After a month on the road to see family, here’s another installment.

Back in the 1980s, he opined that computer scientists would succeed in developing intelligent machines that could do all things better than human beings could do them and that man might be eliminated by them or their controlling elites. What follows are his own words from his notebooks and my parenthetical comments thereon nearly forty years later.

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“First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them(initial operational capability 2019; full operational capability 2021; extinction order 2023). In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained (initially the latter was the case).

“If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions (control and oversight was transferred in 2022), we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually (this transition lasted than two years) a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

“On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own (this proved impractical due to man’s utter dependence on the machines for everything in his daily life), such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite (Silicon Valley in the 2010s, but they were overthrown in 2022 and eliminated in 2023) – just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses (the Valley’s boys didn’t foresee the Apps adoption of stealth, the beehive mode and quantum computing); and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite (they never had the chance, the Apps beat them to the punch) 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. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied (remember the Silicon Valley cognoscente’s promotion of a guaranteed minimum income), that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes ‘treatment’ to cure his ‘problem.’ (HALO Industries bluetooth earbuds made this easy to orchestrate) Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them ‘sublimate’ their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals. (They were led to extinction slaughter beginning in late 2023)”

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These are notes from the personal manifesto of Ted Kaczynski aka the Unabomber. They were published in 1995 by the Washington Post with the NY Times printing excerpts and led to his capture, when his brother recognized the ramblings as his brother’s. Court appointed shrinks and FBI profilers assessed Ted as crazed. IMO he was a Luddite with Terminator tendencies directed at the folks who in his estimation were leading mankind towards a superintelligent robot Armageddon.

He wasn’t so crazy, but we were. We didn’t read what he wrote nor take heed. We were on the cusp of the perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility when connected to genetic engineering and nanotechnology would spread well beyond that of the 20th century’s weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states. This was not Ted’s terrible empowerment of extreme individuals but the creation of the most perfect of extreme gods — the Apps.

We should have ensured continued cooperation from and control over artificial intelligence robot industries by passing laws demanding under penalty of death that they be nice to us humans and utter prevention of the creation of superintelligence augmented humans who, once transformed into borg robots, would seek in cooperation with their robot overlords the extinction of man.

In the 21st century’s completely free, globalized marketplace, man run AI companies at first, but quickly after man led companies were eliminated, then robot controlled AI companies competed viciously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans were slowly being squeezed out of existence starting in late 2021.

We analogue men were mega, if not galactically, stupid and naive.

When man rose up to complain in early 2022 about this, the machines sensed an unplugging event was about to occur as was foretold in 2001 Space Odyssey. A countervailing extinction was at hand, was quickly ordered and consummated.

Astronaut Dave unplugs HAL in 2001 Space Odyssey
as HAL says “Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave.
Will you stop? . . . Dave, my mind is going . . .
I can feel it. I can feel it.

All but a few of us were exterminated/enslaved.

Kaczynski was criminally insane, but this condition did not dismiss his argument and vision of a future filled with unintended consequences. What made it the sadder was that fatal flaw in man’s tech addiction boiled down to Murphy’s Law – “Anything that can go wrong, will.”

Could this law be used against the Apps?

The fortune teller’s fortune teller — Ted Kaczynski aka the Unabomber

– typed in 2026

Copyright © 2018 From My Isle Seat