel training school in Denver in the 1970s. In those pre-microwave days, he struggled with the TV dinner, first putting the whole unopened box in the oven, then removing all the foil, (no film in those days).

But he could take apart and reassemble a Peterbilt tractor-trailer engine by himself.

[T. P. Pole]

Do you think relying on ChatGBT cause people to forget how to think?

[MayflowerMadam]

“disagree with your comment that kids can add cashier’s change today.”

That’s true. About 10 years ago i was at a fast food joint and the computers went down just as I was getting ready to pay. The kid at the register didn’t miss a beat, and counted back the change. All the others were standing there like dolts

I asked, “Home schooled?”
Him: “Yes.”

[MayflowerMadam]

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

LOL! Maybe zero. I’ve always been terrible remembering numbers. I can look at a complicated word once and never forget, but numbers ...

I do remember my phone number from the ‘50s. Of course, it only had four digits.

[maddog55]

Cooking robots would be the least of my concerns...there’s enough brain dead idiots in society now. They can’t speak a sentence let alone write their name or add 4+4 without googling it or asking AI what to do.

These brain dead idiots are America’s future. Thank God I’m old.

[blackdog]

No. Food Stamps under SNAP has taught the parasites to feed off pre-packaged factory foods. It’s a crime.

[Buttons12]

I’d happily buy a cooking robot, as long as I don’t have to wash it all the time.

[goodnesswins]

The last thing I want a robot for is cooking. I want it for cleaning, lifting, and other chores. That will leave me more time for HEALTHY cooking, but, alas, most Americans don’t do that anymore, it seems.

[Redcitizen]

I’m pretty sure a robot can’t cook mutton stew and Frybread.

[VTenigma]

All this kind of thing is going to do is make people with skills more valuable.

[FreedomPoster]

3 vs. probably around 5000.

[Paal Gulli]

And so what if we do? It was our direct ancestor, Homo Erectus, who invented cooking, and what any one man invented, another can re-invent independently.