Kate Darling

Dr. Kate Darling is a leading expert in robotics and society and the author of THE NEW BREED: What Our History with Animals Reveals About Our Future with Robots. After 1.5 decades of studying human-robot interaction at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, Kate now leads the Robotics, Ethics & Society research team at the RAI Institute. Her writing and research seek to influence technology design and policy direction, anticipating difficult questions that lawmakers, engineers, and the wider public will need to address as human-robot relationships evolve in the coming decades. 

Forever interested in how technology intersects with society, Kate has a background in law & economics and intellectual property. She has researched economic incentives in copyright and patent systems and has taken a role as intellectual property expert at multiple academic and private institutions. She formerly served as intellectual property policy advisor to the director of the MIT Media Lab and also helped establish the MIT-BU Technology Law Clinic.

Her passion for technology and robots has led her to interdisciplinary fields. After co-teaching a robot ethics course at Harvard Law School with Professor Lawrence Lessig, she began to work at the intersection of law and robotics, with a focus on legal and social issues. Kate is a former Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and the Yale Information Society Project, and is an affiliate at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. She’s a senior co-chair for We Robot, the leading conference on legal and policy questions relating to robots.

At MIT, Kate investigated social robotics and conducted experimental studies on human-robot interaction to explore the emotional connection between people and life-like machines. Her work has been featured in Vogue, The New Yorker, The Guardian, BBC, NPR, PBS, The Boston Globe, Forbes, CBC, WIRED, Boston Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, Die Zeit, The Japan Times, and more. She has written a monthly column for BBC’s Science Focus magazine and has also been a contributing writer to Robohub and IEEE Spectrum.

Kate graduated from law school with honors and holds a doctorate of sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and honorary doctorates of sciences from Claremont University and Middlebury College. In 2017, the American Bar Association honored her legal work with the Mark T. Banner award in Intellectual Property. She is the caretaker for several domestic robots, including her Pleos Yochai, Peter, and Mr. Spaghetti.