A die the trickiest parts of this gig are setting realistic expectations. The job of writing about robots for a living is a bit of a balance between excited optimism and pragmatic realism. How do you temper the excitement of some of the world’s most fascinating technologies with the inevitable encroachment of reality?

Covering robots in various capacities for over a decade now has taught me the importance of keeping his powder dry. You want exciting titles that will attract readers and give the work the coverage it deserves without being overly promising. People will only accept your hyperbole for so long.

For me, the lesson was learned during a visit to a university research laboratory 5 to 10 years ago. Robotics professors largely develop realistic timelines for real-world deployment of early-stage technologies. I have been regularly told that such applications are 5-10 years old. After waiting, it’s exciting to see so many of them step into the real world. Matured technologies and a global pandemic have come together perfectly to fulfill so much promise of robotics.

However, pragmatism means pointing out the bad with the good. In recent weeks, that means a number of companies have reacted to broader market trends, with layoffs or closures. This also means checking past progress reports. Grab this week’s Chile financial reports via catering company which found the fast casual restaurant chain hitting the big red pause button during its deployment of Bear Robotics service robot, Rita.

“The robotics project we’re on hold right now,” said Kevin Hochman, who stepped into the role of CEO at Chili’s parent company Brinker in May. “We’re going to shut down some of these projects that we just didn’t have in sight for a return on the business. But we will double down and accelerate those that we believe will have a more significant impact on restaurant margins and a faster impact on our business.

ROI is a tricky thing to calculate with these kinds of drivers, of course. And I think the biggest question with this specific type of technology is how directly it can solve the staffing shortages plaguing restaurants — and pretty much every other service industry at this point. It’s a setback for sure, especially after Chili’s agreed to bring the “bots” to about 60 locations just before Hochman’s tenure began.

We’ve reached out to Bear Robotics for comment.

If you’ve followed my work in the space, you know the impact of automation on work has been a hot topic. For this reason, I wanted to draw attention to this report from the University of Central Florida, which places the conversation in an interesting context that is too often overlooked. The study looked at the public reaction to automation in European countries that have different levels of wealth inequality.

“Countries that have more people in unequal conditions, on average, tend to view these technologies more as a threat,” says Mindy Shoss, a UCF professor and co-author of the study. “The United States still ranks quite high on inequality and societal inequality. Given this, I would suspect that there are probably, on average, similar negative opinions about AI and robotics technology in the United States.

It’s the kind of thing that seems obvious at first glance, but probably isn’t discussed enough. People are smart, and they implicitly understand that a push for greater automation in society is likely to have a disproportionate impact on blue-collar workers. Let’s face it, these are the first jobs to be automated, and it will likely contribute to an already expanding wealth gap.

These are precisely the kinds of conversations we need to have whenever we discuss large-scale automation. The long tail of roboticists tend to be very optimistic about this, but the people directly impacted by such innovations also deserve a place in the conversation.

Shoss adds, “These technologies have great potential to improve work by performing hazardous tasks or giving people more flexibility, but these technologies also come with risks. And the implication of our research is that if you’re trying to develop robots or AI technology in a very unequal society, there might be more barriers to getting people to adopt that kind of technology.

All right, let’s get to the fun stuff. I missed this earlier in the month, but it still deserves a place in Actuator. NASA awarded the University of Nebraska–Lincoln $100,000 to put a surgical robot into orbit as part of an ISS mission in 2024.

The ability to perform surgery remotely has very clear advantages for space exploration. The robot’s inventor, Shane Farritor, notes, “The astronaut flips a switch, the process starts, and the robot does its job on its own. Two hours later, the astronaut turns it off and it’s done.

As we’ve seen from companies like Sphero and littleBits, Disney Accelerator support can be somewhat mixed. However, having such a valuable IP address at your disposal is definitely a plus. This week, Miko announced that her little robot for kids, Miko 3, has access to animated storybooks featuring characters from movies like “Moana,” “Frozen,” and “The Lion King.”

“Bringing the imaginative worlds of Disney and Pixar to our platform is a big step forward in robotics for kids,” Miko co-founder and CEO Sneh Vaswani told TechCrunch. “Miko is thrilled to be the first robotics platform to have such an innovative collaboration with Disney, and we look forward to raising the benchmark for child engagement together.”

And finally, research from Stanford and Seoul National University, via IEEE. Schools are promoting work around artificial nerves capable of helping paralyzed mice run.

“Our work is the first example of the transmission of biological neural signals via biomimetic electronic nerves to biological organs,” notes the paper’s co-senior author Tae-Woo Lee. “Through this, it seems possible to present novel solutions and strategies for nerve injuries in humans such as spinal cord injury, peripheral nerve injury, and neurological injury such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease.

The hope, of course, is to one day develop similar results in human patients.

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