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. They also crucially depend upon hard philosophical questions. Can an animal still suffer if it lacks sentience and has no reflective self-awareness of its suffering? Is it meaningful to talk of animals having rights or are these rights merely a projection of our own human duties?
I then spent five years at Brunel University, running a small research unit called the Design Research Centre. Our neighbour at Brunel was another small research unit studying Artificial Neural Networks – computers designed to behave like brain networks. Whilst we never did any work together, I was intrigued to discover that the artificial intelligence I had learned about at the University of Sussex was moving in a decidedly biological direction.
Since 2001, I have worked as an independent consultant. To begin with I played ‘the voice of the customer’, helping big businesses to understand customer needs in e-commerce sites and in businesses seeking to optimise customer acquisition, customer conversion and customer retention. This inevitably drew me in to the burgeoning trend for organisations to digitally transform and this, in turn moved me towards strategy work, which is where my current consultancy business is focused.
I have worked with many of the world’s biggest brands (e.g. Cisco, HSBC, Google, Lilly, Sony Playstation) and few of the most innovative tech start-ups (e.g. Ometria), as well as Universities and charities.
I have published several books (see my Amazon page), the most recent of which was back where I started – studying AI. The book is called AI-Augmented Decisions: A Practical Guide.