It's Your Mom

Can creatures give birth?

What is a creature? This may sound like the first line of a fantasy book for children to grasp their attention, but, seriously, what is a creature? This blog post will show you how I imagined the definition of ‘creatureness’ in a mindmap and present some examples of artificial creatures within a chosen factor.

Creatureness 101

From what I understood, there are various factors consisting of creatureness, such as its sense (input & output), randomness in their behaviours or appearance, development and how it formulates relationships. The image below shows the mindmap of my interpretation of 'creatureness'.

Deep-Dive: Ontogeny

Among all these features, I focused on ontogeny in a way of how it gives birth because of one curiosity in my mind; can we find mothers and kids relationships from artificial creatures? You might think - aren’t robots in a factory already giving birth to produce their products? Well, you could say so, but there are some other approaches.

Example 1. Robots that build ‘baby robots’

This robot creates baby robots with two cube blocks. The important thing is that the mother robot gets smarter every time; its next kid has better quality than the previous kid.

Click here for more details.

Example 2. Xenobot: Living robots that can make babies

Unlike any other robot, it is made with biological tissues and has the capabilities to move around and reproduce itself. The reason why it is called a ‘robot’ is that it is programmed by a computer to conduct several actions. Although its purpose is not fully defined yet, it has the potential to contribute to the biology and medical field.

Check this article for more details.

Think further

Besides the aforementioned examples, there are other examples, such as ‘Victoria, a birth-giving robot’ and self-replicating robots known as the von Neuman machine.

Through these examples, we can see that ontogeny can be found not only in natural creatures but also in artificial creatures. In terms of giving birth or reproduction, as far as I imagine, the difference between natural and artificial creatures is whether it has parenthood towards their children. But do plants have parenthood to their babies? Then, what is the boundary between the two creatures?