Does AI Vindicate Kaczynski's Technological Fears?
By Darrell Lee
Theodore Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who reclused himself to a Montana cabin and waged a 17-year bombing campaign against symbols of modern technology, remains one of America's most infamous figures.
Known as the Unabomber, he embarked on a prolonged and deadly bombing campaign spanning nearly two decades, targeting individuals he associated with modern technology and industrial society. His violent actions commenced on May 25, 1978, when he placed his first crude bomb at Northwestern University, which injured a security officer, beginning a series of increasingly sophisticated explosive devices mailed or delivered to universities and airlines. These targets' selection earned him the FBI codename "UNABOM" (UNiversity and Airline BOMber). On June 10, 1980, Kaczynski injured United Airlines president Percy Wood with a bomb disguised as a book. His attacks escalated in severity. On May 5, 1982, he mailed a bomb that injured a secretary at Vanderbilt University. He continued this pattern, injuring John Hauser, a UC Berkeley graduate student and Air Force captain, on May 15, 1985, and later that year, on June 13, 1985, a bomb sent to Boeing in Auburn, Washington, was discovered and defused.
Kaczynski committed his first murder on December 11, 1985, killing Hugh Scrutton, a computer store owner in Sacramento, California, with a nail-and-splinter-laden bomb. He then targeted another computer store in Salt Lake City, Utah, on February 20, 1987, injuring Gary Wright. After a pause, for reasons that aren't clear, Kaczynski's campaign resumed with greater lethality. On June 22, 1993, he mailed a bomb that severely injured Charles Epstein, a geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco. Two days later, on June 24, 1993, David Gelernter, a Yale University computer science professor, was maimed by another mail bomb. Kaczynski's attacks culminated in two more fatalities: advertising executive Thomas J. Mosser was killed by a mail bomb in North Caldwell, New Jersey, on December 10, 1994, and Gilbert Brent Murray, president of the California Forestry Association, was killed by a mail bomb in Sacramento on April 24, 1995. Throughout this period, Kaczynski meticulously constructed his devices to be untraceable, terrorizing academics, airline officials, and business executives, ultimately killing three people and injuring twenty-three others before his arrest in April 1996.
His 35,000-word manifesto, "Industrial Society and Its Future," was published jointly by The Washington Post and The New York Times in September 1995 to stop his attacks. They decided to publish it after Kaczynski threatened to send another bomb if a major newspaper did not comply with his demand that it be published. The Attorney General and the Director of the FBI recommended its publication in the hope that a reader might recognize the author's distinctive writing style or ideas, which would lead to his identification and capture. That is precisely what happened. His brother, David Kaczynski, and David's wife, Linda Patrik, recognized the ideas and phrasing in the manifesto as similar to Theodore's earlier writings. They had grown suspicious of his isolated lifestyle and past expressions of anti-technology sentiments. After much agonizing, David Kaczynski shared his suspicions and copies of Theodore's letters with the FBI. Linguistic analysis of the manifesto compared to Theodore Kaczynski's known writings provided substantial evidence. The FBI obtained a search warrant for Kaczynski's remote cabin in Montana. After his arrest at the cabin, the authorities found bomb-making materials and journals detailing his crimes.
The manifesto presented a radical and pessimistic critique: that industrial-technological society erodes human freedom, autonomy, dignity, and well-being, leading to widespread psychological suffering and environmental devastation. Kaczynski argued that an industrialized technological system was not reformable and that only its collapse could restore meaningful human existence. Dismissed at the time as the illogical ramblings of a violent extremist, Kaczynski's ideas, particularly his warnings about the trajectory of technology, have found a disquieting truth in the 21st century, especially with the meteoric rise of Artificial Intelligence. As AI systems increasingly permeate every facet of life, making decisions, shaping our information environment, automating labor, and even mimicking human interaction, a chilling question emerges: Does the modern ascent of AI confirm, in unsettling ways, the fears articulated by the man known as the Unabomber? While his violent actions remain unequivocally abhorrent, examining Kaczynski's critique alongside AI's development forces an uncomfortable analysis of our technological future.
Kaczynski's central thesis revolves around the "power process" and the loss of human autonomy. He posited that humans have a psychological need to experience the power process: setting goals, exerting effort, and attaining those goals. Industrial-technological society, he argued, thwarts this need. It satisfies basic survival needs with relative ease but makes meaningful, self-directed goal achievement difficult outside the narrow confines dictated by the system itself. Individuals become cogs in an impersonal machine, their lives regulated by forces beyond their control, large organizations, bureaucratic rules, and technological imperatives. Leading to what he termed "surrogate activities", pursuits like hobbies, entertainment, or activism that offer a semblance of goal achievement but lack the satisfaction of engaging with life challenges. The consequence, in Kaczynski's view, was a society riddled with psychological distress: depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and a pervasive sense of purposelessness.
Furthermore, Kaczynski believed technology was not a neutral tool humans could choose to use for good or ill. He saw technology as a dynamic, self-propagating system with its internal logic setting the goal of expansion and control. While offering short-term benefits, each technological advancement inevitably creates new problems requiring further technological solutions, leading to an ever-more complex and restrictive web. He contended that individual human freedom would be sacrificed by technology for the system's efficiency and stability. He argued that reforming this system to make it compatible with human freedom and dignity was impossible; its nature was to subordinate human needs to its operational requirements. Genuine autonomy, he believed, could only be reclaimed by dismantling the technological infrastructure itself.
When we examine today's technical leaps in artificial intelligence, Kaczynski's decades-old warnings acquire new importance. Consider the erosion of individual autonomy. AI algorithms increasingly mediate our experience of the world and make decisions that impact our lives. Sophisticated algorithms curate the news we see, the products we buy, the entertainment we consume, and even the potential romantic partners we encounter. They influence credit scores, hiring decisions, insurance premiums, and, in some experimental systems, even aspects of criminal justice. While supporters highlight efficiency and data-driven objectivity, Kaczynski saw this as a prime example of surrendering human decision-making to an impersonal, opaque technological system, where individuals have little understanding of or control over the logic dictating life's outcomes. While convenient, our growing dependence on AI for navigation, communication, information retrieval, and problem-solving diminishes self-reliance, critical thinking skills, and the capacity for independent judgment, hallmarks of the self-sufficient individual Kaczynski believed technology was destroying.
The impact of AI on Kaczynski's "power process" also deserves consideration. As AI-driven automation advances, it threatens to reshape labor markets, rendering swathes of human work obsolete. While new jobs may emerge, the transition will be disruptive, stripping many of the sense of purpose, competence, and contribution derived from meaningful work. Suppose AI can perform manual labor and increasingly complex cognitive tasks such as writing, coding, artistic creation, and scientific research. Where does that leave the human need to set and achieve challenging goals through personal effort? Kaczynski argues that a world where AI manages most essential tasks would lead to an unprecedented crisis of human purpose, a society of individuals either engaged in trivial surrogate activities or succumbing to a technologically induced boredom. Furthermore, AI-powered recommendation engines and hyper-targeted advertising are designed to shape and direct our desires, creating needs we didn't know we had. Kaczynski argues that this manipulation of human wants further distances individuals from authentic goal-setting and self-determination, making them pliable components of a consumerist system.
Kaczynski's fears about social control and manipulation also reflect the capabilities of modern AI. The rise of "surveillance capitalism," where large amounts of personal data are collected and analyzed by AI to predict and influence behavior, creates unprecedented tools for monitoring and control, both by corporations and states. Facial recognition technology, predictive policing algorithms, and social credit systems (as seen in China) represent the systemic oversight Kaczynski warned would become universal. Moreover, AI's capacity to generate highly realistic synthetic media, AI-generated text and imagery, presents a formidable new tool for disinformation and propaganda. The ability to create and disseminate convincing falsehoods on a massive scale, tailored to exploit individual psychological vulnerabilities, threatens to undermine the factual basis necessary for democratic debate and cohesion. Kaczynski, who saw the technological system as manipulative, would view these developments as the logical extension of technology's power to shape thought and control populations.
The psychological suffering Kaczynski attributed to industrial society also finds modern parallels, aggravated by AI-driven technologies. While not solely an AI phenomenon, the algorithmic amplification of social comparison, cyberbullying, and curated perfection on social media platforms has been linked to rising rates of anxiety, depression, and body image issues, particularly among young people. The potential for increasingly sophisticated AI companions or therapeutic chatbots raises questions about the nature of human connection. While offering solace to some, a widespread reliance on artificial entities for emotional support would, from a Kaczynskian perspective, represent a further retreat from authentic, if challenging, human relationships, another surrogate activity masking social decline.
Pursuing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or superintelligence, AI systems that would equal or exceed human cognitive abilities, confirms Kaczynski's ultimate fear: a technological system that becomes entirely autonomous and beyond human control. The "alignment problem" in AI safety research, the challenge of ensuring that such advanced AI systems would share and reliably pursue human values, is a direct acknowledgment of this risk. Kaczynski argued that the technological system would inevitably prioritize its survival and expansion over human well-being, even if not overtly malevolent. An unaligned superintelligence, or even a highly capable AGI whose goals produce unforeseen and uncontrollable negative consequences, represents the apotheosis of this concern. Even a "benevolent" superintelligence, making all decisions for humanity "for its good," would, in Kaczynski's mind, reduce humans to the status of well-cared-for livestock, utterly dependent and devoid of true freedom or the ability to engage in the power process.
However, it is vital to approach this comparison with caution and unequivocally condemn Kaczynski's murderous actions. His resort to terrorism was a monstrous response that discredited his message and inflicted irreparable harm. While containing intelligent critiques, his manifesto exhibits paranoia, oversimplification, and a romanticized, unrealistic vision of a pre-industrial past. His vision of pre-industrial autonomy overlooks the rigid social hierarchies, limited individual choice (especially for women), and strong communal pressures in most pre-industrial societies. The freedom and participation in the "power process" Kaczynski imagined were not experienced by most people in those societies.
Furthermore, Kaczynski's pessimistic analysis offered little room for human resourcefulness in shaping technology's path or for technology's undeniable benefits. AI holds promise for good: accelerating scientific discovery, revolutionizing medicine, tackling climate change, improving efficiency, and enhancing human creativity. Millions are working to develop AI ethically and to create safeguards and regulations. The narrative of technology as an unstoppable, malevolent force ignores these efforts and the interaction of human choices, society's values, and political will that guide technological development.
Yet, to dismiss Kaczynski's core arguments about technology's impact on human autonomy and well-being as merely the ravings of a madman might be a mistake, particularly in the age of AI. His critique, stripped of its violent acts, forces us to face uncomfortable questions about the kind of future we are building. Are we creating tools that empower individuals or systems that diminish their resourcefulness? Are we promoting genuine human advancement or providing sophisticated surrogate activities? Are we maintaining control over our technological creations or becoming increasingly subject to their opaque logic?
The modern rise of AI does not so much "vindicate" Kaczynski in the sense of proving his entire worldview correct or justifying his actions, but rather confirms the enduring relevance of the fears he articulated about large-scale technological systems to reshaping human existence in ways that are not always benign or controllable. His work, read with circumspection and historical distance, can be a dark mirror, reflecting negative trajectories of unchecked technological development. The challenge is not to embrace his nihilistic conclusions or violent methods, but to take seriously the concerns about human autonomy, dignity, and psychological well-being in an increasingly technological world.
As AI continues its rapid evolution, society stands at a crossroads. The decisions made now regarding its development, governance, and integration into the fabric of our lives will have lasting consequences. Ignoring the downsides or accepting technological advancement as good would be irresponsible. However unsettling, the ghost of Kaczynski's critique reminds us that progress must be guided by human values, ethical considerations, and a commitment to preserving the autonomy and dignity that define our humanity. Failure to do so risks creating a future where our most powerful creations inadvertently fulfill some of the darkest prophecies about our relationship with technology. The task is to harness AI's potential while ensuring it remains a tool for human growth, not a force that diminishes it, proving that humanity can guide its technological destiny.
Darrell Lee is the founder and editor of The Long Views, he has written two science fiction novels exploring themes of technological influence, science and religion, historical patterns, and the future of society. His essays draw on these long-standing interests and apply a similar analytical lens to politics, literature, artistic, societal, and historical events. He splits his time between rural east Texas and Florida’s west coast, where he spends his days performing variable star photometry, dabbling in astrophotography, thinking, napping, fishing, and writing, not necessarily in that order.