16, he entered Harvard. At 25, he was the youngest assistant professor Berkeley had ever hired. At 27, he walked away from all of it into a Montana cabin with no electricity and no running water.
Then he started mailing bombs.
Ted Kaczynski killed three people and injured twenty-three others. Nothing excuses that, and this is not an attempt to.
But in 1995 he traded an end to the killing for the publication of his manifesto, and there are two passages in it I have not been able to shake. Not because they are unhinged. Because of when they were written and what they describe.
I am deliberately not quoting them here. You should read them cold, with no name attached, and work out for yourself what you are looking at.
Then the uncomfortable question arrives on its own. Was the Unabomber a murderous neo-Luddite whose ideas deserve to be buried with him, or was he among the first to see the #Singularity coming and recoil at it?
My answer will not satisfy either camp.
Full piece in the first comment. Come argue with me.
Was Ted Kaczynski simply a murderous neo-Luddite? Or was he, in his own twisted way, one of the first to foresee the dangers of unchecked technological progress and AI? The uncomfortable truth is: perhaps both.
The Rise of Ted Kaczynski
Born in 1942 in Chicago to Polish-American parents, Theodore John Kaczynski was a child prodigy. He skipped multiple grades, graduated from high school at 15, and entered Harvard University at 16. While at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a now-infamous CIA-sponsored psychological study — one that subjected him to extreme stress and psychological manipulation for years. Whether this experiment contributed to his later unraveling is a matter of debate.