183: The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots

Synopsis

The MIT Media Lab researcher and robot ethicist offers an optimistic look at our future with robots based on our historical relationships with animals.

People name their robot vacuum cleaners and feel bad for them when they get stuck. Participants in workshops refuse to strike baby dinosaur robots. Soldiers have been reported to risk their lives to save the robots they work with. Broken robot dogs get funerals.

The New Breed chronicles the past, present, and future of our relationships to animals to create a compelling vision of what our robotic future could look like. Darling argues that if we harness technology like we’ve harnessed animals in the past, we will start to see massive potential for new kinds of practices, achievements, and even relationships with machines—for the benefit of individuals and society at large.

As consumer robotics investment booms and human-robot interaction increasingly enters into workplaces and households all over the world, much space has been devoted to talking about robots as replacements for humans. The New Breed looks at our rich legal and cultural history of using animals for weaponry, work, and companionship to considers how people and machines will work together.

The Good

1. Puts into perspective what is important when talking about robots- for example, how close we are to actual A.I. terminator robots vs how close we are to say the normalization of digital surveillance. I still think we have to be mindful of the push to replace us with robots but it may not even be  a possibility in any  of our lifetimes.
2. The insight into our relationship with animals – how that could mirror in a some ways how our relationship with robots will be. It made me think of Bright Green Lies which brought up similar ideas about our relationship with non-humans.
3. The bit of history shown of animals put on trial.
4. It does acknowledge the biases that are put into our technology & that we could input in our technology ways to challenge these biases.
5. We underestimate the power of human empathy and apathy.

The Bad

1. Repetitive a bit with the main premise- it felt like the same thing was being said over and over in the same way.
2. Instead it would have been interesting to expand more on certain ideas. – under examined ideas.
3. Especially, since it really hit its stride for me in the last 100 or 70 pages.

Overall Throughout this year I have been unintentionally getting into books that each add different perspectives/thoughts about technology. So I am happy to add another book that takes my thoughts about technology in a different direction. Other Reviews 189: Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It 194: The Genome Odyssey: Medical Mysteries and the Incredible Quest to Solve Them I won this arc from a goodreads giveaway by Henry Holt

(the cover image and synopsis is from goodreads)