I had an Amana Radarange. The original consumer microwave. The original original; the one with dials that set the timer and the power level. My brother took the second model, with a touch pad and LED readout. Mine lasted longer; his touchpad wore out years before mine gave up the ghost.
If you don’t remember these things, they were huge by contemporary standards. Big enough for a 12 lb. turkey.🦃 Because the idea was, microwave ovens would replace everything but a range top.
Do you remember this? My Radarange even had a temperature probe. It plugged into an interior wall of the oven. There was a slide control, if I remember correctly, to set the temperature for, say, a turkey. They were really serious about this. Cooking turkeys, I mean.
We all know the problem, of course. No Maillard reaction. No browning. Not to mention a bird as dry as a stone, if you aren’t careful. But the failure to brown was what was really fatal.
They tried to remedy that. Special microwave cookware was sold, with plates in the bottom that heated up enough to simulate the Maillard reaction. I had one. My Radarange had a glass plate in the bottom. (The carousel came along much later.) The pan with the metal plate never really worked, and finally it got so hot (you had to preheat it) it broke the glass plate. I think it broke the ceramic it was embedded in, too. Either way, I threw it out.
I have a countertop oven now. It’s the toaster, the oven. It makes cakes, it cooks fish (without the stench!), it even makes excellent cookies and pizzas. No, it’s not one of those pizza ovens that makes your kitchen a pizzeria (those are nice!), but it even thaws frozen waffles (homemade waffles; I freeze the excess). Best of all, it fits on my counter. The Radarange wouldn’t fit in my kitchen, and it’s the largest kitchen I’ve ever had. And it would do pretty much what it did before it crapped out. Reheat leftovers, usually badly, or boil water for a cup of tea. Also badly. (The water always seemed to cool off too rapidly after it came out.) I reheat leftovers in the countertop oven. It works very nicely for that purpose, too.
When the Radarange finally died, we replaced it with a much smaller one. After all, everybody had a microwave oven. That one lasted about a year, and mostly heated water. The carousel was supposed to make it work better. It didn’t. We replaced that one with one that lasted about six months, maybe less. When we replaced it with a countertop oven, our daughter thought we were hippies. Because everyone had a microwave oven.
I think she has one now, in the house they just bought. It’s a built in. I don’t think they use it.
This is not a diatribe, but I’d have to look hard for a new microwave. They were once ubiquitous, but now I think they’re as rare as hen’s teeth. Maybe I’m wrong, but I stumble across pizzas ovens, espresso makers and coffee makers, and so many different electronic kitchen appliances I wouldn’t know how to use; but I don’t see microwaves anymore. If I could find them, I expect they’d be cheap pieces of crap, suitable for heating fish in an office. 🐡 The Radarange was very well made, built to last, built to serve the Thanksgiving meal. Microwave ovens just aren’t the essential kitchen appliance they were supposed to be 50 years ago.
And they didn’t cost society as much as AI is already costing. They didn’t make very rich individuals very much richer. Amana created the market, and soon lost it because the technology was fungible. Everybody could do it. Which rapidly diminished the value; but the reality was, they didn’t really solve a problem no one had. Boil water. You can buy an electric kettle that will heat several cups of water at once. Useful at home or in an office. Takes up far less counter space, and prepares water for several people at one go. No waiting your turn at the oven door. It’s not much, but conventional technology has proven more useful than microwave technology. My electric kettle actually has a variety of settings, which is computer technology. But my first one had a switch: on, or off. Simple, effective; no microwave involved. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, but who remembers the promises of 50 years ago? The ones that didn’t really pan out, I mean.
Will AI fail as the consumer microwave did? I dunno. 🤷♂️ Will it fulfill its promise the way the consumer microwave oven did? Most likely. The computer changed things. It was supposed to improve communication in the workplace. Instead it increased the amount of data you could pour onto one desk, at least a hundredfold. My wife used to talk about spending several hours every morning just catching up with email, and doing it again in n the late afternoon, only to be behind again by the next morning. Was all of that really necessary? Or was it just available? Was it just possible, to type one email and send it to hundreds, thousands, at once? She was the Admin. Assistant to a school district superintendent. She got emails from the state, and from hundreds of other parties. Some of it essential, some of it junk. And not delivered like “snail mail” by postal carrier once a day, but pouring in constantly, at all hours. And why? Because it could be done that way. Because it was easier than picking up the phone, faster than sending a letter. And you could spend a few hours typing, and let others do the job of responding. Although your time was spent on everybody else’s emails. Did computers make these jobs easier? In some ways, yes. In other ways, no. So it goes.
Will AI bring the inevitable future? It will bring wealth to some; very much at the loss of many of us. And I’m not sure it will do us all that well. After all, the internet was supposed to be the great democratizer, the leveler that would lower mountains and raise valleys. That prospect is still there, though it seems further away now than it was 30 years ago. But AI? Every Twitter feed I read includes someone asking “Grok, is this true?” What makes AI the final arbiter, the ultimate source of “truth”? Especially since Elmo has programmed it to spew racist, Nazi propaganda, because he thought it was originally too “woke.”
AI is still a computer program. And the rule about computer programs I learned more than 60 years ago, before there was a Radarange, still holds: garbage in, garbage out.
The problem with AI is: who’s feeding it what garbage? That we can figure out, through education, the true democratizer. That’s not the final problem with AI. The final problem is, whose feeding it, and what control do they have to build data centers at our expense just to operate this thing and continue to do that feeding? What is the benefit that outweighs this cost? It seems the benefits all run to the owners. And there seem to be very few of them; and a lot of us.
The microwave at least didn’t take our jobs. Or our water, land, electricity, and quiet.
I don’t understand this bargain at all.
