On June 11, 2023, Ted Kaczinsky a.k.a., the Unabomber, was found dead in his cell in the FMC Butner medical center in North Carolina. He was 81 years old, having served over 25 years of a life sentence with no possibility of parole. He had been transferred on December 14, 2021, to the Butner medical center from his cell in a maximum security federal prison in Colorado. After pleading guilty to planting home-made bombs that killed three people and injured 23 others in various parts of the country between 1978 and 1995, he was incarcerated, closing the chapter on a 17-year reign of terror that visited airports, laboratories and universities.
Yet, Kaczynski was an intellectually gifted individual who had earned his Ph.D. by age 25 and was appointed Assistant Professor of Mathematics at UC Berkeley. His rationale for planting bombs in his attack on technology is detailed in his manifesto. Similar warnings about the dangers of unlimited technological growth are heard today with respect to the explosion in AI technology. Did his concerns have any merit?
Certainly, Kaczynski’s killing and maiming of innocent people would qualified him as a madman, yet we must also visit his manifesto to judge for ourselves whether his concerns about technology had any merit. You can read his manifesto and judge for yourself at: https://www.intelligence-and-iq.com/evil-genius-or-madman/
