Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened? That’s what Wired wrote some days ago and I just stumbled over.

Chris McKinstry and Pushpinder Singh were both researchers working on common sense knowledge databases that were designed to help instill background knowledge into AI systems. Although they both gathered a lot of entries into their systems, the databases haven’t yet produced remarkable output nor AI systems working with it.

We don’t really know why they both committed suicides in early 2006, but their deaths are likely to be connected, seeing that they are only a month apart and happened under similar circumstances (they taped a bag around their heads and filled it with gas). However, their suicides might have nothing to do with their AI projects, as McKinstry was a very eccentric, attention seeking personality, and Singh had searious health problems that clouded his thoughts.

I wondered if it was appropriate to assign a panic value to this story. The loss of two smart AI researchers working on the task of making common sense knowledge available for AI systems certainly throws the field back a bit and probably delays the development of an understanding AI. As I’m looking at the potential dangers of such an AI in this blog, this leeds to less panic. Of course it is questionable to connect the deaths of two researchers with a state of less panic, whatever that panic might be. And I want to make clear that I don’t think their deaths helped to save the world or were in any other way useful for anything.

However, I do give it a AI Panic Level of -1%, not because McKinstry and Singh are not longer amongst us, but two bright minds stopped working on the forefront of AI research. Of course stopping all research cannot and will not be the answer to the threat of hostile AIs, but from the viewpoint of this blog, it does delay their emergence.

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