Who will taste the cherries?
The smart kitchen, once a Silicon Valley experiment in algorithmic cooking, reveals a deeper tension between the irreducibility of human experience and the tech industry’s drive to quantify it. By reducing taste to data points and culinary intuition to programmable commands, the project exposes a worldview—here termed computism—that treats subjectivity as a bug to be engineered out of existence, with profound implications for agency, power, and the very nature of reality.
What does the smart kitchen experiment illustrate about the limits of datafication?
The experiment demonstrates that embodied experiences like taste cannot be fully captured by quantifiable metrics. The oven’s inability to interpret a chef’s intuitive technique—such as 'smacking' lamb with a propane torch—highlights a fundamental category error: subjective qualities like flavor or texture resist reduction to discrete data points, no matter how granular the measurements become.
Who are the key actors in this conflict between human intuition and computational logic?
The conflict pits chefs and designers—who rely on sensory judgment and adaptability—against tech product teams and engineers, who prioritize consistency, scalability, and the elimination of 'friction' in user interaction. The chefs serve as proxies for human subjectivity, while the engineers embody the computist ideology that seeks to replace subjective experience with predictive models.
How does computism redefine the relationship between humans and technology?
Computism posits that reality is composed of discrete, measurable data, extending this digital ontology into economic and political systems. It frames humans not as subjects with agency but as data-generating objects whose behaviors can be optimized, predicted, and manipulated through interfaces and algorithms, eroding the boundary between human intention and machinic control.
What role does interface design play in advancing computist assumptions?
Interface design has shifted from a craft rooted in human subjectivity to a mechanism for extracting and quantifying user behavior. Techniques like A/B testing and design systems reduce complex interactions to isolated, measurable components, abstracting away the craft’s human element and reinforcing the computist belief that all experience can be engineered for efficiency and predictability.
Ce que ça pourrait changer
If computism continues to dominate, it risks normalizing a world where human agency is outsourced to systems that prioritize data over meaning. This could lead to a society where subjective experiences—from taste to relationships—are increasingly mediated by interfaces designed to optimize engagement rather than enrich understanding, fundamentally altering how individuals perceive and interact with the world around them.
