Kate Darling

In an experiment she designed, participants played with Pleo dinosaur robots for about an hour and were then told to hurt them with knives, hatchets and other tools; they refused, and only when told that all the robots would be destroyed did one man reluctantly strike a robot with a hatchet, after which the room fell silent. She argued that because people bond with such robots, protections for social robots may need to be discussed.⁠[1]

On November 19, 2013, she spoke at a Berkman Center luncheon at HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry on near-term ethical, legal and societal issues in robotics, focusing on robots designed to interact with people socially; she was then an IP research specialist at the MIT Media Lab and a PhD candidate in intellectual property and law and economics at ETH Zurich.⁠[2]

In 2017 the American Bar Association gave her the Mark T. Banner award in intellectual property.⁠[3]

In September 2018 she described an experiment that gave Hexbug robots names and backstories, tested whether participants then hesitated more to hit them, and measured participants’ empathy with a psychological test; she said people hesitated more when the robot had a name and story, suggesting a possible link between a person’s empathy and how they treat a robot.⁠[4]

In April 2021, Holt published her first book, The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals About Our Future with Robots (336 pages). It argues that robots should not be seen as replacements for humans but considered through humans’ relationships with animals, and it holds AI creators and users responsible for machines that “misbehave.”⁠[5]

Publishers Weekly called the book “upbeat if inconsistent,” saying some tangents lacked cohesion but that readers curious about AI’s ethical conundrums would find it a breezy enough primer.⁠[5]

The UK edition was titled The New Breed: How to Think about Robots. Writing in Times Higher EducationTimes Higher EducationTimes Higher Education (THE) is a London-based higher education news and data company. It grew out of the Times Higher Education Supplement, launched in 1971, and is best known for its World University Rankings, founded in 2004; it has been owned by the private equity firm Inflexion since 2019.Open the full entry, Michael Marinetto praised the book for considering the challenges of our technological future without lapsing into moral panic and said its account of the history of robotics research would also interest specialist researchers.⁠[6]

On August 4, 2022, Penguin published the UK paperback (336 pages); the publisher’s description says she argues that we should look to our relationship with animals and that robots will supplement rather than replace human skills and abilities.⁠[7]

On October 15, 2022, she appeared on episode 329 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, whose summary described her as an MIT Media Lab researcher interested in human-robot interaction and robot ethics; the timestamps covered what a robot is, the metaverse, bias in robots, automation and autonomous driving, privacy, GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry’s LaMDA, the robot–animal analogy, humanoid robots, ethics in robotics and Jeffrey Epstein.⁠[8]

On September 26, 2023, The AI Institute (later the RAI Institute), headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced that it had hired her to lead a new research team on the ethics and societal impact of robotics and AI; she joined from the MIT Media Lab, where she had worked for about a decade. Executive director Marc RaibertMarc RaibertMarc Raibert is a roboticist and the founder of Boston Dynamics. He founded the Leg Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT to study dynamically balanced legged robots, and since 2022 has been executive director of the RAI Institute.Open the full entry said the ethics team was meant to maximize the opportunities while minimizing the risks.⁠[9]

In February 2026, at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy Wilson Lecture, she discussed how emotion, design and power shape people’s relationships with robots and AI, using examples such as Boston Dynamics’ robot dog Spot, and said: “As humans, we have this inherent tendency to anthropomorphize.”⁠[10]

As of October 2026, her personal website says that after 14 years studying human-robot interaction at MIT, she leads the Robotics, Ethics & Society research team at the RAI Institute in Cambridge, USA.⁠[11]

She has a background in law and economics and intellectual property, graduated from law school with honors, holds a doctorate of sciences from ETH Zurich and honorary doctorates of sciences from Claremont University and Middlebury College, served as intellectual property policy advisor to the director of the MIT Media Lab, helped establish the MIT-BU Technology Law Clinic, and co-taught a robot ethics course at Harvard Law School with Lawrence Lessig.⁠[12]

Personal website: Public link: https://katedarling.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[11]

X: Public account: https://x.com/grok_ (opens in a new window)⁠[11]

RAI Institute: Official website: https://rai-inst.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[9]