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From: "Stephen D. Williams" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2008 23:28:34 -0800 To: Friends of Rohit Khare <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [FoRK] Awww crap. User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 (Windows/20071031) Reply-To: Friends of Rohit Khare <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I liked Push's stuff. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-02/ff_aimystery Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened? By David Kushner Email 01.18.08 | 6:00 PM Illustration: Justin Wood Using the Internet to Build Their Case for Artificial Intelligence On the morning of June 12, 1990, Chris McKinstry went looking for a gun. At 11 am, he walked into Nick's Sport Shop on a busy street in downtown Toronto and approached the saleswoman behind the counter. "I'll take a Winchester Defender," he said, referring to a 12-gauge shotgun in the display. She eyeballed the skinny 23-year-old and told him he'd need a certificate to buy it. Two and a half hours later, McKinstry returned, claiming to have the required document. The clerk showed him the gun, and he handled the pistol grip admiringly. Then, as she returned it to its place, he grabbed another shotgun from the case, yanked a shell out of his pocket, and jammed it into the chamber. "He's got a gun! He's got a gun!" a woman screamed, as she ran out the front door. The store emptied. He didn't try to stop anyone. Soon McKinstry heard sirens. A police truck screeched up, and men in black boots and body armor took up positions around the shop. The police caught glimpses of him through the store windows with the gun jammed under his chin. They tried to negotiate by phone. They brought in his girlfriend, with whom he'd just had a fight, to plead with him. They brought in a psychiatrist — McKinstry had a history of mental problems and had tried to institutionalize himself the day before. After five hours, McKinstry ripped the telephone from the wall and retreated into the basement, where he spent two hours listening to radio coverage of the standoff. Eventually, a reporter announced that the cops had decided on their next move: Send in the robot. McKinstry had stolen the gun because he wanted to end his own life, but now he was intrigued. He'd always been obsessed with robots and artificial intelligence. At 4, he had asked his mother to sew a sleeping bag for his toy robot so it wouldn't get cold. "Robots have feelings," he insisted. Despite growing up poor with a single mom, he had taught himself to code. At 12, he wrote a chess-playing program on his RadioShack TRS-80 Model 1. As McKinstry cowered in the basement, he could hear the robot rumbling overhead, making what he called "Terminator" noises. It must be enormous, he thought, as it knocked over shelves. Then everything went eerily quiet. McKinstry saw a long white plume of smoke arc over the stairs. The robot had fired a tear gas canister, but it ricocheted off something and flew back the way it came. Another tear gas canister fired, and McKinstry watched it trace the same "perfectly incorrect trajectory." He realized the machine had no idea where he was hiding. But the cops had had enough. They burst through the front door in gas masks, screaming, "Put the gun down!" McKinstry had been eager to die a few hours before, but now something in him obeyed. The gas burned his eyes and lungs as he climbed from the basement. At the top of the steps, he saw the robot through the haze. It looked like an "armored golf cart" with a tangle of cables and a lone camera eye mounted on top. It wasn't like the Terminator at all. It was a clunky remote-controlled toy. Dumb. Three hundred miles away in a suburb of Montreal, Pushpinder Singh was preparing to devote his life to the study of smart machines. The high schooler built a robot that won him the top prize in a province-wide science contest. His creation had a small black frame with wheels, a makeshift circuit board, and a pincer claw. As the prodigy worked its controller, the robot rolled across the floor of his parents' comfortable home and picked up a small cup. The project landed Singh in the Montreal Gazette. Push, as everyone called him, had also taught himself to code — first on a VIC-20, then by making computer games for an Amiga and an Apple IIe. His father, Mahender, a topographer and mapmaker who had studied advanced mathematics, encouraged the wüenderkind. Singh was brilliant, ambitious, and strong-willed. In ninth grade, he had created his own sound digitizer and taught it to play a song he was supposed to be practicing for his piano lessons. "I don't want to learn piano anymore, I want to learn this," he said. Singh's lifelong friend Rajiv Rawat describes an idyllic geek childhood full of Legos, D&D, and Star Trek. One of his favorite films was 2001: A Space Odyssey — Singh was fascinated by the idea of HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence that thought and acted in ways its creators had not predicted. To create the character of HAL, the makers of 2001 had consulted with the pioneering AI researcher Marvin Minsky. (In the novel, Arthur C. Clarke predicted that Minsky's research would lead to the creation of HAL.) Singh devoured Minsky's 1985 book, The Society of Mind. It presented the high schooler with a compelling metaphor: the notion of mind as essentially a complex community of unintelligent agents. "Each mental agent by itself can only do some simple thing that needs no mind or thought at all," Minsky wrote. "Yet when we join these agents in societies — in certain very special ways — this leads to true intelligence." Singh later said that it was Minsky who taught him to think about thinking. In 1991, Singh went to MIT to study artificial intelligence with his idol and soon attracted notice for his passion and mental stamina. Word was that he had read every single one of the dauntingly complex books on the shelves in Minsky's office. A casual conversation with the smiling young researcher in the hallway or at a favorite restaurant like Kebab-N-Kurry could turn into an intense hour-long debate. As one fellow student put it, Singh had a way of "taking your idea and showing you what it looks like from about 50 miles up." ... In The Emotion Machine, Minsky suggests that chronic pain is a kind of "programming bug." He writes that "the cascades that we call Suffering' must have evolved from earlier schemes that helped us to limit our injuries — by providing the goal of escaping from pain. Evolution never had any sense of how a species might evolve next — so it did not anticipate how pain might disrupt our future high-level abilities. We came to evolve a design that protects our bodies but ruins our minds." Four weeks after Chris McKinstry committed suicide, the police were dispatched to an apartment at 1010 Massachusetts Avenue near MIT. Inside, they found the 33-year-old Singh. He had connected a hose from a tank of helium gas to a bag taped around his head. He was dead. Mahender Singh still has the robot that his son created in high school. "He thought that computers should think as you and I think," he says. "He thought it would change the world. I was so proud of him, and now I don't know what to do without him. His mother cries every day." "If anyone was the future of the Media Lab, it was Push," wrote the director of the lab, Frank Moss, in a mass email on March 4, 2007. A memorial wiki page was set up, and friends and colleagues posted dozens of testimonials as well as pictures of the young researcher. "His loss is indescribable," Minsky wrote. "We could communicate so much and so quickly in so very few words, as though we were parts of a single mind." Singh's childhood friend Rawat, with whom he had watched 2001 as kids in the '80s, posted too. "This might sound corny," he wrote, "but I felt at the funeral that they should play Amazing Grace' [as in] Spock's death scene in Star Trek II, where Kirk eulogized him as being the most human' being he had ever met in his travels." It would have been appropriate to Push, he said, "who was at once intellectually curious and logical (or as he put it, sensible) and deeply human." Privately, Rawat cites a different movie. "Sometimes I think this totally ridiculous thought," he says, "that he was bumped off like the end of Terminator 2." He refers to the fate of the character Dr. Miles Dyson, who creates a neural network processor that eventually achieves sentience and turns against mankind. When a cyborg from the future warns of what's to come, an attempt is made to kill Dyson before he can complete his work. Ultimately, the scientist nobly sacrifices himself while destroying his research to prevent the machines from taking over the world. "That's a fantasy [Push] would have gotten a kick out of," Rawat says. Amid the grieving, there were whispers about the striking parallels between Singh's and McKinstry's lives and deaths. Some wondered whether there could have been a suicide pact or, at the very least, copycat behavior. Tim Chklovski, a collaborator with Singh on Open Mind, suggests that perhaps McKinstry's suicide had inspired Singh. "It's possible that he gave Push some bad ideas," he says. (The rumors are likely to begin again: The fact that Singh committed suicide in nearly the same way McKinstry did has not been reported or widely known until this writing.) Details have not been forthcoming from MIT. After initial reports in the media of an "apparent suicide" by Singh, a shroud of secrecy descended. Minsky and others in the department declined to be interviewed for this article. The school has long been skittish about the topic of suicide. MIT has attracted headlines for its high suicide rate in the past, and the family of a 19-year-old student who set herself on fire sued the school in 2002. A week after Singh's suicide, a columnist in the student paper urged school officials "to take a more public and active role in acknowledging and addressing the problem of mental health at the Institute." Singh's bio page and personal blog remain online, but shortly after Wired began making inquiries, MIT took down the tribute wiki. Many say the greatest tragedy is that neither young man lived long enough to see his work bear fruit. Recently, the Honda Research Institute in Mountain View, California, began using Open Mind data to imbue its robots with common sense. "There is a nice resurgence of interest in commonsense knowledge," Amir says. "It's sad that Push didn't live to see it." After McKinstry's long struggle for academic legitimacy and recognition, his "Mind as Space" article will finally appear in the book Parsing the Turing Test, whose publication was delayed from mid-2003 to this February. "McKinstry himself was a troubled soul who had mixed luck professionally," the book's coeditor, Robert Epstein, says. "But this particular concept is as good as many others." In his acknowledgments, McKinstry credits Marvin Minsky for his "encouragement of my heretical ideas"; his colleagues at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal facility, "who tolerated my near insanity as I wrote this article"; and "of course the nearly fifty thousand people that have worked so hard to build the Mindpixel Corpus." McKinstry and Singh were both cremated. Singh's sister scattered his ashes in the Atlantic, not far from MIT. McKinstry's remains are said to be under his son's bed in the UK. Meanwhile, someone is posting to newsgroups under McKinstry's name. "I have always been and will always be," one message read. "I am forever." Contributing editor David Kushner ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote about the Linkin Park cyberstalker in issue 15.06. sdw -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.hpti.com Per: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://sdw.st Stephen D. Williams 703-371-9362C 703-995-0407Fax 20147 AIM: sdw _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
