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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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If my favorite bakery found a way to mass produce their cheesecakes but the pastry chef was not required anymore and it would be all done by machines, then good. More people can enjoy great food for cheap. And to be honest my tongue doesn't care, if it did, its priorities are not in order.

I think you go too far here. If your tongue cares, it's because the machines are not producing the same cheesecakes you enjoyed from the pastry chef, they are producing almost the same. This is great for everyone who wants a good cheesecake for a reasonable price, but it is also good for the pastry chef - now he gets to make cheesecakes for people who want cheesecakes that are better than the machines can make. Plus he gets the fame and prestige of being the model upon which the machines are based. Nobody is putting "Made by machines!" on the label of their cheesecakes - they want a cheesecake made by the pastry chef for a reasonable price. Thanks to the machines they can get it, and if that's not good enough then they can pay for the chef's actual cheesecake.

They are equal in my analogy.

What a strange thing to say. Never mind that mass production has been around for a century and never ever created products identical to handmade, what other priorities might your tongue have then? Have you considered that maybe your tongue doesn't actually care, but due to a minor addendum you made to one of its arguments - helping it no less - it is just pretending to care because it is a child?

They are equal in my analogy

But in reality? That is the difference between people's experience of increasing automation and industrialisation, and the rosy forecasts of "by the 1980s, people will have so much leisure time it will be hard to fill it all, because the work week will be hours not days, thanks to machines!"

Unless we get Star Trek style replicators, the machine-made cheesecake will never be equal to 'the real thing' (and even in Trek, people still go out to restaurants where humans do the cooking). There's even an entire Youtube channel with different levels of chefs making different dishes - here's one for cheesecakes. This is why people pay different prices for different levels of cooking - you don't expect premium prices for fast food burgers, and you expect a higher level of quality if ordering a steak in a fancy restaurant.

I believe there is an American expression, used pejoratively, about "whitebread" or "Wonder bread", deriving from commercially produced sliced white bread loaves, filled with flour improvers and preservatives to enable it to remain soft and long-life. Now this is decried as spongy, tasteless and inferior. These were created thanks to the [Chorleywood Process}(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process) which gave rise to the expression "the best thing since sliced bread" since the innovation was new and remarkable and consumers loved the product.

But I think anyone will agree that the commercial sliced panloaf is not as tasty as the bakery loaf, even if it lasts longer and is ready-sliced. I use both, I prefer batch bread. The constant 'improvements' turned out not to be improvements but were certainly an economically superior process. The end product suffered. That is the fear around AI art.

Wonderbread is a real brand and product that exists and is popular, not a pejorative. I prefer it for some types of sandwiches, like a pb&j and not for others. The world is richer for the existence of wonderbread.