All through the fall my head was spinning, and I steered into the spin by watching Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Errol Morris' rhapsodic 1997 documentary about a bunch of monomaniacs features a xylophone-heavy score and the roboticist Rodney Brooks. I wanted to hear Brooks dilate on robots in his cosmic way again. As it happens, this fall had also seemed like the right time to clean the hell out of my apartment. To that end, I bought a Roomba, the blockbuster robovac Brooks coinvented in 2002, five years after he went public in the Morris movie with his theories of what robots ought and ought not to be.

With a tank-like continuous track and an angular arm reminiscent of the Pixar lamp, the lightweight PackBot robot was designed to seek out, defuse and dispose of the improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that killed and injured thousands of coalition soldiers during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bomb disposal was and is highly dangerous work, but the robot could take on the riskiest parts while its human team controlled it remotely from a safer distance. US Army explosive ordinance disposal technician Phillip Herndon was assigned a PackBot during his first tour in Iraq. Herndon's team named their robot Duncan, after a mission when the robot glitched and began spinning in circles, or doughnuts (doughnuts led to Dunkin Donuts, hence Duncan). His fellow bomb disposal techs named theirs too, and snapped photos of themselves next to robots holding Xbox controllers, dressed in improvised costumes or posing with a drink in their claws.

The Jobs of the Future Are a Thing of the Past. "You may have read about the outsourcing issue, the great X-factor in American politics today, in cover articles in Time, Wired, Business Week.... In New Hampshire, John Kerry was asked about the problem. His answer: 'We have to create the next wave of those kinds of jobs that come from the fact that we're highly educated and deeply committed to science and technology education.' He mentioned artificial intelligence--and drew a laugh from a computer science professor who noted that artificial intelligence, the gleaming dream of the 1990s, has hardly created a single job in the world."

Rio de Janeiro's police force, like the rest of the city's public services, is broke. In the headquarters of the bomb-disposal unit, supplies of everything from soap to explosives are running out as the city struggles to pay its debts amid Brazil's deep recession. But, poor as it is, Rio's bomb squad is one of the most technologically advanced in South America. In the cramped storeroom of its base in northern Rio, a state-of-the-art robot takes pride of place. "The robot is a fundamental piece of equipment--it's vital to our day-to-day work," says the bomb squad's boss, Marcelo Corrêa.

Robot-maker Sean Bielat says he's fine with the Dallas Police Department's apparently unprecedented use of a police bomb-disposal robot to kill a gunman on Thursday. "A robot was used to keep people out of harm's way in an extreme situation," said Bielat, the CEO of Endeavor Robotics, a spinoff of iRobot's military division. "That's how robots are intended to be used." Joergen Pedersen, the CEO of RE2 robotics and the chairman of the National Defense Industrial Association's robotics division concurred. "If these robots are used in manners for which they were unintended, we would expect that the officers who are there to keep citizens and themselves safe would use good judgment where the application of lethal force is a last resort," he said.

Editor's Note: This is part of IEEE Spectrum's ongoing coverage of Japan's earthquake and nuclear emergency. An anonymous worker at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant has written dozens of blog posts describing the ups and downs of his experience as one of the lead robot operators at the crippled facility. His blog provides a window into the complex and dangerous work environment faced by the operators, a small group of young technicians who, like other front-line personnel, must approach areas of high radiation, deploying remote-controlled robots to assist with efforts to further stabilize and shut down the plant's four troubled reactors. The blog posts, which have recently been deleted, depict the operators' extensive robot training exercises, as well as actual missions, including surveying damage and contamination in and around the reactors and improvising a robotic vacuum to suck up radioactive dust. The author, who goes by the initials S.H., also used the blog to vent ...

The Negotiator, another tactical mobile robot that can climb stairs, seems to be a pared down, civilian version of the PackBot. Like the PackBot, the Negotiator can climb stairs, work by remote control, and be outfitted with tools for reconnaissance and chemical detection. While some municipalities have adopted it, the PackBot hasn't exactly become a common sight at your local police station. It seems that iRobot has finally realized that the PackBot, while fine for military units with large budgets, was just too expensive for local government agencies to adopt. "We believe that the low entry price point for iRobot Negotiator will help make it accessible to local, state and federal agencies that would not have been able to afford a robot otherwise," Joe Dyer, president of iRobot's Government and Industrial Robots division, said in a statement.

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