Kate Darling

"Maybe any entity significantly smarter than a human being would be crippled by existential despair."

"Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, is a powerful illumination of how we really behave toward animals."

"Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy"

"While there may be similarities here and there, my child doesn’t sense, act, or learn the way a machine does."

"The machine like the djinnee, which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us.” —Norbert Wiener, mathematician and philosopher"

"Where my beasts of their own wrong without my will and knowledge break into another’s close, I shall be punished, for I am the trespasser with my beasts.” —Anonymous case during the reign of Henry VII"

"It may seem preposterous today to hold a robot morally accountable for its actions, but there are already glimpses of this in how we talk about robot-caused harm—in ways that risk assigning them more agency than appropriate."

"I sometimes think that, in the desperate straits of humanity today, we would be grateful to have nonhuman friends, even if they are only the friends we build ourselves." —Isaac Asimov, Robot Visions"

"The military wasn’t equipped to deal with people’s demand for information about their beloved pups."