Intelligent robots are all the rage nowadays, but what about emotional robots? And creative robots? Or even useless, curious, helpless or misbehaving robots? Does researching these bots with 'unique' human or lifelike qualities make us less or more human? And why should we care?
In this course we discuss inspirational examples demonstrating that bots can be more than just smart, and argue that by studying bots like you we can learn more about who we are as humans, and speculate about our joint future.
At the end of the course you will focus on a particular human or creature-like quality, and make this experienceable through an artificial creature that you will build yourself.
This course is a derivate of Bots Like You, a joint project by Peter van der Putten and Maarten Lamers. It is part of the Creative Intelligence and Technology MSc program at Leiden University.
The 2025-26 Artificial Creatures zookeepers are Peter van der Putten and Michael (Mikkel) Olthof.
This course enables you to practice a form of philosophy-by-doing. Stepping away from technology, we will reflect on specific qualities that make us human, one at a time, and you will learn about various ways artists, researchers and inventors have used automatons, robots and other artificial creatures to express this particular quality.
You will then apply this methodology on a human quality and creature of your own choice. You will need to pick one quality (and one quality only), and construct a creature that maximizes the immediate experience of this quality with the minimal technical means possible. The creature should also trigger further thoughts in the audience on what makes us human, or our future with technology.
This methodology has broader use than just artificial creatures. In science and humanities we create artefacts - theories and models of the world and ourselves, to speculate, understand, explain and provide better answers. In arts we make artefacts as well - statues, installations, stories and performances - to provide different perspectives on ourselves, or pose new questions.
If you want to create something new in science and arts, new answers or questions, or visions of possible futures, it can be good practice to briefly park the scientific or artistic method and artefacts, and return to what inspires us most: our fascination with understanding ourselves, and our relationship with the world - humans, non-humans, non-living nature and technology. And then making our points through the simplest artefacts possible.
For previous editions, see Artificial Creatures 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 (spring semester).