End users aren’t the customer.

I cleaned out my kitchen about a year ago and got rid of the bread machine that had sat, taking up space, unused for close to twenty years in a bottom cabinet.

So, no, AI is not going to take over every job, and the way it's looking, the current iteration of "AI" isn't going to take over many jobs at all.

Yup, and there are a lot less bakers around now that machines do most of it.

it will, however, create jobs

someone’s gotta clean up all the slop

I can’t find a baker who makes loaves of bread to save my life. Even living near a major city, it’s all pastry. I just want to support a local business and have delicious fresh bread.

My neighbor is an independent baker. He makes "regular" bread in various types in addition to pastries.

He closed his retail business during COVID and never reopened it. He reports that it is significantly less hassle to sell directly to local businesses (restaurants, delis, etc.) and their only consumer sales are now made at local farmer's markets. Your local bakeries only sell pastries because they're the only things that sell. The reason for this is broadly speaking that individual consumers are whiny and entitled shitheads, and "the grocery store has it cheaper."

That's interesting, there's two bakeries with bread within walking distance from me. But they're not square loaves, it's sourdough and rodeo bread and challah and baguette and focaccia... And rolls, and yes pastries as well. Tbf, I live in Los Angeles so the unusual part isn't variety, it's the "walking."

I know it's not exactly what you're saying, but a lot of grocery store bakeries bake loaves of bread.

I used to have a naysayer coworker, and he was the most annoying shit. He'd always say things like, "In ten years, this building won't even be here anymore." Eventually, you just learn to say, "Okay, I'm just going to get back to work."

in germany bread baking is its own valuable branch of baking and it's often treated with a lot of sincerity

That's odd, I live in a pretty small city and there are multiple local bakeries. I just wish there was one a little easier to walk to.

This is such a weird post. Is it satirical? Baking as a profession functionally does not exist anymore.

i tryed to make a power point with copilot, i even gave a template as pptx file. it was horrible. it can not even put words in a table in the template.

This little machine is incredible. I disagree with OP’s premise, but this makes yummy little loaves.

No, I think there are fewer bakers.

For fun, I tried doing the same with a presentation I was thinking of doing for work. I work in a kindergarten, and I just... it's like it was made by someone at McKinsey or something, every simple and plain sentence I had was drawn out into a glorious jargon-filled mess

I just bake my own bread. It is healthier and with tastier flavor.

Who's baking disingenuously?

They're also smaller

Is this a grammer thing? I'm fairly certain I can use "a lot less".

Hmm nvm, I don't recognize the meme.

It is a grammar thing. You can have a lot less of a non-count noun, like sand. But you have to have fewer of countable nouns, like loaves of bread, or bakers of bread

That's fair, but we also get successful bread much more than half the time.

I love making bread. I've made a lot of bread. Bread takes hours. The best loaf of bread I've ever made I could have gotten for a few dollars at a store, and it would probably be better. Having said that bread makers are the closest thing to a food replicator you can get, throw some ingredients in, push a button, come back in a few hours and bam, fresh loaf of bread.

Oh my, I just realized that we have now everything we need to cook food at home. We don't need the restaurants anymore! The whole industry is going to be dead in few years.

Ahhh I see, thank you

It's kind of similar, I think. I mean most store bought bread is low quality compared to the artisinal product. Corporations don't care if the product sucks so long as they can replace the worker.

You can use "less" when it's a non-discrete plurality, such as water or sand (ignoring the technical fact that these can now be observed as discrete components below the macroscopic level) or money (the made-up kind, not necessarily the physical representations thereof). It's vastly more messy to have 1.78 bakers, and their families get really upset about it, so it's safer just to use "fewer."

Didn't you hear? Elon announced the total collapse of the baking industry within the next 6 months.

The difference is that bread is a minimum viable product, while Gen AI slop tends to eventually become descructive vs. productive.

I don't trust small bakers...

OMG we are so cooked baked.

To be fair, knowing what the first mass production machines looked like, some families definitely got back .78 of their baker.

Jk tho, thanks for the correction.

Non-countable? I think some vampires might disagree.

I also thought Thor relevant but I can't find anything to support that.

I was thinking the same thing but I'm guessing it's the major city part that is the issue. Rent and labor probably make it too expensive in major cities.

That's a failed joke to me. When I was living in London I bought one of those and I was making better and cheaper bread that I could find, including electricity cost.

That thing paid itself very quickly and I was happier with it.

And the AI that's trying to moke is better than a dozen people in my company. We recently got bored of waiting for a tool and tried to just prompt it. In a few hours it was in better shape starting from scratch that another team has managed in over a month.

Of course I am proficient enough I could spot the issues quickly and prompt a solution

Whether something is a. Punt or non-count noun is more convention than actual ability to be counted

How can a 50 year old (66 by now) look that young? Witchcraft or technoheresy!

I was a baker for some years about 23 years ago, I will tell any baker that they will make better money working for the company delivering the flour, probably have better hour and still get to eat baked goods all the time. Unless you are a craft baker you are just reheating frozen dough.

The quickest way to ruin the enjoyment of making food is to do it for customers. I've been told for those last 20ish years that I should open a restaurant, I always reply the same "I cook for those I love and like, not asshole customers"

Grupo Bimbo Bakeries.

London bread is that bad honestly.

The quickest way to ruin doing most anything you love is to do it for a living.

Classic Pump and dump. You're better investing in the fermenting industry in the long term.

A bit of a tangent:

Bread machines are the absolute best for one thing: fresh baked bread ready for when you wake up, without having to get up at 3 am to do it. Load that baby up at night, set the timer, and wake up to your place smelling amazing.

Baking bread has gone from an everyday job employing a significant fraction of the workforce to more of an artistic job that only a few people do. Bakers don't really compete with mass produced bimbos, instead they offer a premium product for people who are willing to pay more.

I think it's always like that when technologies get replaced. There are still people offering horse-drawn carriage rides, but it's a specialty service now instead of a common job. Same with many of the things you find on Etsy.

Jobs being replaced by automation wouldn't be a bad thing if the benefits were shared with the whole population and there were a social safety net for people whose jobs were eliminated. Unfortunately, the benefits always go to the people at the top. Some theorists have proposed economic systems where there are no people at the top, or where things are shared much more fairly. It's a sad fact that those systems seem incompatible with human nature as it stands. Country-sized experimentation with anarchism or communism still leads to people at the top who take a lot more than they give. Those systems seem to work fine in small communities where everyone knows each-other. But, not when they are implemented in countries containing millions of people.

The most effective systems right now seem to be mixed socialist / capitalist systems where unions are strong and willing to call major strikes and shut the country down. You still get "haves" and "have nots", but the "have nots" still get a voice and aren't completely trampled by the rich.

Well, there have been home baking machines since the 1980s. They've never taken off.

It’s a sad fact that those systems seem incompatible with human nature as it stands.

Eh, I’d say 20% human nature, 80% propaganda.

I know, but if I let reality impinge on my comments, it would get a lot harder to make stupid jokes.