57-year-old Frank Dimarino is having a moment of vindication, as yet another new artificial intelligence technology has made a reality out of one of his delusions. “I can’t tell you how validating it feels,” said Dimarino, who believes that technology generally develops on a 25-year lag from some wild jumble of concepts he put together while having a psychotic episode.
“It’s been tough to be ahead of the times so frequently, inadvertently, in this precise manner. I’ve been dismissed, ridiculed and clinically treated for bipolar disorder for years because I would talk about these things like they were 100% true. And like clockwork, whatever it is I said that was supposed to be totally removed from the world as we know it ends up being the world as it is. Well, who’s crazy now, Bill? Who’s a conspiracy theorist now, Kelly? Who actually needs a long-acting injection of Haldol, Dr. Sally Waxler?”
“I admit, it’s changed the way I see him,” said Dimarino’s sister Cindy, his foremost social support.
“We were too quick to ignore him. He’d get into this bizarre mental place and go on and on about the telephone having facial recognition chips, and how you can buy an artist’s studio tool where the robot in the phone will turn your face into a portrait of a Roman emperor. And that was in, like, 1987. We were just like, ‘Frank, what on earth?’ Nobody could have predicted a future where any of that made any sense, let alone turn into something we have our kids playing with every day.”
She added, “Even some of his more cryptic exclamations, like, ‘The Tik of the Tok and Alibaba are at it again!’ now have an intelligible context to them. It really makes you wonder just what is mad and what isn’t in a world that looks so much like the mind of my brother Frank.”