Oddhead Blog

Well, geeks are certainly inheriting my earth.

On January 13, my company named Carol Bartz, a self-avowed math nerd and former punch-card carrying member of her college computer club, as its CEO. In her own words:

I was a real nerd. I love, love, love, love math. Back in the late ’60s, math meant being a teacher if you were a woman. I wasn’t interested in teaching. Then I took my first computer course. It was crazy. It was like math, only more fun. I switched to computer science.

Exactly one week later, on January 20, my country turned over executive control to Barack Obama, a CrackBerry addicted comic book geek. In his inauguration speech, Obama vowed to “restore science to its rightful place”, “wield technology’s wonders”, and even addressed “non-believers” — wording that in any sane universe should be entirely unremarkable, yet in ours appears to represent an unprecedented milestone.

I can’t recall a two-week span filled with so much geek pride and cautious optimism.

Back to the Carol Bartz quote. Reading it brings a smile to my face. It also reminds me of my mom, who, convinced it was her only option, taught middle school for a few years before returning to medical school to pursue her passion, enjoying a successful career as one of the first women radiologists.

I highly recommend Bartz’s essay, which mixes biography with prescience and insight. Bartz describes how technology and the Internet are transforming collaboration and improving productivity, at the same time ushering in an era of information overload, email bankruptcy, and misuse of the extra time technology affords. Remarkably, she wrote about these things in 1997!

It’s amazing to think how things have changed since 1997. My own first web experience, courtesy Mosaic, came in 1994, the same year Yahoo! was founded. In 1996, PayPal predecessor and public company First Virtual wrote their own keystroke-sniffing malware as a stunt to bolster their urgent call to “NEVER TYPE YOUR CREDIT CARD NUMBER INTO A COMPUTER”. Ebay was founded in 1995, PayPal in 1998. In 1997, Friendster had neither come nor gone, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was 13.

Yet Bartz’s words seem more relevant than ever today.

Until just reading about it in Wired, I knew little¹ of the apparent suicide of Push Singh, a rising star in the field of artificial intelligence.

Singh seemed to have everything going for him: brilliant and driven, he became the protégé of his childhood hero Marvin Minsky, eventually earning a faculty position alongside him at MIT. Professionally, Singh earned praise from everyone from IEEE Intelligent Systems, who named Singh one of AI’s Ten to Watch (apparently revised), to Bill Gates, who asked Singh to keep him appraised of his latest publications. Singh’s social life seemed healthy and happy. The article struggles to uncover a hint of why Singh would take his own life, mentioning his excruciating chronic back pain (and linking it to a passage on the evolutionary explanation of pain as “programming bug” in Minsky’s new book, a book partly inspired by Singh).

The article weaves Push’s story with the remarkable parallel life and death of Chris McKinstry, a man with similar lofty goals of solving general AI, and even a similar approach of eliciting common sense facts from the public. (McKinstry’s Mindpixel predated Singh’s OpenMind initiative.) McKinstry’s path was less socially revered, and he seemed on a never ending and aching quest for credibility. The article muses whether there might be some direct or indirect correlation between the eerily similar suicides of the two men, even down to their methods.

For me, the story felt especially poignant, as growing up I was nourished on nearly the same computer geek diet as Singh: Vic 20, Apple II, Star Trek, D&D, HAL 9000, etc. In Singh I saw a smarter and more determined version of myself. Like many, I dreamt of solved AI, and of solving AI, even at one point wondering if a neural network trained on yes/no questions might suffice, the framework proposed by McKinstry. My Ph.D. is in artificial intelligence, though like most AI researchers my work is far removed from the quest for general AI. Over the years, I’ve become at once disillusioned with the dream² and, hypocritically, upset that so many in the field have abandoned the dream in pursuit of a fractured set of niche problems with questionable relevance to whole.

Increasingly, researchers are calling for a return to the grand challenge of general AI. It’s sad that Singh, one of the few people with a legitimate shot at leading the way, is now gone.

Push Singh Memorial Fund