When I was a kid I would spend holidays with my grandparents in Michigan and Florida. It was during one of those holidays in the early 1980s that my grandparents introduced us to their fancy new microwave oven. Today, we take them for granted, but back in the 1970s are and 1980s they were magical. TV advertisements promised that you could cook whole turkeys or roasts and even three different things at once!
In this pre-internet age you had to rely on paper recipe books to figure out how to use the microwave oven. Those books promised delicious miracles! The shiny new machine could cook anything, from popcorn to cakes and lamb chops.
Grandpa Al was really excited about that microwave oven! He figured that we should try something simple, so we started with popcorn. I'll never forget the first batch of popcorn we made in that machine. The popping sounds were so exciting to hear. It went on for a minute and then stopped. We figured that the machine had made a mistake, so we fired it up again. And again. And again. Until the smoke started to pour out of the machine.
The mass of charred popcorn did not deter Grandpa Al, me or my brother. We tried again and got it right! Like the cake recipe in the screenshot on this page, the oven manual had a suggestion for how to make brownies, so that seemed like the reasonable next step. We mixed the batter, poured it into the glass pan, placed the pan in the microwave oven and fired it up!
After a few minutes, we opened the door, tested the mixture, saw that it was still runny and fired up the microwave oven again! And again. And again. The result? An inedible rock-hard brown block.
Eggs? Yup. Tried those, too. And had to clean the inside of the microwave oven after they exploded.
Roast chicken? Barely edible and super tough.
Today, we all know that microwave ovens are primarily used for popcorn and reheating leftovers or coffee. Otherwise people use a proper stove + oven combination or use an online food delivery service to get lukewarm McDonalds.
To me, today's AI discussions online and at work remind me of those early days with microwave ovens. I think that a lot of us are coming to the conclusion that the AI boosters have over-promised and under-delivered. Just like we discovered that microwave ovens do a decent job with popping corn and reheating coffee, we're seeing that the generative AI machines can get some work done with acceptable results. Other applications, like cooking a turkey in a microwave, are a waste and shouldn't be attempted. And finally, just like you can but shouldn't put a metal fork in a microwave oven, there are things that should simply be off-limits for the AI chatbots and agents.
It's on this last example that I want to end. We know that we shouldn't put forks in microwave ovens. But, really, nothing is preventing you from doing so, as you can see in all kinds of YouTube or TikTok videos.
Again, there is nothing preventing you from putting metal in microwave ovens. And what a lot of us are starting to discover with AI, there are very few limits on them. The guardrails are, often, just talking points that either don't actually exist or are circumventable.
It's important to give all this AI talk a solid reality check. Beyond the ethical, resource and economic questions that we need to examine, never forget that AI tools are just tools. They are not miracle machines. They're statistical machines with inherent limits -- effectively spell checkers on steroids -- and we need to see them as such.
This is a two part blog post in which I argue that we need to curb our AI enthusiasm. The first post tries to draw lessons from an obscure online engineering tool. This second post attempts to do the same thing with 1980s-era cook books.
James Andrew Smith is a Professional Engineer and Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of York University’s Lassonde School, with degrees in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Alberta and McGill University. Previously a program director in biomedical engineering, his research background spans robotics, locomotion, human birth, music and engineering education. While on sabbatical in 2018-19 with his wife and kids he lived in Strasbourg, France and he taught at the INSA Strasbourg and Hochschule Karlsruhe and wrote about his personal and professional perspectives. James is a proponent of using social media to advocate for justice, equity, diversity and inclusion as well as evidence-based applications of research in the public sphere. You can find him on Twitter. You can find him on BlueSky. Originally from Québec City, he now lives in Toronto, Canada.