The New Breed - Kate Darling ****

This book is based on a fascinating concept - that we've got robots all wrong. Kate Darling is admittedly a robot enthusiast, but she makes a convincing argument that too often we compare robots to humans, where a more useful parallel might be domesticated animals. As Darling shows, most of things that worry us about robots, whether it's their usurping us or needing robot rights, are concerns that have already been developed in some depth when we think of animals.

Darling also suggests that long term we don't need to worry about robots taking our jobs, just as the luddites didn't need to worry about technology - robots can and will cause disruption, but long term the outcome is more likely to be beneficial than negative. Darling also points out that predictions of robots doing more generalised tasks tend to hugely over-promise. Self-driving cars, for example, still have a long way to go and many robotic devices still need human oversight. (You might not think of self-driving cars as robots, but one of the underlying themes here is that useful robots are hardly ever the SF humanoid cliché.)

This isn't a totally rose-tinted picture, though. Darling does remind us of the issues faced by anything making life-changing decisions for us based on artificial intelligence - but overall, with the right safeguards, she is enthusiastic about a future where robots will have a similar relation to us as pets and working animals.

The one shame about this book is that it didn't have a science writer as co-author. Although Darling starts off in a chatty fashion, the writing suffers considerably from needing a good writer's oversight, to cut down on the significant amount of repetition and to give more sense of narrative to what can often seem like a collection of facts and ideas with insufficient structure. There is also too much on the history of animal domestication and animal rights - it needed to be fed in, but not to have whole chapters dedicated to it. It might also have helped with some of the prehistoric context. For example we are told that humans have punished animals for hundreds of thousands of years - that's a bit of a stretch.

Overall, though, despite some writing issues, the book is thought-provoking and at a time when the ethics of AI and robotics is a popular topic, provides genuinely novel insights and imagination.

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Review by Brian Clegg

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