Part 17
I’ve lived an exciting and often adventurous life but I’m not a person to dwell on the “What ifs” of the past. However, writing these blogs has necessarily taken me down memory lane. In that lane I’ve recovered various moments that I could relate in some ways to the birth and the development of ExoBrain.
In a recent article, one of the biggest names in IT was asked what he would do if he were today at the age he was when he dropped out of Harvard. He replied that he would create a company to use Artificial Intelligence to enable computers to read, so that they could absorb all the valuable data Mankind has accumulated over the millennia.
Happily, ExoBrain will make this dream come true in a far less laborious way than current AI will have to struggle with. Between them, ExoBrains across the planet will read and understand whatever they are given, and together create the biggest compendium of facts ever known to Man…and will do so in an easily accessible manner – to all ExoBrainers.
Today, I came up with a rather odd collection of “What ifs,” but it served to remind me that if one has strong intentions in life, the chances are you will survive to carry them out, no matter how long it takes. Peter Warren has enormously strong intentions to see ExoBrain through to the point where it is the most important communication tool ever devised by Man.
My “What ifs” took me to numerous points where I could easily have been killed but somehow managed to avoid this inconvenient ending to one’s activities.
Very briefly then, when I was five years old I was beaten up and left unconscious on the village green in Weybridge, Surrey. A year later my parents were returning to London from Edinburgh on the then famous “Flying Scotsman” train. My Dad was fooling around with me in the train’s compartment. He lifted me up and jokingly said he was going to throw me out of the train. As he swung me forward towards the door, unbelievably, the door blew open. My Dad probably got a bigger fright than I and fell sideways onto the seat with me in his arms and the wind whistling around the compartment while the train careered along the line at sixty miles an hour!
It was wartime and we lived in Weybridge, not far from the famous Brooklands Motor racing track. During World War II, the Vickers Armstrong aircraft factory had been built on the grounds of Brooklands. Because of this, we were subjected to endless air raids as German aircraft attacked the factory. Unexploded shells and even a bomb fell into our garden without harming us. However, then unmanned V-1 rockets known as “Buzz Bombs” started arriving. The first Buzz Bomb to descend on England hit a tree about 100 yards from my prep school, blowing out windows and damaging the buildings, but fortunately no life was lost. A “charming” facet of the Buzz Bomb was that when it ran out of fuel, it did one of two things. It either glided, crashed and exploded or it would dive straight down splattering everything beneath it. I had two Buzz Bombs stop right over my head. As you can guess, both of them glided!
On our way to South Africa in 1946, we travelled on a ship from Marseilles to Alexandria in Egypt. The ship travelled through a minefield with the captain ordering all passengers to remain in the stern of the ship in case we hit a mine.
Arriving in South Africa, we eventually lived in a lovely old cottage below Kirstenbosch Botanical gardens. Immediately above us was Table Mountain. Every school holiday, I would climb the mountain on a route through Skeleton Gorge. Coming back one day, showing off, I ran down the path above the gorge, tripped and fell over the edge of a 200-hundred-foot cliff, landing in a tree about six feet below the path!
In another notorious fall in Jersey in the Channel Islands, I tripped crossing a road, running for a bus with a car almost upon me. Fortunately, some basic Judo moves had taught me to roll with the fall, escaping the car by inches.
Apart from being charged by an enraged elephant we were trying to film in the Knysna Forest in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, the rest of my life has been relatively disaster free in later years.
What if I hadn’t survived? Who knows? Thankfully, Peter Warren has also made it through numerous adventures and ExoBrain is going to be his legacy.
Oh, and the big name in IT? Bill Gates!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.