I’m not really a ‘destiny’ kind of person but in my more lyrical moments I can conjure a hand of destiny guiding me towards Autobiography of an Artificial Mind.
As an undergraduate at the University of Sussex, I specialised in Neurobiology but was also able to take a Philosophy of Psychology course in the Arts Faculty, taught by Maggie Boden, one of the early pioneers in artificial intelligence.
After graduating I became a research scientist in the emerging field of Applied Animal Ethology, which aimed to understand the behaviour of animals in their natural environment and apply it to enhance their existence in our human world. My own research focused on the welfare of animals, mostly farm animals but later extended to dogs and animals in zoos. This, at its heart, was all about trying to understand ‘other minds’. Do pigs need to walk and run and, therefore do they suffer if confined to a stall that prevents them from even turning around? Do chickens need to nest-build, dust-bathe and perch, all of which they will do every day, given the opportunity. And do they, therefore, suffer when housed in battery cages. These are hard questions to answer scientifically.