Not to discredit the potentially valid concerns of these articles but it's not quite accurate to say these aren't an improvement.

I'm a few weeks out from a robotic assisted surgery related to kidney cancer and the recovery time is significantly shorter in duration (6 weeks instead of 3-6 months) than the non robotic surgery. My understanding is that the DaVinci surgical robot also allowed them to be more precise with how much tissue they removed as well.

Hopefully the medical community can get a better sense of when it's appropriate to use such technology but it would be a mistake to dismiss the benefits because of misuse by some surgeons.