Kate Darling

Kate Darling is a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab and one of the world’s best-known scholars of human-robot interaction. Trained in law and economics before turning to robot ethics, she spent years running experiments on how readily people empathize with machines — including a famous workshop in which participants refused to “hurt” toy dinosaur robots — and held fellowships at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and the Yale Information Society Project.

The animal analogy

Her 2021 book “The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals About Our Future with Robots” makes the argument she is now synonymous with: the endless comparison of robots and AI to humans is a trap. “Comparing robots to people is limiting,” she wrote — we have millennia of experience integrating a different kind of intelligence into our work, transport, armies and families: animals. Oxen did not replace farmers, and therapy dogs do not replace nurses; in her view robots, like animals, are partners with alien skill sets, not substitutes for people.

That framing makes her an optimist about the technology and a sharp critic of how humans deploy it. The real dangers, she argues, are not robot uprisings but human choices: programmers baking their biases into systems, and companies using automation as an excuse to degrade labor. As she put it in 2021, the conflict that matters is “humans versus humans” — and if we care about human flourishing, we should look past the robots to the systems and choices around them.