It's an interesting time to be a long-running science fantasy media property in the streaming TV age. Star Trek is in the grip of an existential crisis as it (wrongly) fears it's too old-aged to be relevant. Star Wars became a battlefield in the culture war and, to duck all future bad faith criticism, gave us The Rise of Skywalker. And then there's Doctor Who, which is somehow managing to plough a 62-year furrow and still fill it with original ideas. This week the Doctor and Belinda go up against a sentient cartoon holding the patrons of a 1950s cinema hostage.

The start of any season of Doctor Who is important, doubly so when there's a new co-star to introduce. "The Robot Revolution" has to get us to fall in love with Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu), ensnare new fans and keep existing ones hooked. Especially since it's the second of two series that Disney paid for, meaning it's got to do well enough to keep the money flowing. It's an awkward teenage date, with Alan clearly trying to win the heart of his beau by buying her one of those star adoption certificates. In 2025, Belinda is now a nurse at a busy London hospital where, in the background, the Doctor is searching for her.

Marc Raibert, the founder and chairman of Boston Dynamics, gave the world a menagerie of two- and four-legged machines capable of jaw-dropping parkour, infectious dance routines, and industrious shelf stacking. Raibert is now looking to lead a revolution in robot intelligence as well as acrobatics. And he says that recent advances in machine learning have accelerated his robots' ability to learn how to perform difficult moves without human help. "The hope is that we'll be able to produce lots of behavior without having to handcraft everything that robots do," Raibert told me recently. Boston Dynamics might have pioneered legged robots, but it's now part of a crowded pack of companies offering robot dogs and humanoids.

In 2012, Amazon quietly acquired a robotics startup called Kiva Systems, a move that dramatically improved the efficiency of its ecommerce operations and kickstarted a wider revolution in warehouse automation. Last week, the ecommerce giant announced another deal that could prove similarly profound, agreeing to hire the founders of Covariant, a startup that has been testing ways for AI to automate more of the picking and handling of a wide range of physical objects. Covariant may have found it challenging to commercialize AI-infused industrial robots given the high costs and sharp competition involved; the deal, which will also see Amazon license Covariant's models and data, could bring about another revolution in ecommerce--one that might prove hard for any competitor to match given Amazon's vast operational scale and data trove. The deal is also an example of a Big Tech company acquiring core talent and expertise from an AI startup without actually buying the company outright. Amazon came to a similar agreement with the startup Adept in June.

Artificial intelligence is set to revolutionise agriculture by helping farmers meet field-hand needs and identify diseased plants. "Farmdroid" has made life a lot easier for Mark Buijze, who runs a biological farm with 50 cows and 15 hectares of land. Buijze is one of the very few owners of robots in European agriculture. His electronic field worker uses GPS and is multifunctional, switching between weeding and seeding. With the push of a button, all Buijze has to do is enter coordinates and Farmdroid takes it from there.

Robot revolution to transform human workplaces Feature 18 April 2017 Over the last few months, the idea that a robotic revolution is just around the corner has become commonplace Nick Ismail Robots and artificial intelligence is set to intrude into many of the spheres of our lives – driverless cars are about be tested on Manchester roads, self-driving delivery robots are being trialled in London while a New York firm has developed a robot which can lay six times as many bricks in a day as its human counterpart A recent report from The International Bar Association, a global organisation for lawyers, said Governments could be forced to legislate for quotas of human workers, traditional working practices would be transformed over the coming years and that legal frameworks regulating employment and safety were becoming rapidly outdated. A third of graduate level jobs around the world may eventually be replaced by machines or software, the report said. See also: Robots: better saved for Sci-Fi believe UK consumers An estimate by PWC earlier this year said that 10 million UK workers were at high risk of being replaced by robots over the next 15 years. In some sectors half the jobs could go, it warned. The speed with which change is occurring and the broadness of impact being brought about by AI and robotics is incredible.

Regarding robotics, the future is the present -- in that it is already here. For advanced economies, robots are providing domestic companies with the efficiency edge they need to support the reshoring trend where manufacturing production returns from lower-wage manufacturing outsourcers located in other parts of the world. But you cannot simply deploy robots into existing manufacturing plants and expect things to move smoothly. Plants must be retrofitted or even redesigned to make the most effective use of this new 24/7/365 workforce. Additionally, new plants should be built around the robotic operations to ensure safe and smooth workflows throughout the facility.

Not only are these books enjoyable on their own, fiction can serve as teachable moments in robots and STEM and inspire a robot-obsessed teen to read more and improve their reading comprehension. Let's start with the scifi book I most frequently recommended to friends to read in 2021: Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. It is not a robot book per se but robots and automation are realistically interspersed through it- and the book is one of Stephenson's best, pulling together LOTS of technology, subplots, and themes similar to what he did in Diamond Age. One of the technology threads is how drones are ubiquitous throughout the book, with small drones being used singly or in swarms for surveillance and social media and bigger drones used for delivery, human transport, and, well, mayhem. Nominally the book is about climate change and how a group of individuals led by a rich Texan plan to cut through the COP26 meetings blather and get on with geoengineering the environment.

In 2017, I returned to Canada from Sweden, where I had spent a year working on automation in mining. Shortly after my return, the New York Times published a piece headlined The Robots Are Coming, and Sweden Is Fine, about Sweden's embrace of automation while limiting human costs. Although Swedes are apparently optimistic about their future alongside robots, other countries aren't as hopeful. One widely cited study estimates 47 per cent of jobs in the United States are at risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence. Whether we like it or not, the robot era is upon us.

Cristian Alonso is an economist in the IMF's Fiscal Affairs Department; Siddharth Kothari is an economist in the IMF's Asia and Pacific Department' Sidra Rehman is an economist in the IMF's Middle East and Central Asia Department. At a joint meeting of the UN's Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and its Economic and Social Committee, a robot named Sophia had an interactive session last year with Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed. WASHINGTON DC, Dec 8 2020 (IPS) - New technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, robotics, big data, and networks are expected to revolutionize production processes, but they could also have a major impact on developing economies. The opportunities and potential sources of growth that, for example, the United States and China enjoyed during their early stages of economic development are remarkably different from what Cambodia and Tanzania are facing in today's world. Our recent staff research finds that new technology risks widening the gap between rich and poor countries by shifting more investment to advanced economies where automation is already established.