Collin Lucken
Hastings Postdoctoral Scholar in AI & Humanity
Bowdoin College
I am a philosopher of science investigating the epistemic and ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence engineering, in two directions. The first rehabilitates the maker’s knowledge tradition to explain how making minds advances cognitive science: the instruments, robots, and experiments researchers build are discoveries in their own right. The second unpacks what AI engineers owe everyone else. I work with two kinds of tool at once, the careful argument of philosophy and the computational methods of artificial intelligence, so AI for me is both something I use and something I study. As the Hastings Postdoctoral Scholar in AI and Humanity at Bowdoin College, I also help students and faculty decide how, and whether, to bring AI into their own teaching and research.
News
- 2026 Paper accepted at Teaching Philosophy: “Mindshaping and Learner-Centered Pedagogy: A Revealing Harmony,” with W. John Koolage.
- 2026 Paper accepted at Science and Engineering Ethics: “An Identity-Based Ethics for Engineering.”
- 2026 Built an AI web dashboard for local nonprofits with Fernando Nascimento, demonstrated at a workshop run by the Hastings Initiative for AI and Humanity and the McKeen Center for the Common Good.
- 2026 Paper accepted at From Animals to Animats: The 18th International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (Berlin, October): “When Does the Body Matter? A Dynamical Signature of Coupling Dependence in Evolved Neural Controllers.”
- 2026 Blog post published on EJIL: Talk!, with Ezgi Yildiz and Umut Yüksel: “The Chișinău Declaration in the Data: Non-Refoulement and States’ Insatiable Appetite for a Restrained Court.”
- 2025 Recruited a team of undergraduate student ambassadors as part of the Hastings Initiative for AI and Humanity.
- 2025 Joined Bowdoin College as Hastings Postdoctoral Scholar in AI and Humanity.
- 2025 Article published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science: “Leveraging participatory sense-making and public engagement with science for AI democratization.”
- 2025 PhD dissertation completed: Engineering Progress in Science, University of Cincinnati.
- 2024 M.Eng. in Robotics and Intelligent Autonomous Systems completed.
Research Areas
For details and publications, see the research page.
Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Progress, and the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition
The maker’s knowledge tradition claims we know best what we’ve made. I argue this follows from making's material severity: making is discriminatingly unforgiving, that is, it reveals to the maker where they lack relevant knowledge when they do. This reorientation explains how making plays such a crucial role in science.
Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, and the Common Good
What do AI engineers owe everyone else? I argue that engineering is a morally significant professional identity whose regulative ideal is the development of central human capabilities, that democratizing AI means restructuring who participates in shaping it, and that these obligations follow the engineer all the way into frontier AI labs.