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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.
I read this part
I mean... that's inspiring.
And then, he falls apart and kills himself on the web years later, abandoning his dream because of a fundamental flaw, he was a geek but he didn't have business sense.
That's about as close to Greek Tragedy as you can get.
I can't remember the name, but there was this one Sci-fi story about the human race being grown by a superior species. In the same way that we would grow bacteria in a petri dish and put a ring of penecillin around it to kill all bacteria that try to leave that specific area, we were also being confined. But we were confined intellectually - our penecillin was "the discovery of an invisible nuclear shield" that could protect against a nuclear blast. In the story, every scientist who came close to this discovery would commit suicide. The story follows one particularly brilliant scientist who easily solved the problem, but was consumed by an irrisistable urge to kill himself once he figured it out.
Anyone remember the name of that story? Or was it a book? I don't remember.. but it's pretty interesting to think about - especially if AI researchers begin to have a statistically higher probability of suicide.
Maybe this is our penecillin?
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The problem with the "emergent intelligence" from lots of "neural networks" approach is even if it works you often don't really know why it works (or whether it's really working the way you want) - it's more a probability thing.
;).
:).
;)
The idea that a neural network given a "large enough corpus" can resemble a human being might be true. But a "long enough dead end" could look like a highway. Then again we are probably dead ends too, and so it's more a matter of which one goes on for longer
My other objection to such approaches is, if you wanted a nonhuman intelligence from neural networks that you don't really understand (the workings of), you can always go get one from the pet store.
As it is the Biotech people probably have a better chance of making smarter AI than the computer scientists working on AI - who appear to be still stuck at a primitive level. But both may still not understand why
Without a leap in the science of Intelligence/Consciousness, it would then be something like the field of Alchemy in the old days.
I am not an AI researcher, but I believe things like "building a huge corpus" are wrong approaches.
It has long been my opinion that what you need is something that automatically creates models of stuff - simulations. Once you get it trying to recursively model itself (consciousness) and the observed world at the same time AND predict "what might be the best thing to do" then you might start to get somewhere.
Sure pattern recognition is important, but it's just a way for the Modeller to create a better model of the observed world. It is naturally advantageous for an entity to be able to model and predict other entities, and if the other entities are doing the same, you have a need to self model.
So my question is how do you set stuff up so that it automatically starts modelling and predicting what it observes (including self observations)?
Couldn't have said it better myself. I knew Chris for a few years back in the day (even stayed at his house on Maryland a few times), and you nailed it. He was a drug abusing paranoid kook who videotaped CNN 24 hours a day and watched it on fast-forward to see if anything the US government was doing might be affecting him. He was your stereotypical geek who never got past his teenage pathos of "the MAN is trying to get me" - and as such, pretty much refused to get any real sort of work after a while. He just moved on to scamming people. Leaving behind debt is an understatement.
He did have access to some pretty potent LSD, though. Before knowing him, I always thought LSD was pretty harmless, but with the quantities that man could ingest, I now wonder if permanent brain damage kicks in. And he loved to combine it with a little coke - or whatever other easily accessible drug was around.
Funny, the last I had heard about him was his mindpixel scam. Which made me chuckle a lot, because very few people seemed to catch on that the entire project was just the ravings of a drug-addled lunatic.
I didn't realize he finally offed himself. I say finally because everyone who knew him expected it "any day now" - since at least the early 90s. I'm rather astounded he held on so long.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
No, I'm saying that if you take it seriously you're going to drive yourself insane. There's absolutely nothing you, or anyone, can do about what someone else says or does on the Internet, or in person for that matter. Trying to do so is an exercise in futility. The only person you have even a little control over is you.
It shouldn't matter (to you) if I say something that is offensive, what matters is how you deal with it. You have choices in how you react to it. One of those choices is to ignore it and write it off as "oh, that's just some asshole on the Internet." Another is to become upset about what some anonymous asshole on the Internet who didn't know your friend has said. It is your choice.
Who am I to you? Nobody. Why should anything I say at all have any impact on you if you don't want it to?
For example, you may consider my stance of "you can only control yourself" as lame-ass, and attempt to insult me by insinuating that I live in the past, but I can choose to react negatively to that (ie: "waaah, my fewwings are hurted") or I can read between the lines and see that you're just angry about someone making a joke about your departed friend and not take offense -- just like I would do "in real life."
--J(K) DOS is like Unix in exactly the same way that a pinto is like an aircraft carrier.
This whole story reminds me of the poem Richard Cory (http://www.bartleby.com/104/45.html):
"Dogs don't even understand our language, they clearly cannot tell when we are lying"
You clearly don't have enough experience with dogs. They can tell. Eventually, they can even figure out the word "bath" if we spell it instead of saying it. They understand the difference between "do you want to go outside" and "youy're not going outside", and "come get a treat" and "come get a cookie" Bear doesn't like the treats, but he likes chocolate chip cookies. He knows the difference between "treat" and "cookie". Toby clearly understands "don't go in the garbage", but he still sneaks into it when he thinks he can get away with it, and he pretends nothing's wrong up to the moment of discovery, at which point he KNOWS he's been busted, even before I say anything.
There was a cat that temporarily had a limp. It got more attention when it was limping, so if anyone was watching, it limped. As soon as it thought nobody was watching, it walked perfectly normal. Even cats know how to lie, and can do it intentionally.
The medicine I took was Ayahuasca, from plants purchased from certain Internet sites. Western tourists travel to South America to ingest this drug in the presence of a Shaman to cure any mental illnesses or emotional problems. Partakers call ayahuasca a Medicine rather than a drug because of it's beneficial healing effects.
I wish more suicidal/depressed people knew about this other option for a cure. Modern western medicine tries to 'dull' depression by sedating the patient with SSRI's. Ayahuasca helps a person overcome depression by making them confront their innermost fears.
It's unfortunate psychedelics have a bad press in the west, due history of abuse of the drugs. In the right context psychedelics can be a powerful tool for spiritual insight and healing of the mind.
It's a rather brute force way of gaining knowledge (well in this case, for a computer system to gain knowledge). One may not necessarily gain more understanding of intelligence by doing this (much like one will not necessarily gain a better understanding of how to fight cancer just because one knows the the DNA structure of a blood cell for example). It is however a tool. If this "common sense" knowledge could be combined with neural networks (combining the knowledge with a mechanism to learn), then perhaps something useful may be had of this. All AI systems (as far as I know) require the input of knowledge, like typing in the quality and quantity of weapons in a war game simulator for example. The difference being that their efforts were more grandiose than these more limited forms of AI.
"Knowledge" itself is not the product of intelligence as you propose (although it can be). This knowledge already exists without human intervention. The phrase "Dogs have four legs" does not require a human brain for this fact to be true. The crux is having a computer system with this knowledge, and then developing a system to use this knowledge in an intelligent, human-like fashion.