The “Instant Pot” is yet another electric pressure cooker with a timer and pressure setting.
Farberware had one just like that over 15 years ago. It didn’t catch on then, so it was discontinued.
The author makes some good points, but Ocasio-Cortez's love for the Instant Pot led him down a goofy path. I have been using pressure cookers for over 40 years. The first “automatic” electric models I saw were definitely not “Instant Pots”.
The author has been misled by Instant Pot who claims on their web page, “Chinese scientist, Yong-Guang Wang, filed the first electric pressure cooker patent on January 9th, 1991 (patent No. ZL91100026.7).”
https://instantpot.com/portfolio-item/electric-pressure-cooking/
There is a form of Clinton legalese. They are referring to a Chinese patent... one for a pressure cooker that uses electromagnetic heating instead of electric resistance heating. If Instant Pot were not trying to deceive they would have said that Yong-Guang Wang filed HIS first electric pressure cooker patent in 1991 which was definitely not the first electric pressure cooker patent.
If one does a search of US patents for automatically controlled electric pressure cookers... other examples will be found from decades earlier... one example is this one: Automatically controlled electric pressure cooker US2495603A granted in 1950.