Christopher McKinstry

I was somehow for some reason reminded of Christopher McKinstry. If you remember him from the 1990s he was bullied on one of the local newsgroups/bulletin boards.

He was "suicided" at one point, something having to do with his work on AI-based Mind Control?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_McKinstry

I think what he was working on was computer/AI type of V2K (voice 2 skull) technology which I think is being used right now.

I don't know why TPTB suicided him for though. Did he "know too much"? Did he reach whistleblower status and TPTB were afraid of him "squealing" about his/their work.

Remember the computer program Eliza? It starts off with "How are you feeling?". Then you respond like "my husband/wife hates me"...It then responds with "tell me more about your husband/wife"....etc. etc... Now instead of typing this, a computer voice is able to communicate ...computer to mind...Is this what CM was working on? It seems like this technology goes back to Nazi Germany, so it isn't out of the box when I say that Nazi America might be using similar technologies.

What really happened?

See also:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=AI+voice+to+skull&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz35

jimj_wpg wrote:I was somehow for some reason reminded of Christopher McKinstry. If you remember him from the 1990s he was bullied on one of the local newsgroups/bulletin boards.

I recall him doing plenty of bullying himself on wpg.general. A better description is that the BS he shoveled at people often got shoveled back.

jimj_wpg wrote:He was "suicided" at one point, something having to do with his work on AI-based Mind Control?

His AI claim was essentially that a large enough database of true/false statements would somehow spontaneously become an AI capable of reasoning. In reality it simply doesn't work that way. It's just a database. The addition of a neural net might get you answers to your true/false questions faster, but it ain't AI and it ain't a mind. There's no reasoning, and there's no more self-awareness to it than your toaster.

More recent systems can answer plain-English questions using Wikipedia as their database. One recently competed with good results on Jeopardy. This is VERY useful and far beyond anything McKinstry's system would ever have done. It's still not a HAL-9000 or Data (Star Trek) style AI mind.

There's no reason to believe that McKinstry was "suicided" because there was simply nothing to "suicide" him over.

jimj_wpg wrote:What really happened?

He suffered from bipolar disorder. He had an armed standoff with police in Toronto where he held himself hostage in a gun shop. Years later he committed suicide.