Matt Walsh

Ted Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber, was a mathematician who murdered and maimed several people with mail bombs during a domestic terror campaign lasting nearly 17 years.

And Kaczynski's goal was to wage war on what he called the industrial technological system and to return humanity to a much more primitive state of wild nature, where everybody lived like he did, off the grid, in a cabin in the woods, without water or electricity.

And

To prevent further bombings, the New York Times and the Washington Post published Kaczynski's manifesto called Industrial Society and Its Future at the urging of the FBI, which believed, correctly it turns out, that somebody would recognize his writing style

and turn him in.

Now, what you may not know about Kaczynski's manifesto is that it discusses the rise of artificial intelligence, which is pretty remarkable for a document written in the early 1990s.

Now, obviously, back then, AI was nothing like what it is today.

When students cheated on their homework or their tests back in the good old days, they had to do it the honorable way.

You know, raid the teacher's desk, copy from the smart kid.

fill in the answers on the Scantron sloppily so that it can't tell if you filled in the A bubble or the B bubble, you know, stuff like that.

I never did any of those things, of course, but I heard about people doing it and I was really disappointed in them.

Anyway, even back then, Kaczynski saw the potential of AI to cause mass disruption.

And here's what he wrote, quote,

Due to improved techniques, the elite will have greater control over the masses, and because human work will no longer be necessary, the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system.

If the elite is ruthless, they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity.

If they are humane, they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite.

But suppose now that the computer scientists do not succeed in developing artificial intelligence so that human work remains necessary.

Even so, machines will take care of more and more of the simpler tasks so that there will be an increasing surplus of human workers at the lower levels of ability.

On those who are employed, ever-increasing demands will be placed.

They will need more and more training, more and more ability, and will have to be even ever more reliable, conforming, and docile because they will be more and more like cells of a giant organism.