Twenty-two and a half years ago, in
December 1992, Derek McCarthy graduated from Cornell University ... but just
barely, and only after overcoming some setbacks.
Now he’s seeking
funding for a not-for-profit Artificial
Intelligence project to bring free AI to the masses!
Long story
short: Derek became the first suicide-attempt
survivor off Cornell University’s highest bridge on campus — in the days before
the anti-suicide fences that were eventually put up on the bridges over the deep
gorges that cut through campus, bridges the students must cross every day.
He took the 120
foot plunge onto the stony creek bed in October 1991, in the fall semester of
his senior year. He suffered multiple
skull fractures and a fractured pelvis; once they’d helicoptered him to the
hospital, they ran 25 units of blood transfusions through him in the first 12
hours, and he was not expected to live.
Prognosis poor.
But he did live.
He spent a month
in the Intensive Care Unit of the Arnot-Ogden Hospital in Elmira NY, two weeks of
which in a coma and on a ventilator; then another month in Orthopedics, after
he opened his eyes and began to speak a little.
Just before Christmas, his parents brought him to a head-injury hospital
in Boston (closer to where they lived) and he recovered much more and much more quickly than
expected. Some people said it was a miracle. Though his brain injuries were severe, they were in a part of the brain that made recovery more possible.
Spring 1992 he
spent in out-patient rehab, and he took an English class at Northeastern night
school to demonstrate he had enough brains left to go back to Cornell. In May he returned to Ithaca NY both to watch
his friends graduate and to begin the process of completing his own undergraduate
education (despite some cognitive deficits).
Then he was
given an option: he could either pursue
legal action against Cornell (for failing to follow up on clear suicidal
indications in his case) or he could give up his legal rights and complete his
degree.
He chose the
degree.
In summer 1992
he completed one of the Incompletes he’d received from the aborted Fall 1991
semester. Fall 1992, he completed two
more Incompletes and took two new classes — just enough to graduate in
December, and still in the hoped-for 8 semesters.
Just in
time! Only a few weeks after graduation
he began to have seizures, resulting from the traumatic brain injury of the previous
year — the brain is slow to form scar tissue; but when it does form scars, they
are electrically disruptive to the neural “circuits” and tend to cause seizures. Derek spent the next few months adjusting to
the seizures and the new medications, before heading down to North Carolina to
continue his studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Academically
he’d started at Cornell as a physics major, worked under a nasa grant on some Voyager-II-at-Neptune
research as a sophomore (and was co-author on papers published in Science and Icarus about the photometry of Neptune’s moon Triton),
before switching his major to English in the fall semester of his junior year. He had a high aptitude in math and science,
but also in English. (He had his own funky brand of being an English major, too.)
And as a result
of his severe traumatic brain injury, he began receiving Social Security
Disability Insurance payments — his doctors knew he would never be able to work
a traditional 40-hour-per-week job. He
still had much the same aptitude for math, science, and English as ever; but he
no longer had the emotional endurance for full-time work (which is often an
unfortunate side-effect of traumatic brain injury). So Derek would have to make do with Social
Security payments and fend for himself as best he could, renting a room as he
could afford.
Part of the
process of recovering from his brain injuries had been re-learning how to think
and to speak, so Derek now had an unusual perspective on speech and
thought. At UNC Chapel Hill he began
trying to combine his academic interests and took classes in symbolic logic,
folklore, and women’s studies. The
symbolic logic was a good fit, and he began to see computationally how a
computer program could learn to communicate in English text with a person — so
his interest in Artificial Intelligence was born. He also tried his hand at writing fiction,
under the pen name of Mary Evans (the real name of the woman who’d written with
the pen name of George Eliot — whose novel Middlemarch
had a profound effect on him when he’d become an English major).
Derek studied
and worked as best he could; he took the GRE in 1993, applied to graduate
schools, and in March 1994 got an acceptance letter from the Philosophy
department of Arizona State University at Tempe. So he moved out to Arizona and gave it a try; he began taking
classes in Linguistics — Syntax was the best fit, and the history of English — since
their Philosophy department was not
well-suited to studies in Artificial Intelligence, and the school offered him
no help in finding his way academically.
He spent a year
working in the Geology department at their nasa
Regional Planetary Imaging Facility, where the woman running the lab had heard
of him from his work at Cornell, and he continued taking whatever ASU classes
he could find relevant to his interests — like Critical Theory — and studying
computational linguistics using the programming languages LisP and Scheme. It was slow going, but he was also using the
time to grow up socially (something he’d previously neglected).
He moved to
Durango, Colorado with an ill-fated (and soon ended) relationship and began
writing a memoir (which he page-set, printed & bound himself in 2001 under
the pen name Mary Evans, once he’d moved back to Arizona). Writing the book, which he titled anomaly, was liberating for him. He felt it freed him from the failures of the
past.
Derek came back
east in 2002, spent a summer in Ithaca NY after his ten-year reunion at Cornell,
and then moved back to Massachusetts for some quiet years. He took two semesters of Java programming at
Framingham State in 2007 and continued his independent studies as best he
could. In 2008 he moved (with another
ill-fated relationship) to Acton, and then to Concord (when it ended). And then back to Acton, where his soul-mate
Sandi found him on Match.com (and they were married at First Parish in Concord
in 2013) and where they live happily to this day, despite Derek’s inability to
work a job or even to drive a car, since by the year 2000 he couldn’t afford
the driver’s license renewal fees or the penalties for not switching his MA
license to AZ and let his license lapse — but he really didn’t like driving
anyway.
So now, in 2015, Derek is getting on with
his Artificial Intelligence work.
Despite the coursework in Java, he’s decided to use the C++ programming language for his text-AI
programs — it’s a language better suited for text strings, especially on unix (a system he was first exposed to
while doing nasa work in 1990), and
it’s much faster.
He’s closer than
ever to getting his computational consciousness up and running; he needs
the system to be able to run five custom-written programs (in the background)
simultaneously: one each to handle
emotion, logical thinking, associative thinking, natural language expression,
and memory (and anything else he discovers to be necessary). And since proper understanding and empathy requires some sort of virtual body, he plans to add graphics of a face & body for the AI (and a camera to view the user).
The main problem
is that his computer is six years old (from 2009) and too slow for the computationally
intensive UNIX work he wants to do.
Derek pays 90% of his Social Security for rent, utilities, insurance, and
medical expenses; and he contributes the rest to help pay for food. [Sandi’s car died in 2012, and she spends
most of her money paying off the car loan for the replacement (and for her health
insurance and car insurance and groceries).] So saving money is virtually impossible.
Derek wants to
continue the work on his computational consciousness and possibly use it as a
way of getting into a graduate program in Computer Science (which probably
should have been his major back in the undergraduate days, though he had no way
of knowing). This month is his 45th
birthday, and he thinks it’s the perfect time to re-focus his efforts on his interdisciplinary AI
project.
It’s also the
perfect time in terms of his recovery from the brain injuries — he’s finally at
a stable point in his life (emotionally, spiritually, medically) and he’s ready
to make more of a contribution to the society that saved his life. Derek doesn’t want to create another
faceless, greedy U.S. corporation; instead, he wants everyone to benefit by freely
sharing his artificial intelligence tools and systems. Who knows how his medical status will evolve
over time, but he’s strong now. He
doesn’t want a bigger income; he just wants to pursue his dream.
Whatever you can
do to help give Derek a useful project to work on would be greatly appreciated! He will create a special blog detailing the project’s
progress and do his best to answer people’s questions and comments. (He also wants to thank his parents, family, friends,
and the many doctors for all the support they’ve given him over the years — and
most especially the United States Social Security Administration!)
Mary Ann(e) Evans
May 2015
