You see, in the future, when we're flying around in cars and Will Smith is saving us from over-protective robots, the dishes will wash themselves.

Case in point, in the video this robot/video camera contraption has magic hands that grip, wash, dump out and otherwise do all the things I had planned on forcing my kids to do after dinner in the future.

Panasonic is also working on a robot load lifter that converts into a motorized wheelchair, which will be perfect for all those elderly folks in the future who double as deliverymen. [Impress via Engadget]

Gallery haters take note, to skip the slides and jump to a single long post, click here.

Equipment: A dishwasher. To make sure I got a good sense of the process, I tested out two machines, one from probably 1975 and one that's maybe two or three years old. Both relatively cheap.

Ingredients:
For the Fish
• Two smallish fillets of salmon, about 4oz.
• Olive oil, salt, pepper

For the Cilantro Sauce (from Salon)
• 1 tbsp butter, lots of salt and pepper
• 1 leek, finely chopped
• 1 shallot, minced
• 1 jalapeño chile, seeds removed and diced
• 1.5 cups chicken stock
• 2 cups lightly packed cilantro leaves
• 3 tbsp lime juice
• 3 tbsp sour cream

Notes: This recipe cheats a little bit. The fish is cooked in the dishwasher, yes, but the sauce is made in usual boring fashion with a saucepan and a blender. A more MacGyverian side: Vegetables (asparagus, broccoli, etc) can be cooked in the dishwasher, sealed in a foil packet with butter, though you'll have to take them out before the dry cycle kicks in or they'll be overdone.

Step 1: Pull out three 12-inch square sheets of aluminum foil, and coat the shiny side of two of them with butter, oil or that aerosol spray stuff. Put both salmon fillets on one of these sheets and season with lime, salt and pepper.

Step 2: Put the other coated sheet of foil, coated side down, on top of the fillets, then press the two sheets of foil together and roll tightly from all four sides. Make sure your foil doesn't tear or your dishwasher will smell like fish for at least a week. Wrap the last sheet of aluminum foil around the packet, as a last measure to keep your landlady from knowing you put fish in her dishwasher.

Step 3: Stick the double-wrapped foil packet on the top shelf of your dishwasher. (You can also stick dishes in there if you want.) Turn on the dishwasher, both a wash and a dry cycle. The key, says the original recipe, is to disable the Energy Star power saver mode (it won't get hot enough) but to use the regular cycle instead of "pots and pans" (which makes it too hot).

Step 4: Start making your sauce. I followed the sauce instructions from Salon to a tee—it's an easy sauce to make and tastes pretty good, though I think it'd be better on a taco than on delicately steamed fish. It'll be done by the time your fish is out of the dishwasher.

Step 5: Here's where things started to go wrong for me. The first dishwasher I tried is probably 30 years old and on a normal cycle can barely clean dishes. After a full wash and dry, my first attempt at dishwasher steamed salmon yielded...

Sashimi. Dammit. Lucky for me, I happened to move that very weekend, and my new place has a newish dishwasher that I immediately broke in by following steps 1 through 3. Little did I know that this was no ordinary dishwasher.

There must have been some kind of nuclear reaction happening in this dishwasher because it overcooked the crap out of my fish. We're talking straight-up cat food here. At least I could just stick the undercooked fish in a frying pan and then have dinner. Not very MacGyver, but still dinner. This time, the dried-out piece of gross orange fish carcass was in no way salvageable.

The Results: After two disasters in a row, I can pronounce dishwasher salmon too finicky to be worth MacGyvering. I'm sure I could have played around with it and gotten it right (ruining several whole salmon in the process), but I just don't think it's worth it. Dishwashers are just too varied in heat to reliably steam fish, even one as forgiving as salmon. If you have tried it yourself, and can shed some light, please share in the comments.

After the bland success of coffee-maker poached chicken, dishwasher salmon was a big disappointment.

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

While tabletop dishwashers aren't new, tabletop dishwashers that actually look cool are. [Yanko]

Designed by Marie-Christine Lacasse and Marie Claude Savard, I almost like it. Almost. Big thumbs-up to the elongated rack—but I'm just not sure about that "autonomous" dishwasher unit that moves across the rack, rather like the printer head on an old dot matrix printer. And ladies, where was the spirit level in the making of your dishwasheur? Attention to detail, that's Giz all over, innit? [MoCo Loco]

The result? Success.

They removed the keyboard right before the drying cycle began, and it came out in a pristine state of cleanliness. But we all expected that, the question is does it still work? In this case it did, every key continued to work just like it did the day they bought it.

So what does this tell us? Common sense says keep your electronics out of the water, moron. It's NPR. Do you really trust their exploration into gadget cleanliness? But if you are truly filthy and have unsuccessfully tried everything else to get your keyboard to shed its grime, then we say give it a go. Worst case it breaks and you go by a new one, preferably waterproof. Either way you don't have a dirty keyboard anymore that scares your friends away.

Now we ask you the reader, what is your fail-safe tactic for cleaning your keyboard? Rubbing alcohol? Moist towelettes? Cotton swabs? Canned air? Do tell, because the keyboards here at Gizmodo HQ are getting pretty raunchy. – Ben Longo

Are Computer Keyboards Dishwasher Safe? [NPR via Digg]

But look! This dishwasher is small enough to fit in my apartment! But then again, it only holds like four plates. And I mean, how hard is it really to wash four plates? I might be lazy, but I'm not so lazy that I'm going to go spend $189 on this water waster. I guess I'll just keep saving my pennies until I can afford to move into a place with a real dishwasher. –Adam Frucci

Product Page [via Crave]

There's even a special tray for Lego bricks. (Jump for a photo)

–Brian Lam

Bosch Lego Dishwasher [slashgear]

PS, that brick isn't really painted on the washer front.

We love the World's Smallest Dishwasher as much as you did and were considering ordering one, so we were extremely bummed to find out that it's out of stock and no longer in production. Reader David was kind enough to forward the email he got from Christopher, the owner of goodcommonsense.net:

We would love to send you more photos, but unfortunately we've been misled and no longer have the cd-400 compact dishwasher available to us. In fact, we learned today that the manufacturer recently discontinued this line entirely (and failed to let us know). After much research, we have concluded that there are no units available from anyone, anywhere in the US.

I'm so sorry for the confusion. Today's response after the Gizmodo posting has been amazing, but unfortunately - this product is no longer available.

We've emailed Christopher to see if they plan on carrying another compact dishwasher in its place, and are researching alternatives ourselves. We'll write about our results in the next few days but in the meantime, if you've got any finds or recommendations yourselves please let us know in the comments or drop us an email.

New York apartments most often than not don't have dishwashers in them, partly because of the lack of space and partly because in many old buildings water is folded into your rent and the landlord just doesn't want a hefty water bill. As a result, we know more than a few people in the city who hate doing dishes so much that they've just done away with them, using paper plates and plastic utensils the few times they eat meals at home that aren't straight out of take-out containers. For them, $199 might not be too dear a price to pay for this dishwasher the size of a microwave that you install on your counter and can clean up to four place settings at a time. It saves space and it saves water, and it's not like you can fit more than four people into your average New York apartment anyway.

World's Smallest Dishwasher [goodcommonsense.net, via Kitchen Contraptions]