ABRI Lunch Seminar Mia Chang 7 April 2026

The seminar will take place on Tuesday, April 7th, from 12:00 to 13:00 (HG-06A37).

This is a lunch seminar; please register your attendance by accepting/declining your emailed invitation by Friday, April 3rd at the latest (for catering).

Abstract
Prior work in organization theory has shown that, during the emergence of a field, heterogeneous communities coalesce around a shared vision, often accompanied by heightened expectations and hype. Yet, we still have a limited understanding of what happens when such a vision fails and hype collapses. We investigate this question through an extensive set of archival data and oral histories on the emergence of the field of robotics from 1962 to 2005. We show that, initially, the industrial and research community entered the field with a near-term vision “automation” and distant vision “autonomy,” respectively. The field coalesced around an intermediate vision of adaptive automation. As the perceived gap between envisioned futures and present realities—i.e. the vision-reality gap—shrank with the first proof of commercial viability, short-term-oriented and long-term-oriented peripheral communities entered the field, pouring resources. However, as the intermediate vision did not come to fruition after a few years, the vision-reality gap widened, leading to disillusionment. Attempts by the industrial and research communities to close it unexpectedly led to a bifurcation of the field into two extremes: automation-focused robots without autonomy and autonomous robots without automation, with a decline in the intermediate vision of adaptive automation. We contribute to the literature by showing how temporal dynamics among diverse communities shape field evolution, and in particular, how efforts to close the vision-reality gap can unexpectedly spur field bifurcation. We also extend the temporality literature by theorizing novel mechanisms such as temporal compression, decoupling, and the elasticity of the vision-reality gap.