Letter from Unabomber to Dr. David Gelernter (1995)
montanaheritageproject.org
montanaheritageproject.org
In his sophomore year at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a personality assessment study that was conducted by Harvard psychologists and led by Henry Murray. Students in Murray's study were told they would be debating personal philosophy with a fellow student. Instead, they were subjected to "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks in a "purposely brutalizing psychological experiment".[28] During the test, students were taken into a room and connected to electrodes that monitored their physiological reactions, while facing bright lights and a one-way mirror. Each student had previously written an essay detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations: the essays were turned over to an anonymous attorney, who would enter the room and individually belittle each student based in part on the disclosures they had made. This was filmed, and students' expressions of impotent rage were played back to them several times later in the study. According to author Alston Chase, Kaczynski's records from that period suggest he was emotionally stable when the study began, and Kaczynski's lawyers attributed his deep-seated hostility towards mind control techniques to his participation in this study.[28] Furthermore, some have suggested that this experience may have been instrumental in Kaczynski's future actions.[29][30]
Dunno about all the mkultra stuff, but they psychologically abused the hell out of a 17 year-old kid.
[30] Jump up ^ Cockburn, Alexander (October 18, 1999). "CIA Shrinks & LSD". CounterPunch. Retrieved August 7, 2015. https://www.counterpunch.org/1999/10/18/cia-shrinks-lsd/
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...
https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
EDIT: I am getting a lot of downvotes for this comment. And just to clear up intention, all I am trying to say here is that yes, technology could be deleterious but we can prevent it in ways other than concluding “and that’s why we have to start blowing shit up and killing people”. I don't see why that's offensive.
My response to the theory that an all-powerful computer intelligence will one day have us at it's whim is why would it even care? For the same reason it lacks empathy, it would also lack any ambition or fear or jealousy.
The bigger risk is relying too much on A.I. built for very specific purposes (ANI). A contrived example would be putting A.I. in charge of managing the nuclear arsenal. A bug in the A.I. that caused a pre-emptive strike could wipe out all life on earth.
Part 2, although I know where I intend to take it, is very inchoate at this point for a reason that I mention in a postscript to part 1. I'd love to have any feedback anyone would care to provide! It'll be of great use in improving the back half of the essay.
So, while it's possible that AGI will be as bad or worse than competing with a more powerful and intelligent species of animal, they're not animals, and probably won't behave like animals. Increasing chimp intelligence, on the other hand, is probably not a good idea. Bonobos, maybe. Not chimps.
Also missing from the discussion is that intelligence isn't the only danger from competitors for resources. Insects collectively weigh a multiple of the total human biomass and many of them would eat us all, given half a chance. Microbes could evolve to kill us all, directly, or by modifying the ecosystem.
This letter speaks rather directly to our contemporary issue of technology displacing non-degreed workers. Either by exporting the jobs (cheaper transport, better logistics), eliminating or reducing the number of people required (increased automation), or increasing the technical sophistication required (again, automation but also increasing presence of computer systems and more complex tooling). It's pretty obvious in the present discussions (and the most recent US presidential election) that people are feeling a great deal of fear and hardship because of our direction over the past 30-40 years (in particular). We have to confront these issues. Otherwise, a lack of consideration or deliberation (publicly) is a tacit endorsement of the current direction and its negative effects on large blocks of our fellow humans and citizens.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard...
The man is clearly mentally disturbed and needed medical care, but that in no sense should dimish his academic accomplishments and raw intelligence.
what do you mean, exactly? that he didn't terrorize and kill people?
> there is still the question of his genesis as a terrorist and a murderer. Do you refuse to discuss that too?
i don't 'refuse', but it doesn't hold that much interest for me.
I am not defending a terrorist so much as espousing a better communication of ideas.
- Wendell Barry
Not saying I approve of bombing people, but we owe much progress to nonconformist losers.
There are a lot of people who are definitely not OK. Arguably the majority of people live in a state of at least uncertainty about their future, if not outright fear for their security and safety. This is true at both a local and a global scale.
I think that this has always been the case? Do you have evidence that this has grown significantly (and not in a way that has simply been fueled by eyeball-grabbing FUD from news organizations?)
Is there not evidence of those things?
Computers also enable absolute privacy via current-gen public/private-key encryption protocols. In fact, this is the first time in history that absolute privacy is actually achievable. This is also the first time in history that I can evade arguably-unethical government controls on my money by using a cryptocurrency. Also enabled by computers. The fact that everyone is willfully crowding themselves into just a handful of un-end-to-end-encrypted for-profit services is just laziness.
> environmental degradation through excessive economic growth (computers make an important contribution to economic growth)
I would agree that computers accelerate economic growth, but they also accelerate solutions to problems created by that economic growth, so I don't see how computers alone can be faulted for this. Also, if my laptop was solar-powered or if I paid for green energy for my home, then my carbon footprint is effectively nil (which reminds me, I need to get on that!)
"Fear of the unknown" is a terrible thing to choose as a motivator, because the unknown will continue to exist for the foreseeable future, we might as well take everything to its logical conclusion and see where that takes us all.
A lot of this seems to just be belief based on an antagonistic worldview ("the world is out to get me unless I'm vigilant and mistrusting") vs. a more positive worldview ("let's just move ahead; we'll figure it out as we go along; I'll trust others until proven otherwise; we'll collectively be fine")
IMHO Kaczynski experienced a traumatic event that changed his worldview to an antagonistic one. His literal trust in the world itself somehow got eroded or poisoned.
The only reason we are sanguine on the power of tech is that we have the historical luxury of non-predatory government. If the state truly wished to be oppressive, the technology the tech sector has created would allow it to be efficient beyond measure in doing so.
Or the state could bribe security companies like RSA to use crypto that they backdoored:
You don't work in netsec do you, judging by your use of the phrase absolute privacy?
Crypto does not guarantee privacy, especially if your endpoints are pwned
No, the FBI investigation was named “UNABOM”, the popular media name assigned to the perpetrator before he was identified, inspired by that, was “Unabomber”.
“UNABOMer” seems to be an attempt to preserve the sound of the latter while making it more consistent with the former, but is historically inaccurate.
kind of gross.
He did math too. Do you want to ban math here also?
This is not a conspiracy board here. People here would me the enemies of this guy and we all see that he was wrong now. So what are you afraid of?
Blindly attempting to suppress writings because of the actions of the author, if it worked, might serve to devalue violence as marketing, but it is never going to keep words from the true believers, who will just overvalue them because they're suppressed.
It also damages our ability to discuss the complaints voiced. Like it or not, some ideas that in the past have been promoted via violence turned out to be correct.
Finally, history is important. This, I hope, needs no explanation.
Same reason suicide charities discourage newspapers from reporting the contents of suicide notes.
If you want to discuss this "math" of yours, bring it from a source that does not amplify the signal by killing people.
(this is a joke, but the point is reasonable)
We also read excerpts of Mein Kampf at school. I did not have the feeling I needed to kill Jews afterwards. Maybe the text is not the problem here?
I'm impressed to hear that you don't have a problem with his ideas. I certainly do! I went into some detail about that, not long ago: https://aaron-m.com/2017/07/09/on-kaczynski
Perhaps I have failed to take your meaning here. But the trouble with an idea is that you can't kill it by excluding it from what we please ourselves to regard as polite discourse. Kaczynski isn't the only radical anarchoprimitivist in the world. Don't you think it might be a good idea to give food for thought to the next one who might be thinking about blowing people up?
https://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/bits/2013/03/22/the-best-th...
I don't think it does much, to help his thesis gain traction, that he should argue it the way he seems to do. But that's his mistake to make, I suppose, and even he strongly disclaims the "blow shit up and kill people" part of Kaczynski's analysis - and that's the only part of his analysis which is genuinely original; Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, just off the top of my head, predates Kaczynski's publication by over a decade.
So I'm not sure that we really can add one otherwise obscure adjunct professor to one otherwise forgettable NYT opinion columnist and end up with meaningful uptake of anything that Kaczynski actually had to contribute, rather than simply an early attempt to find in anarchoprimitivism what value may be there to synthesize with the culture in which we live. A subtle distinction, I concede - but, I maintain, a worthy one nonetheless.
I cannot pretend to know what timwaagh thinks, but it seems overwhelmingly plausible to me that his comment communicates the view that Kaczynski's behavior turned irretrievably inexcusable at the point when he resorted to actual violence.
That aside, I think he seems to overly doubt the inevitability, which is to completely ignore the fact that if we didn't create these systems then someone else would.
Even if you believe that they're dangerous or harmful (inherently), there's some game theory involved in not having created them in the same way as not having designed the h-bomb when we did. Because another potential world power will and that seems hard to dismiss.
No, the article is specifically a letter written by a mass-murderer. The objection is not that the ideas are the same, it's that this is literally what the killer wrote.
And? What's the objection to that?
Rejecting A's ideas because those ideas led A to murder is somewhat defensible. It's evidence that there is something deeply morally flawed in A's thinking.
Rejecting B's ideas because they are similar to A's is shakier. B's ideas deserve a hearing on the merits. (Ideas have consequences, and A has shown what A thinks the consequences are. Those consequences can reasonably be considered part of the "merits" of A's ideas.)
But I also disagree with the idea that we can't constructively discuss what he was saying.
Censoring the ideas seems even more dangerous to me. For instance, I'd rather that an impressionable person read the ideas in public where sane people can openly critique them than have them only presented on batshit conspiracy sites.
Your argument is invalid.
Of course, that doesn't mean I disagree with your conclusion.
yet they have pervasive technology use including new and emerging technologies, so this is reductive.
> selectively-bred food crops
humans have been doing this for ages, from bananas to cows... are they telling people to not eat bananas? this too seems reductive.