Collin Lucken
Hastings Postdoctoral Scholar in AI & Humanity
Bowdoin College
I am a philosopher of science, and I trained as an engineer before I trained as a philosopher. The fundamental question that organizes my scholarship is: what do we learn by building things? I pursue it in three places. In science, I argue that the instruments and experiments researchers build are discoveries in their own right, not merely applications of theory. In the study of the mind, I build robots and computer simulations to test how thinking depends on the body. In ethics, I ask what we owe one another as engineers and makers. 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 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
Three connected areas, joined by a single question: what do we learn by building things? For details and publications, see the research page.
Maker’s Knowledge and Scientific Progress
My main work is an account of what makers know. The old tradition says we know best what we make because we made it. I argue the ground is not authorship but severity, the world’s standing capacity to register failure in the maker’s performance. A robot that falls over corrects its builder in a way no argument can. This supports what I call the operative account of progress, the idea that science advances by expanding what we can do, not only what we can say.
Cognitive Robotics and the Embodied Mind
Robots built to model cognition have a habit of outliving the theories they were built under. My explanation is that they are not models standing in for a target but candidate instances of the very kind of system the science aims to explain. I test these ideas by building: evolved artificial agents, robots, and sensors modeled on animal whiskers.
The Ethics of Engineering
My third area is the ethics of engineering, and it grows out of my own training as an engineer. I am interested in the particular moral situation of people whose job is to build large-scale systems that affect not just their makers but the public as well. I am developing an account that locates an engineer's responsibilities in their professional identity, in the kind of person the work asks them to become, rather than only in rules or in a tally of costs and benefits.