General

Just a thought I had today, and other days too.

Ever wish there was a machine that can pick up snacks such as various pastries, baked goods, or other food and will place it in or near your mouth, while you are perhaps sitting and typing away at your desk, or while playing video games?

I kind of wish there was. I have a feeling I might eat more doughnuts and cookies if I had such a machine.

If it were 30+ years ago, this would have absolutely been the stuff of science fiction. Even 10-20 years ago, I would have expected that while potentially possible, something like this would be prohibitively expensive if possible at all.

Although nowadays, in the age of facial and image recognition software, I almost wonder if it might be at the point where someone with the right knowledge might be able to construct something like this. A machine that can pick cookies, doughnuts, or other snacks out of the package (even if not necessarily in a fixed location), and then be able to find your mouth, perhaps even being smart enough to open and pull back individual wrapping and disposing of the wrappers.

Then again, I do know that one thing that has been, and continues to be an engineering challenge are machines that can pick fruit and other produce from fields, so maybe this is still the stuff of science fiction. Still, it's nice to think about.

Maybe it's just as well no such thing exists. I have a feeling if there was, I might be well over 400 lbs by now!

I think the technology exists now. Computer vision is really sophisticated, and there are lots of examples of AI learning to perform tasks that are close to what you describe:

futurism.com/the-byte/robot-hot-dogs-cook-serve

Whether or not something like what you describe would be feasible to install in a household would be a different matter. But I think a robot consisting of a base for going from the kitchen to the bedroom and an arm for unpackaging (and, potentially, preparing) food isn't out of the realm of reason. It might be expensive, and what this would look like would be different for each household. But this is far from sci-fi.

Honestly, a machine like that sounds not only feasible, but wonderful. It'd be great if you could program a schedule of what is dispensed and served. Though, it might not understand that you'e not hungry and forcefeed you - but that's doesn't seem bad.

Rates of obesity would sky rocket for sure.

This exists, but for the disabled.

Really? I've never heard of this before. Do you have a link to an example, or could tell me what to search for? What's it called?

An example:

assistive-innovations.com/en/eatingdevices/ieat-robot