IAPP AI Governance Global North America 2025

A leading expert in robot ethics, Kate Darling Ph.D is a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She heads the Boston Dynamics AI Institute’s study of ethics and societal impact, where she oversees a team of researchers who explore key societal questions related to the development of intelligent robots.

She investigates the emotional connection between people and life-like machines, seeking to influence technology design and policy direction. Darling’s writing and research anticipate difficult questions that lawmakers, engineers and the wider public will need to address as human-robot relationships evolve in the coming decades.

She has a background in law and economics as well as intellectual property. Darling has researched economic incentives in copyright and patent systems and has taken a role as intellectual property expert at multiple academic and private institutions. Named one of the “Women in Robotics You Need to Know About” by Robohub, she has been a contributing writer to BBC Science Focus, Robohub, and IEEE Spectrum. She is also the author of the book “The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals About Our Future with Robots”, exploring how building diverse relationships with robots could be the key to making our future with robotic technology work.

Her passion for technology and robots has led her to interdisciplinary fields. She increasingly works at the intersection of law and robotics, with a focus on legal and social issues. Darling is a former Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and the Yale Information Society Project. She is also an affiliate at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Darling’s work has been featured in Vogue, The New Yorker, The Guardian, BBC, NPR, PBS, The Boston Globe, Forbes, CBC, WIRED magazine, Boston Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, Die Zeit, The Japan Times, and more. She is a contributing writer to Robohub and IEEE Spectrum.

Darling graduated from law school with honors and holds a Doctor of Sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and an honorary doctorate of sciences from 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.

Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of two graphic memoirs: “Flying Couch” and “Artificial: A Love Story,” which was named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR, The New Yorker, and Kirkus. She is the 2024 winner of the Overseas Press Club Cartoon Award for her comics with the Los Angeles Times, and she was a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow with the American Academy in Berlin. Amy has also received fellowships from The Black Mountain Institute, Yaddo and MacDowell, and her work has been nominated for a Reuben Award and an Ignatz Award for “Technofeelia,” her four-part series with The Believer Magazine. Her writing, comics and cartoons have also been published in The Verge, The New York Times Book Review, WIRED and many other places. Amy has taught widely, in public and private school, in universities and online. Find her on Patreon to join her monthly cartoonist class.

Professor Chris Miller is an expert on international politics, economics and technology. He is the author of “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology”, which explains how computer chips have made the modern world and how the U.S. and China are struggling for control over this fundamental technology. A handful of companies control the manufacturing of all the world’s semiconductors, giving them a chokehold over the computing power on which everything from the biggest data centers to the tiniest Internet-of-Things devices depends. The future of computing, the book argues, will be determined by who controls the ability to produce the world’s most advanced chips. “Chip War” won Financial Times' Best Business Book of the Year award in 2022 and the prestigious Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations in 2023. It was described by The New York Times as a “a nonfiction thriller.”

Miller serves as professor of international history at The Fletcher School at Tufts University and co-director of the school’s Russia and Eurasia Program. He also serves as nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a leading think tank, where he researches and writes on trends in international politics. He is also a Director at Greenmantle, a New York and London-based macroeconomic and geopolitical consulting firm that advises some of the world’s largest hedge funds, venture capital firms, asset managers and corporations.

Professor Miller’s previous books explored major trends in politics and economics that shaped the contemporary world. His book “Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia” explores the origins of Vladimir Putin’s rule over Russia and his economic impact. Miller’s book “We Shall Be Masters” examines major shifts in geopolitics in Europe and Asia over the past three centuries, exploring the rise and fall of prior empires and how this legacy shapes Russia and China today. Miller’s first book, “The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy” examined the collapse of the Soviet Union and global demise of socialism.

Professor Miller frequently writes for newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and many others. He has published academic articles in leading journals of international politics and economics.

He has previously served as Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, a lecturer at the New Economic School in Moscow, a visiting researcher at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research associate at the Brookings Institution, and as a fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Academy. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. from Yale University and his B.A. in history from Harvard University.