Never a good sign for journalistic objectivity when the reporter says "Wow"

 ... particularly when it's a story about robots. 

From Planet Money 

JUSTIN KRAMON, BYLINE: We're standing in a restaurant kitchen in Philadelphia's Chinatown, staring at their newest cook, Robby the robot wok-bot. The automated wok stands 6 feet tall and is mostly metal, kind of looks like a washing machine with no door. At its center is this basket. That's the wok where Robby cooks its dishes.

KENNY POON: He can make over 5,000 different dish.

ERIKA BERAS, BYLINE: Five thousand?

POON: Yes.

BERAS: Wow.

That's Kenny Poon, co-owner of this fast casual restaurant, InstaFoodz. He shows us how Robby works. Poon selects the dish he wants Robby to cook from its touchscreen menu - beef chow fun. Then Robby the robot tells Poon the human what precut raw ingredients to add to the hot spinning wok as it heats up and spins. Different tubes squirt in sauces and seasoning as the ingredients are tossed around. Poon says not only is Robby efficient, but his cooking is just as good as a human's.

KRAMON: Do you think you can tell the difference which one's made by the robot?

POON: I don't think so.

KRAMON: Because Robby's so easy to use, Poon says his labor costs have gone down.

POON: Now, I don't have to require a main chef.

KRAMON: How has it changed the staffing for the restaurant?

POON: It's easier. So now I don't need to ask them - what's your skill? - no more. All I need to ask them - what's your availability?

BERAS: That's right. He says the machine is so good he's shifting his focus from making sure he hires and trains staff that are skilled cooks to staff that just shows up.

There is more to this report, but as far as I can see, the only source of information for the part about the robot wok is from the owner of this gimmicky themed restaurant that probably depends on PR and novelty seekers for much, if not most, of its business, someone who has a huge incentive to spin this as big as he can, making it sound like the future of the culinary arts.

The 5,000-recipe claim certainly sounds impressive, but did anyone actually verify it? And even if it’s true, are these dishes that require a wide range of techniques and skills? Can the robot, for example, make Cantonese scrambled eggs (which, according to YouTube isn't that difficult but would be out of the standard stir-frying repertoire) , or is it limited to recipes that rely on a small set of actions just with different ingredients and cooking times?

What’s the cost? How much maintenance does it require? How labor-intensive is the operation?

To be fair, this isn’t some goofy, wildly impractical bipedal humanoid lumbering around the kitchen. At least from the pictures I found online, the design of the robot seems to be squarely focused on functionality. There’s no reason to believe it isn’t a real innovation that will pay for itself and might even become a common fixture in restaurants in the years to come. 

There might well be a real and genuinely interesting story here about the future of automation in the food industry, but reporting on that would require actual work—reasonable skepticism, critical thinking, and independent thought. Instead, the Planet Money team cranked out a badly reported, standard-narrative-template story based almost entirely on a single source who had an enormous incentive to tell them what they wanted to hear.