My ‘Hidden’ Agenda

Abstract

Exactly two months to the day before my first visit to British Telecom Laboratories where I now work In artificial life research, I found myself before a multldiscipllnary panel of scientists at the offices of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The government’s Scottish Office and the Royal Society, the organisation which bills Itself as “Scotland’s premier learned society”, were sponsoring a small number of Personal Research Fellowships, and I had been short-listed and Invited to Interview. If successful, my next few years of research were to focus on the development of new cognitive models, Inspired by human studies, which would be especially tailored for the goal of Implementing data structures like the self model In non-biological substrates such as computers. My proposal was entitled ‘Engineering the First Generation of Conscious Machine’.