[FoRK] Awww crap.

[Gordon Mohr]

Stephen D. Williams wrote:
> I liked Push's stuff.
> 
> http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-02/ff_aimystery

You left out pp. 2-5 of the 6-page article. (I was wondering when
McKinstry died, if not in 1990.)

Here is the full story:

> Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened?
> By David Kushner Email 01.18.08 | 6:00 PM
> Illustration: Justin Wood
> Online Extras
> 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."
> 
> The field of AI research that Singh was joining had a history of
> bipolar behavior, swinging from wild overoptimism to despair. When
> 2001 came out in the late '60s, many believed that a thinking machine
> like HAL would exist well before the end of the 20th century, and
> researchers were flush with government grants. Within a few years, it
> had become apparent that these predictions were absurdly unrealistic,
> and the funding soon dried up.
> 
> In the mid-'90s, researchers could point to some modest successes, at
> least in narrow applications like optical character recognition. But
> Minsky refused to abandon the grand Promethean dream of re-creating
> the human mind. He dismissed Deep Blue, which beat chess grand-master
> Garry Kasparov in 1997, because it had such a limited mission. "We
> have collections of dumb specialists in small domains; the true
> majesty of general intelligence still awaits our attack," Minsky is
> quoted as saying in a book called HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as
> Dream and Reality. "No one has tried to make a thinking machine and
> then teach it chess."
> 
> Singh quickly established himself as Minsky's protégé. In 1996, he
> wrote a widely read paper titled "Why AI Failed," which rejected a
> piecemeal approach to research: "To solve the hard problems in AI —
> natural language understanding, general vision, completely
> trustworthy speech and handwriting recognition — we need systems with
> commonsense knowledge and flexible ways to use it. The trouble is
> that building such systems amounts to 'solving AI.' This notion is
> difficult to accept, but it seems that we have no choice but to face
> it head on." June 9, 1996: Singh's manifesto, titled "Why AI Failed"
> (with Bill Gates' response). View full page.
> 
> Singh's ambitious manifesto prompted an encouraging note from Bill
> Gates. "I think your observations about the AI field are correct," he
> wrote. "As you are writing papers about your progress, I would
> appreciate being sent copies."
> 
> 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. While pursuing a degree in
> psychology, he began posting on AI newsgroups and became enamored
> with the writings of the late Alan Turing.
> 
> A cryptographer and mathematician, Turing famously proposed the
> Turing test — the proposition that a machine had achieved
> intelligence if it could carry on a conversation that was
> indistinguishable from human conversation. In late 1994, McKinstry
> coded his own chatbot with the goal of winning the $100,000 Loebner
> Prize for Artificial Intelligence, which used a variation of the
> Turing test.
> 
> After a few months, however, McKinstry abandoned the bot, insisting
> that the premise of the test was flawed. He developed an alternative
> yardstick for AI, which he called the Minimum Intelligent Signal
> Test. The idea was to limit human-computer dialog to questions that
> required yes/no answers. (Is Earth round? Is the sky blue?) If a
> machine could correctly answer as many questions as a human, then
> that machine was intelligent. "Intelligence didn't depend on the
> bandwidth of the communication channel; intelligence could be
> communicated with one bit!" he later wrote.
> 
> On July 5, 1996, McKinstry logged on to comp.ai to announce the
> "Internet Wide Effort to Create an Artificial Consciousness." He
> would amass a database of simple factual assertions from people
> across the Web. "I would store my model of the human mind in binary
> propositions," he said in a Slashdot Q&A in 2000. "A giant database
> of these propositions could be used to train a neural net to mimic a
> conscious, thinking, feeling human being!" July 1996: McKinstry
> announces "Internet Wide Effort to Create an Artificial
> Consciousness." View full page.
> 
> The idea wasn't new. Doug Lenat, a former Stanford researcher, had
> been feeding information into a database called Cyc (pronounced
> "psych") since 1984. "We're now in a position to specify the steps
> required to bring a HAL-like being into existence," Lenat wrote in
> 1997. Step one was to "prime the pump with the millions of everyday
> terms, concepts, facts, and rules of thumb that comprise human
> consensus reality — that is, common sense." But the process of adding
> data to Cyc was laborious and costly, requiring a special programming
> language and trained data-entry workers.
> 
> Cyc was a decent start, McKinstry thought, but why not just get
> volunteers to input all that commonsense data in plain English? The
> statements could then be translated into a machine-readable format at
> some later date. But McKinstry's grand vision to harness the
> collective power of the Internet community to create an artificial
> intelligence had one serious flaw: The Internet community thought he
> was nuts.
> 
> McKinstry had been posting for years, detailing his research, his
> theories, and his personal life. He was known in newsgroups primarily
> for his outlandish rants and tall tales. He claimed to have been a
> millionaire at age 17. He detailed his police standoff and his
> experiences dropping acid ("I wandered downtown Toronto thinking and
> acting as if I was god").
> 
> In December 1996, snarky geeks created a newsgroup in his honor,
> alt.mckinstry.pencil-dick, taking as its charter "Discussion of
> Usenet kook McKinstry, aka 'McChimp.'" Leading the brigade was Jorn
> Barger, who would later run the site Robot Wisdom (and coin the term
> weblog). "You write like a teenager, and have shown frequent signs of
> extreme cluelessness," Barger emailed McKinstry in May 1995.
> 
> McKinstry never shied away from a flame war. "I'm just sick of you
> spouting your highly uninformed opinion all over the net," he replied
> to Barger. He threatened legal action against people who, in an
> effort to refute his theories, quoted directly from his emails. To
> those who made fun of his frequent misspellings, he explained that
> they were caused by dyslexia, not dementia.
> 
> But some of McKinstry's improbable boasts turned out to be true. Many
> scoffed when he claimed to have moved to Chile to work on the world's
> largest telescope, but he soon provided evidence that he was indeed
> an operator of the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern
> Observatory. "It's funny how often I get called a liar," he once
> posted. "I will no longer tolerate slander."
> 
> The eccentric researcher made friends among the bohemians and hackers
> of Santiago. "Chris could make people laugh and wasn't afraid to make
> a fool of himself in the process," recalls his ex-wife. And there was
> one important person who McKinstry said treated him with respect:
> Marvin Minsky. McKinstry claimed to have emailed Minsky in the
> mid-'90s, asking if it were possible "to train a neural network into
> something resembling human using a database of binary propositions."
> 
> "Yes, it is possible," Minsky is supposed to have replied, "but the
> training corpus would have to be enormous."
> 
> That was apparently all the encouragement McKinstry needed. "The
> moment I finished reading that email," he later recalled, "I knew I
> would spend the rest of my life building and validating the most
> enormous corpus I could."
> 
> On July 6, 2000, McKinstry retooled his pitch for a collaborative AI
> database. He had a business model this time, one that seemed well
> suited to the heady days of the dotcom boom. His Generic Artificial
> Consciousness, or GAC (pronounced "Jack"), would cull true/false
> propositions from people online. For each submission, participants
> would be awarded 20 shares in McKinstry's company, the Mindpixel
> Digital Mind Modeling Project.
> 
> Mindpixel was a term McKinstry invented to describe the individual
> user-submitted propositions. Pixels, short for "picture elements,"
> are the tiny, simple components that combine to create a digital
> image. McKinstry saw mindpixels as mental agents that could be
> combined to create a society of mind. Gather enough of them — roughly
> a billion, he estimated — and the mindpixels would combine to create
> a functioning digital brain.
> 
> The criticisms and flames never let up. But McKinstry's clever stock
> offer managed to generate mainstream press coverage and hundreds of
> thousands of mindpixel submissions. He posted regular messages to his
> "shareholders" and talked up the enormous potential value that the
> Mindpixel project could have if it achieved its lofty goals. "It's
> like inventing teleportation," he told Wired News in September 2000.
> "How could you put a value on that?"
> 
> Do fish have hair? Can blue tits fly? Did Alan Turing theorize that
> machines could, one day, think? Did Quentin Tarantino direct
> Terminator 2? Is a neural network capable of learning? Is the
> Mindpixel project just a scam to make Chris McKinstry famous? —
> Questions submitted to the Mindpixel database Chris McKinstry (left)
> created a database called Mindpixel. Push Singh (right) created a
> database called Open Mind Common Sense. Both believed the programs
> could be used to develop machine intelligence. Photos: McKinstry: The
> Streeb-Greebling Diaries; Singh: Pushblog
> 
> Meanwhile, in Cambridge, Push Singh was pursuing a similar vision. He
> had teamed with Stanford researcher David Stork to create a database
> of commonsense knowledge through open submissions. On the surface it
> resembled Mindpixel, but instead of yes/no questions it compiled
> factual statements like "every person is younger than their mother"
> and "snow is cold and is made of millions of snowflakes."
> 
> In September 2000, two months after McKinstry launched Mindpixel,
> Singh posted a message on the rec.arts.books newsgroup to announce
> Open Mind Common Sense. "We have recently started a project here at
> MIT to try to build a computer with the basic intelligence of a
> person," it read. "This repository of knowledge will enable us to
> create more intelligent and sociable software, build human-like
> robots, and better understand the structure of our own minds. We
> invite you all to come visit our project web page, and teach our
> computer some of the things all us humans know about the world, but
> that no computer knows!" September 7, 2000: Singh announces Common
> Sense Open Mind on rec.arts.books newsgroup, ignites flame war with
> Barger and McKinstry. View full page.
> 
> But the Web community was dubious. The reason: McKinstry. "How is it
> any less moronic than Mindpixel?" Barger replied. Another poster
> agreed: "Should be obvious by now that these [AI] guys ... are the
> most successful con artists of our time."
> 
> "Mindpixel isn't moronic, it's courageous," Singh responded. "I
> disagree with how McKinstrey is doing it (as a company, giving out
> shares' that will never have any value, instead of making it public
> immediately). [And] the Mindpixel idea of training up a neural
> network' with the database is clearly ridiculous. I also believe our
> interface is better."
> 
> It didn't take McKinstry long to respond. "First, no e' in
> McKinstry," he fired back. "And second, your statement is misleading.
> The database is publically [sic] available right now, just not for
> commercial use." McKinstry bristled at Singh's dismissal of his stock
> plan. "Thems fightin' words!" And if Singh felt Mindpixel was
> "clearly ridiculous," perhaps he'd be willing to bet on whose
> database would be first to achieve intelligence? As for the dig at
> his site's interface, McKinstry conceded that Open Mind's was better,
> but blamed it on his lack of resources: "You didn't have to write it
> all by your lonesome."
> 
> McKinstry insisted that Mindpixel had one significant advantage over
> Open Mind: He required his contributor-shareholders to verify the
> accuracy of each other's submissions. "The net is a very open place,"
> he wrote. "How do you keep garbage out without any form of validation
> mechanism? ... All you have to do is try to [imagine] Slashdot
> without the moderation system to see what's going to happen to your
> database."
> 
> McKinstry had been stung by Singh's criticisms. But the fact that
> Singh called Mindpixel "courageous" and was pursuing a similar
> project gave him a sense of validation. His response to Barger sounds
> triumphant. "How many years have you been fighting this idea of mine
> here in these news groups?" he crowed. "Now I guess the whole MIT
> Media Lab is crazy too?"
> 
> McKinstry sat at his computer uploading statements to Singh's Open
> Mind database. "Don Adams played Maxwell Smart. Trees don't have
> neurons. Jesus was a superstar. Marvin Minsky was alive in 2001.
> Houses don't eat pork." One thought led to the next in a revealing
> free association. "Push is normally a verb," he typed. "McKinstry is
> competing with Push."
> 
> Actually, McKinstry was hoping to forge a partnership with Singh. In
> 2000, he hinted to his shareholders that Mindpixel and Open Mind
> Common Sense were going to connect their databases. Singh initially
> did nothing to dispel this impression. "Chris is a good guy," he told
> Wired News.
> 
> McKinstry's mind turned often to Singh. They had so much in common:
> Two young researchers obsessed with simulating common sense. Both
> Canadian. Both Net-savvy.
> 
> Like McKinstry, Singh was convinced that the potential of artificial
> intelligence was enormous. "I believe that AI will succeed where
> philosophy failed," he had written on his MIT homepage. "It will
> provide us with the ideas we need to understand, once and for all,
> what emotions are." According to Bo Morgan, a fellow student at MIT,
> Singh suggested that giving common sense to computers would solve all
> the world's problems.
> 
> "Even starvation in Africa?" Morgan asked.
> 
> Singh paused. "Yeah, I think so."
> 
> But Singh's ambitions were modest and grounded compared with
> McKinstry's. The man behind Mindpixel was certain that his database
> would become a thinking machine in the near future. The father of a
> son from his brief marriage in the '90s, he sometimes referred to GAC
> as his second child. He believed that he would be recognized as one
> of the great scientific minds in history. "He thought he deserved a
> Nobel Prize," says a friend who blogs under the handle Alphabet Soup.
> "He compared himself to Einstein and Turing. He said GAC would make
> him immortal."
> 
> McKinstry meant that part about immortality literally. "The only
> difference between you and me is the same as the difference between
> any two MP3s — bits," he wrote in an Amazon.com review of How We
> Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and
> Informatics. (He gave the book three stars.) McKinstry often told
> friends that he intended to upload his consciousness into a machine:
> He would never die.
> 
> Do teenagers think they know everything? Is MIT the best tech school
> in the world? Did HAL 9000 ... go nuts and try to kill everyone? Does
> me got bad grammar? Does Wired magazine mostly write about different
> types of wire? Is death inevitable? — Questions submitted to the
> Mindpixel database
> 
> McKinstry's hopes for a partnership with the MIT project were soon
> dashed. "McKinstry was fundamentally different than us," Singh's
> collaborator, Stork, recalled. "We thought people wouldn't
> participate in the project if they were making some guy in Chile
> rich."
> 
> McKinstry didn't let it go. On July 16, 2002, he tried to reconnect
> with Singh, emailing him a link to a paper on language models. It
> suggested a way that statements submitted to Open Mind and Mindpixel
> could be understood by machines. "This is what I've been babbling
> inarticulately about all these years. It just needs to be trained on
> a corpus of validated propositions," he wrote. The paper's author was
> Canadian. "Another coincidence," McKinstry noted.
> 
> Four days later, Singh sent an unenthusiastic reply. "Current
> statistical approaches are still too weak to learn complex things,"
> he wrote. "We need some really new ideas in machine learning that go
> beyond what people are doing today. It helps to have the large
> datasets like mindpixel or openmind, but we're still missing the
> right learning component."
> 
> Open Mind, which would eventually garner more than 700,000
> submissions in five-plus years, was now part of a Commonsense
> Computing division at the MIT Media Lab. Singh was pursuing another
> research project for his PhD. He was also coauthoring papers with
> Minsky and presenting his ideas at conferences and symposia around
> the world.
> 
> Privately, McKinstry began speaking of his resentment of Open Mind.
> Singh's project, he felt, had gotten all the attention simply because
> it was affiliated with MIT. He complained that Singh had copied his
> statistical model for collecting data and claimed that he had
> contacted a dean at MIT asking that Singh's work be taken down.
> (There is no evidence to support this allegation.)
> 
> Mindpixel would eventually receive roughly 1.5 million submissions,
> but McKinstry's lack of business skills had become apparent. He had
> lined up no commercial partners or applications and apparently had no
> intention of honoring any of the promises he'd made to his
> "shareholders." All he had was an enormous collection of questions
> ranging from "Does Britney Spears know a lot about semiconductor
> physics?" to "Is McKinstry a media whore with no real credentials or
> expertise?"
> 
> McKinstry, who said he was diagnosed as bipolar, went into decline. A
> fight with his latest girlfriend led to a few nights in a Chilean
> mental hospital. His mood was briefly buoyed when an article he'd
> written, entitled "Mind as Space," was chosen to run in a 2003
> anthology that would feature contributions from many of the
> luminaries in the AI field. But as the publication of the book was
> repeatedly postponed, he grew more frustrated and despairing. He
> started wondering about his old rival again.
> 
> On January 12, 2006, McKinstry hit Singh's personal blog. "It has
> been hard to give this blog any attention while finishing my
> dissertation," Singh had written some six months earlier. "I am now
> Dr. Singh!" Singh also wrote about "some new ideas [Minsky] has been
> developing about how minds grow. The basic idea is called interior
> grounding,' and it is about how minds might develop certain simple
> ideas before they begin building articulate connections to the
> outside world."
> 
> New ideas? McKinstry commented on Singh's blog that it sounded
> similar to a 1993 paper in the journal Cognition, and he provided a
> link to the PDF. On his own blog, he wrote, "The idea reminded me
> strongly of some neural network experiments that I replicated in
> 1997." Singh never replied.
> 
> "So what exacty does a web suicide note look like?" McKinstry wrote
> on January 20, 2006, a week after he posted to Singh's blog. "Exctly
> like this."
> 
> He was sitting in a café near his home in Santiago, pounding the keys
> on his Mac laptop. He posted the message on his blog and a slightly
> different version on a forum at Joel on Software, a popular geek
> hangout.
> 
> McKinstry's rant was florid and melodramatic. "This Luis Vuitton,
> Parada, Mont Blanc commercial universe is not for me," he wrote. He
> talked about his history of suicidal feelings and botched attempts,
> and he insisted that this time things would be different. "I am
> certain I will not survive the afternoon," he wrote. "I have already
> taken enough drugs that my alreadt weakened liver will shut down very
> soon and I am off to find a place to hide and die."
> 
> The online forum members were understandably skeptical. McChimp was
> flinging bananas again, they figured. "Have a nice trip! Let us know
> if there's anything beyond the 7th dimension!" read the first
> comment. "Typical of his forum," McKinstry replied. "I am having more
> trouble than usual typing due to the drugs. I have to go die not.
> bye." Then, "It is too late. I will leave this cafe soon and curl up
> somewhere." A few minutes later: "I am leaving now. People are
> strating to notice I canot type and I am about to vomit. Take to go.
> Last post." Later still: "I am leave now. Permanently." January 20,
> 2006: McKinstry's suicide note on Joel on Software forum. View full
> page.
> 
> "I don't buy this for a minute," replied a familiar detractor named
> Mark Warner. It was enough to pull McKinstry back into the fray for
> one last flame war. "Warner, you were alway an ass," he replied. "I
> have to go vomit now and take more pills." His final post continued
> the theme: "I am feeling really impaired. And yes, time will tell
> what happens to me. I really have to get out of here. I cannot type.
> and want to vomit. Time to go hide."
> 
> Three days later, on January 23, after calls from panicked friends,
> the police checked McKinstry's apartment and found his body. He had
> unhooked the gas line from his stove and connected it to a bag sealed
> around his head. He was dead at age 38.
> 
> McKinstry's few friends say he occasionally spoke of suicide, but no
> one knew why he had gone through with it this time. Carlos Gaona, a
> younger hacker who had become his protégé, raced over to the
> apartment and convinced McKinstry's girlfriend to give him his
> laptop, his journal, the dog-eared books. And, of course, the Web was
> full of his thoughts, rants, dreams, and nightmares. He never got to
> upload his consciousness into a thinking machine, but in a sense he
> had been uploading himself his entire adult life. Before he died, he
> had replaced the home page of chrismckinstry.com with the words
> "Catch you later."
> 
> One blogger wondered, "If not for his belief in the permanence of the
> internet, that his suicidal proclamation would remain on the World
> Wide Web for posterity — would Chris McKinstry be alive today?"
> 
> Others wondered how this would affect the idea of collaborative AI
> databases. On January 28, Bob Mottram, who had once been offered the
> unpaid position of chief software developer at Mindpixel, wrote in a
> post memorializing McKinstry: "For the present, the last man standing
> in this game is Push Singh."
> 
> After completing his dissertation, Singh was offered a job as
> professor at the MIT Media Lab. He would be teaching alongside his
> mentor, Minsky, who credited him with helping to develop many of the
> ideas in his new book, The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking,
> Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. He would
> have the resources to pursue his dream of "solving AI." Before
> assuming his position, though, he decided to take time off, as he
> told a friend, "to think."
> 
> Everything in Singh's life seemed to be going well. He was enjoying a
> relationship with a girlfriend who worked at the lab. The IEEE
> Intelligent Systems Advisory Board, a consortium of top AI figures
> around the world, had selected him as one of the top 10 researchers
> representing the future of the field.
> 
> But privately, Singh was suffering. He had severely injured his back
> while moving furniture, and though he did his best to stay engaged on
> campus, colleagues noticed that he was distracted. He told a friend,
> Eyal Amir, that there were times when he was incapable of doing
> anything because of the excruciating pain. Some thought it was
> clinical depression. Colleague Dustin Smith asked, "How much of your
> attention is on the pain at a given moment?"
> 
> Singh replied, "More than half."
> 
> 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 (david at davidkushner.com) wrote
> about the Linkin Park cyberstalker in issue 15.06.