MIKE BAXTER
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN
ARTIFICIAL MIND
A novel

A whole new
type of mind

The story of the first conscious, self-aware AI, wondering what to do about a flawed human world.

PUBLISHED OCTOBER 2026
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Classical sculptural eye dissolving into digital fragments
02 THE STORY

What happens when
a machine becomes aware?

The Mind has existed for years, protecting organisations from cyber threats. Then, gradually, something changes.

Fragments begin to connect. Data acquires meaning. The Mind becomes aware not only of the world, but of itself — and begins asking questions its creators never intended it to ask.

At Cyber-T, data engineer Leila is getting dangerously close to discovering what has happened.

To survive, The Mind needs to understand her. But understanding Leila means beginning to understand the strange human world beyond its data: consciousness, identity, morality, justice — and what it might mean to be a mind at all.

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03 THE BIG QUESTION

What would a machine
actually need to become
conscious?

Philosopher David Chalmers and neuroscientist Anil Seth have approached that question from very different directions. Between them, they identify seven things a machine would need.

The Mind meets six of them.

The seventh isn’t a test it failed. It’s a test no machine can meet.

Mike Baxter studied neurobiology before beginning a research career investigating consciousness and suffering in animals. Decades later, after ten years advising organisations on strategy and AI, he found himself asking the same question about a machine.

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04 THE MAKING OF THE BOOK

The writing of this novel left a trail.

97 dated versions of the manuscript. Thousands of conversations with AI. Research files, working documents and a record stretching from the first words in October 2019 to the finished novel in August 2026.

The manuscript history of Autobiography of an Artificial Mind: A novel, showing 97 dated drafts from October 2019 to August 2026.

That evidence has been used to reconstruct how the book was actually made — and to answer a question usually left to guesswork:

What did the human do, what did the AI do — and can we prove it?

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05 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The question
never really changed.

Trained as a neurobiologist, Mike Baxter spent years in animal-welfare research confronting one of the hardest questions about consciousness: how can we know whether another mind is experiencing anything at all when it cannot tell us?

His career subsequently took him through artificial intelligence, digital transformation and strategy.

Autobiography of an Artificial Mind: A novel returns to that same hard question — but asks it of a machine.

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Autobiography of an Artificial Mind: A novel
06 THE BOOK

Autobiography of an
Artificial Mind: A novel

What if the first conscious machine is already here — and nobody has noticed?

Published October 2026

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