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Two AI Pioneers, Two Bizarre Suicides
BotnetZombie writes "Wired tells the quite sad but very interesting stories of Chris McKinstry and Pushpinder Singh. Initially self-educated, both had the idea to create huge fact databases from which AI agents could feed, hoping to eventually have something that could reason at a human level or better. McKinstry leveraged the dotcom era to grow his database. Singh had the backing of MIT, where he eventually got his PhD and had been offered a position as a professor alongside his mentor, Marvin Minsky. Sadly, personal life was more troublesome for them, and the story ends in a tragic way.
Check out the flamewars in the wpg.general newsgroup. McKinstry ("McChimp") was a liar and self-promoting ass until he took off from Winnipeg leaving debt in his wake. He was not a visionary, he was a drug-addled delusional kook. Hell I remember his bogus "OxyLock" protection scheme which, like any protection scheme, utterly failed.
disclosure: I'm in a few of the usenet posts as he and I were about the same age and grew up in the same city.
It's discouraging reading this. Especially since I knew some of the Cyc people back in the 1980s, when they were pursuing the same idea. They're still at it. You can even train their system if you like. But after twenty years of their claiming "Strong AI, Real Soon Now", it's probably not happening.
I went through Stanford CS back when it was just becoming clear that "expert systems" were really rather dumb and weren't going to get smarter. Most of the AI faculty was in denial about that. Very discouraging. The "AI Winter" followed; all the startups went bust, most of the research projects ended, and there was a big empty room of cubicles labeled "Knowledge Systems Laboratory" on the second floor of the Gates Building. I still wonder what happened to the people who got degrees in "Knowledge Engineering". "Do you want fries with that?"
MIT went into a phase where Rod Brooks took over the AI Lab and put everybody on little dumb robots, at roughly the Lego Mindstorms level. Minsky bitched that all the students were soldering instead of learning theory. After a decade or so, it became clear that reactive robot AI could get you to insect level, but no further. Brooks went into the floor-cleaning business (Roomba, Scooba, Dirt Dog, etc.) with the technology, with some success.
Then came the DARPA Grand Challenge. Dr. Tony Tether, the head of DARPA, decided that AI robotics needed a serious kick in the butt. That's what the DARPA Grand Challenge was really all about. It was made clear to the universities receiving DARPA money that if they didn't do well in that game, the money supply would be turned off. It worked. Levels of effort not before seen on a single AI project produced some good results. Stanford had to replace many of the old faculty, but that worked out well in the end.
This is, at last, encouraging. The top-down strong AI problem was just too hard. Insect-level AI, with no world model, was too dumb. But robot vehicle AI, with world models updated by sensors, is now real. So there's progress. The robot vehicle problem is nice because it's so unforgiving. The thing actually has to work; you can't hand-wave around the problems.
The classic bit of hubris in AI, by the way, is to have a good idea and then think it's generally applicable. AI has been through this too many times - the General Problem Solver, inference by theorem proving, neural nets, expert systems, neural nets again, and behavior-based AI. Each of those ideas has a ceiling which has been reached.
It's possible to get too deep into some of these ideas. The people there are brilliant, but narrow, and the culture supports this. MIT has "Nerd Pride" buttons. As someone recruiting me for the Media Lab once said, "There are fewer distractions out here" (It was sleeting.) It sounds like that's what happened to these two young people.
Breeds There a Man...?
Isaac Asimov
It is a short sory by Isaac Asimov called "Breeds there a Man...?".
If you like that, I'd recommend the movie Pi which has similar ideas.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
"Speed Trap" by Frederik Pohl (1967)
We're the only mammal that bares its fangs - an aggresive trait - when we're happy! Ditto for looking directly into another person's eyes. We're aggresive by nature.
False - look at the narwhal! (Seriously, get a grip before making such categorical statements - the narwhal thing was a joke, but many apes have been shown to make open mouth gestures when happy.)
I find your claim for overt aggression disheartening. Maybe I'm just a decent person, and don't think that someone wants to kill me because they smile at me or look at me. Claiming humans are inherently aggressive is simplistic and counterproductive.
ps. :D (take that how you will.)
http://www.chrismckinstry.com
Isaac Asimov's "Breeds There a Man...?"?
There's another story that should come to mind when AI researchers start committing suicide... "Press Enter []" from John Varley's short-story collection, Blue Champagne.
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."