dnf @ 16%

I'm not dnf'ing this book because it's bad; I'm dnf'ing because I don't think I'm the right reader for it.

From what I read, I can tell you that The New Breed offers a very interesting perspective on our relationship with robots and AI and I actually enjoyed the points Kate Darling made. My problem is that reading this felt like reading a very dense essay. I just finished my final exam period and I desperately need a break from academic style writing. Reading this was literally giving me flashbacks to proofreading my essays (I'm dying out here <3) and I really don't want to spend my free time reading something that reminds me of my uni assignments. Don't get me wrong, it's very accessible and not at all hard to understand (again, Kate Darling does an excellent job here), but I just couldn't bring myself to keep pushing through something I wasn't that eager to read about.

I'd definitely recommend this to someone who is really keen to learn about this topic, and more willing to read a 300+ book on it. Unfortunately, that someone is not me. It took me three months to read 50 pages, and I'd rather not spend another year on this just for the sake of finishing it.

THE NEW BREED by Kate Darling, as its beautiful cover suggests, focuses on "What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots." Darling, a leading expert on robot ethics and policy, divides this text into three main sections: I. Work, weaponry, responsibility; II. Companionship; III. Violence, empathy, rights. She describes the first section as "contemporary exploration of how we are integrating robots into our spaces and systems," followed by "slightly further into the future" with social robots and then "the very futuristic sounding realm of robot rights." Darling argues "if we harness technology as we've harnessed animals in the past, we will start to see massive potential." She believes that "using a different comparison [thinking of robots as analogous to animals instead of human-like] lets us examine how we can leverage different types of intelligences and skills to invent new practices, find new solutions, and explore new types of relationships." Filled with numerous (perhaps too many?) personal anecdotes and historical examples (complete with diagrams and photos), THE NEW BREED explores collaborative robotics, using robots as supplements rather than replacements. Darling also refers to the ground-breaking work of Stanford's Clifford Nass and more recent developments around bias in design. Generally accessible for student readers, this text offers a new perspective with which to consider human-robot relationships. Much more will be written as this field develops.

I'm conflicted about this book. On the one hand it has a very interesting thesis (and a way of thinking of robot human relations that I hadn't considered before). It's also full of lots of interesting examples, anecdotes, and histories of animals in human society. But for some reason it wasn't that great a read. It felt disjointed and jumpy, as if the author was going from one cool set of stories to another, and I didn't catch much of a unifying cohesion or through line to her story. In the end I appreciate it for the stories and a new way of thinking, but I feel like it could have been better than it was.