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.

Comments

Re:They just wanted...

[seeker_1us]

Yes. This was a terribly sad article.

I read this part

While Singh was climbing the academic ladder at MIT, McKinstry was trying to put his life back together after spending two and a half months in jail. But the suicidal standoff had given him a new sense of purpose. He liked to think that the police robot had deliberately misfired its tear gas canisters in an effort to save him "Maybe robots do have feelings," he later mused. By 1992, McKinstry had enrolled at the University of Winnipeg and immersed himself in the study of artificial intelligence.

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.

reminds me of this one sci-fi story

[krnpimpsta]

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?

I knew him back in those days

[freeweed]

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.

Push ... so sad

[FlunkedFlank]

Wow, Push was my TA in Minsky's class in '96. He was an incredibly thoughtful and brilliant soul. He had the sysiphean task of grading several hundred long AI papers all by himself, and the papers all miraculously came back with voluminous detailed and insightful comments. I am just learning of this now. To see that he had achieved such great heights in his career only to end it the way he did ... will we ever be able to find any meaning in this, or is it just one of those inexplicable twists of human behavior?

This whole story reminds me of the poem Richard Cory (http://www.bartleby.com/104/45.html):

WHENEVER Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich--yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Re:McKinstry was a kook

[tomhudson]

"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.