Ted Kaczynski

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pages: 261 words: 71,798

Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself From Harmful People by Joe Navarro, Toni Sciarra Poynter

Bernie Madoff, business climate, call centre, Columbine, delayed gratification, impulse control, Louis Pasteur, Norman Mailer, Peoples Temple, Ponzi scheme, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh

The former employee or ex-boyfriend who, angry about how he’s been treated, shows up at the office unannounced and armed. The brilliant scientist no one listens to, so he moves to a smelly cabin in Montana where he can warn us of the threat of technology by sending bombs (16 in all) through the mail that killed 3 and injured 23 (“Unabomber” Theodore John “Ted” Kaczynski, PhD). These are more than cranky people. They’re driven by irrational fear and distrust. They’re thin-skinned and hyperreactive. And when crossed, rejected, or embarrassed, they may lash out and can be extremely dangerous. When coupled with narcissism, the paranoid personality drives violence on every level: from criminals to cult leaders to dictators who live by their own rules, vilify others, and annihilate anything that gets in their way.

These individuals may show up at demonstrations and make it a point to not just argue but to be vitriolic, even physical, pushing others, blocking cars, damaging property. They skate very close to being unstable—all it takes is a trigger. Some are mental lightweights, while others have high IQs and achievements to their name. Ted Kaczynski had a very high IQ and a real knack for making bombs and hiding their origin. Howard Hughes was smart and rich but very paranoid—so much so that he cocooned himself in hotel rooms during the last 10 years of his life, allowing no outsiders to see him. He died isolated from the world in a Las Vegas hotel room in 1976.

Eventually, if you associate or interact with the person long enough, these will be revealed to you—if not in words, then through the person’s paranoid, eccentric, or dangerous behavior. Some are so mistrusting that they keep lists of the comings and goings of co-workers, neighbors, family members, strangers, or anyone who passes by. Ted Kaczynski did just that from his remote cabin in Montana. President Richard Nixon, who had many of the features of the paranoid personality, kept an enemies list and repeatedly stated to others that he just could not “confide in anyone.”5 Opinionated, Argumentative, Prone to Hate Adaptability is a hallmark of a healthy human being.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

Langdon Winner claims that “technical artifice as an aggregate phenomenon [or what I call the technium] dwarfs human consciousness and makes unintelligible the systems that people supposedly manipulate and control; by this tendency to exceed human grasp and yet to operate successfully according to its own internal makeup, technology is a total phenomenon which constitutes a ‘second nature’ far exceeding any desires or expectations for the particular components.” Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, killing three of them, was right about one thing: Technology has its own agenda. It is selfish. The technium is not, as most people think, a series of individual artifacts and gadgets for sale. Rather, Kaczynski, speaking as the Unabomber, echoes the arguments of Winner and many of the points I am making in this book, claiming that technology is a dynamic, holistic system.

You politely try to escape the squeeze of technological civilization by retreating to its furthest reaches, where you establish a relatively techno-free lifestyle—and then the beast of civilization/development/industrial technology stalks you and destroys your paradise. Is there no escape? The machine is ubiquitous! It is relentless! It must be stopped! Ted Kaczynski, of course, is not the only wilderness lover to suffer the encroachment of civilization. Entire tribes of indigenous Americans were driven to remote areas by the advance of European culture. They were not running from technology per se (they happily picked up the latest guns when they could), but the effect was the same—to distance themselves from industrial society.

Success can be hoped for only by fighting the technological system as a whole; but that is revolution not reform. . . . While the industrial system is sick we must destroy it. If we compromise with it and let it recover from its sickness, it will eventually wipe out all of our freedom. For these reasons Ted Kaczynski went to the mountains to escape the clutches of civilization and then later to plot his destruction of it. His plan was to make his own tools (anything he could hand fashion) while avoiding technology (stuff it takes a system to make). His small one-room shed was so well constructed that the feds later moved it off his property as a single intact unit, like a piece of plastic, and put it in storage (it now sits reconstructed in the Newseum in Washington, D.C.).


pages: 756 words: 167,393

The Tylenol Mafia by Scott Bartz

AOL-Time Warner, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, independent contractor, intangible asset, inventory management, Just-in-time delivery, life extension, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, too big to fail

The FBI put an end to Carl Vergari’s investigation of the Tylenol manufacturing and distribution network just as he was closing in on the repackaging facility where the Tylenol killer had dropped cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules into the bottling production lines. The FBI’s active participation in the reactivated 1982 Tylenol murders case may be primarily about keeping hidden its conspicuous role in covering up the 1986 Tylenol killer’s modus operandi. A clue to the real reason for the FBI’s involvement in this reactivated investigation came from Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. Court documents that Kaczynski filed in May 2011 revealed that the FBI had added him to its list of suspects in the reactivated Tylenol murders case. Kaczynski had been arrested in 1996 as the perpetrator of a mail bombing spree that spanned from 1978 to 1995, killing three people and injuring 23 others.

On May 19, 2011, the news media got wind of Kaczynski’s court filing and had a field day reporting that the Unabomber was now a suspect in the Tylenol murders. FBI spokesperson Ross Rice confirmed that the FBI had asked Kaczynski for a DNA sample. “As part of our re-examination of the evidence developed in connection with the 1982 Tylenol poisonings,” said Ross, “we have attempted to secure DNA samples from numerous individuals, including Ted Kaczynski. The feds cannot charge Kaczynski for the 1982 Tylenol murders, because those murders were not federal crimes. The 1986 Tylenol tamperings and murder, however, were federal crimes. In response to the 1982 Tylenol tamperings, Congress passed the Federal Anti-Tampering Act on October 13, 1983, making it a federal crime to tamper with consumer products.

The FBI appears to be carrying out a stealthy investigation into the 1986 Tylenol murder; hoping to wrap up that murder and the 1982 Tylenol murders in one neat package. But first, it needs a patsy for the 1986 Tylenol murder who can also conveniently take the fall for the 1982 Tylenol murders. Ted Kaczynski would fit that role quite nicely. The FBI’s search for someone who could take the fall for both the 1982 and 1986 Tylenol tampering incidents was evident back in January 2010 when the Certificate of Materiality was served on James and LeAnn Lewis, requiring them both to submit DNA samples. The FBI cannot frame James for the 1986 Tylenol murder because he was in prison at that time – hence, the FBI’s injudicious interest in LeAnn.


pages: 306 words: 85,836

When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, feminist movement, food miles, George Akerlof, global pandemic, information asymmetry, invisible hand, loss aversion, mental accounting, Netflix Prize, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Pareto efficiency, peak oil, pre–internet, price anchoring, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Richard Thaler, Sam Peltzman, security theater, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549

My mother had an extraordinary (and long-buried) story to tell about her religious faith. I’ve interviewed Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber; the rookie class of the NFL; a remarkable cat burglar who stole only sterling silver. But lately I have been writing about economists—and, most fruitfully, with the economist Steve Levitt. This is a whole new bag, and here’s why. A non-fiction writer like me, trained equally in journalism and literature, is constrained by what his subjects tell him. Yes, I am afforded great latitude in surrounding a subject—if Ted Kaczynski won’t discuss his trial, for instance, there are plenty of others who will—but I am gravely limited by what people will tell me and how they tell it.

., In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies (Harper & Row, 1982; HarperBusiness Essentials, 2004). 287 “WHY I LIKE WRITING ABOUT ECONOMISTS”: “My mother had an extraordinary (and long-buried) story to tell”: See Dubner, Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son’s Return to His Jewish Family (William Morrow, 1998); republished as Choosing My Religion: A Memoir of a Family Beyond Belief (HarperPerennial, 2006.) / 287 “I’ve interviewed Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber”: See Dubner, “I Don’t Want to Live Long. I Would Rather Get the Death Penalty Than Spend the Rest of My Life in Prison,” Time, October 18, 1999. / 287 “The rookie class of the N.F.L.”: See Dubner, “Life Is a Contact Sport,” The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2002. / 287 “A remarkable cat burglar who stole only sterling silver”: See Dubner, “The Silver Thief,” The New Yorker, May 17, 2004. / 288 “After I wrote about the economist Roland Fryer”: See Dubner, “Toward a Unified Theory of Black America,” The New York Times Magazine, March 20, 2005.


Science...For Her! by Megan Amram

Albert Einstein, blood diamond, butterfly effect, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, double helix, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, pez dispenser, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Wall-E, wikimedia commons

Good thing this ugly duckling turned into a swan! * * * 2. Daniel Day-Lewis! Even this young, you can recognize the future talent in his expressive features. * * * 3. Cameron Diaz! Not pointing any fingers, but it looks like someone’s had a little work done since then . . . * * * 4. Ted Kaczynski! It’s very disturbing to look at this early picture of a killer and truly see the evil radiating from within as early as high school. Genes * * * Since it’s distracting to bring up a homophone of one of women’s favorite things without showing them, I will start off this section with a treat—a glossy page chock full of photos of beautiful jeans!

Baseball, the “American Pastime,” is about using bats (“dicks”) to hit balls (“balls”) all while blowing each other in the dugout (“RBI”). And how about the American flag? Obviously thirteen dicks going into fifty buttholes. America has time and time again proved itself as a launching ground for young starlets. It’s fun seeing people before they became huge stars, like John Ritter, Stella McCartney, Theodore John “Ted” Kaczynski, and Ted “Ted” Bundy. But the ensemble works best when we see the regulars yearn for a raise or promotion, struggle with Mary Tyler Moore’s foibles, and be there for Mary Tyler Moore when the going gets rough. I stole this from a review for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but I think it completely and entirely makes sense to literally lift from that review and drop it into this context as well.


pages: 696 words: 143,736

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Not everyone will find this prospect appealing, so the Luddite issue will broaden in the twenty-first century from an anxiety about human livelihoods to one concerning the essential nature of human beings. However, the Luddite movement is not likely to fare any better in the next century than it has in the past two. It suffers from the lack of a viable alternative agenda. Ted Kaczynski, whom I quote above from his so-called “Unabomber Manifesto,” entitled Industrial Society and Its Future, advocates a simple return to nature. 22 Kaczynski is not talking about a contemplative visit to a nineteenth-century Walden Pond, but about the species dropping all of its technology and reverting to a simpler time.

It has its own set of styles, so it is feasible for its knowledge base to be relatively complete within its visual domain. Of course, human artists, even brilliant ones, also have a boundary to their domain. Aaron is quite respectable in the diversity of its art. OKAY, JUST TO SWITCH TO SOMEONE MUCH LESS RESPECTABLE, YOU QUOTED TED KACZYNSKI TALKING ABOUT HOW THE HUMAN RACE MIGHT DRIFT INTO DEPENDENCE ON MACHINES, AND THEN WE’LL HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO ACCEPT ALL MACHINE DECISIONS. BASED ON WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT THE IMPLICATIONS OF ALL THE COMPUTERS STOPPING, AREN’T WE ALREADY THERE? We are certainly there with regard to the dependence, not yet with regard to the level of machine intelligence.

Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1997. 20 Ben J. Wattenberg, ed., The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present. 21 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1997. 22 Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber Manifesto was published in both the New York Times and the Washington Post in September 1995. The full text of the document is available on numerous web pages, including: <http://www.soci.nui.edu/~critcrim/uni/uni.txt>. CHAPTER 9: 2009 1 A consortium of eighteen manufacturers of cellular telephones and other portable electronic devices is developing a technology called Bluetooth, which provides wireless communications within a radius of about ten meters, at a data rate of 700 to 900 kilobits per second.


pages: 223 words: 72,425

Puzzling People: The Labyrinth of the Psychopath by Thomas Sheridan

airport security, carbon footprint, corporate governance, double helix, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, quantitative easing, Rosa Parks, Ted Kaczynski

We should not completely discard the imagery of the quack doctor or mad scientist either, because such individuals really do exist. The notorious UNABOMBER Ted Kaczynski was accepted into Harvard University at the age of 16, where he earned an undergraduate degree, and later a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan. He became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley at age 25. Then he started making bombs and killing innocent people in order to save the planet. Now where this gets very interesting is his manifestos are almost identical to the current depopulation fetish among intellectuals and college professors. Ted Kaczynski’s population reduction plan was implemented in an immediate ‘hands-on’ manner, whereas the pontificating psychopathic academics prefer mass sterilisation and forced abortions rather than pipe bombs.


pages: 357 words: 130,117

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, affirmative action, Columbine, Donald Trump, false flag, George Floyd, gun show loophole, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, QAnon, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Ted Kaczynski, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, white flight, Y2K

… And if we trace it to a particular nation, what about hitting the nation anyway, even if we don’t know who exactly did it?” After McVeigh was arrested and the evidence against him became overwhelming, a different kind of distancing took place. To this day, McVeigh is often described as a “survivalist,” an isolated and eccentric figure like Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who carried out his terrorist attacks by mail from a remote cabin in Montana. In a similar vein, McVeigh has been called “antigovernment,” as if he were a kind of anarchist opposed to all forms of authority. Both descriptions are inaccurate. Rather, McVeigh had a different ideological profile, one with deep roots in American history and a modern legacy that extends to the present day.

After deliberations at the highest level of government, Freeh and Reno advised the papers to publish the manifesto, in the hope that the public attention would lead to his capture. The Post published the manifesto on September 19, 1995, and it showcased an idiosyncratic ideology that borrowed from both the left and right. (The style and content of the work reminded David Kaczynski of his brother Ted, who lived an isolated existence in the Montana woods. Ted Kaczynski was arrested as the Unabomber in his tiny cabin on April 3, 1996.) At the time, and especially in later years, the two crimes, and especially the two lead defendants, came to be seen in similar ways. Kaczynski and McVeigh were perceived as evil eccentrics whose views and actions emerged from the bizarre circumstances of their individual lives.

After McVeigh’s conviction, the legal process moved slowly, but it did develop an inexorable momentum as the months and years passed. The verdict and death sentence were upheld at every stage. The prison authorities in Florence put McVeigh on “bombers row”—the wing with the most notorious inmates. He was next door to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and near Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. The three men’s stories were strangely intertwined, and they struck up a friendship of sorts. (The Trade Center bombing led many to speculate that the Oklahoma City bombing was the work of foreign terrorists like Yousef, and Jones had attempted to show links between Nichols and Yousef in the Philippines, where Yousef hid out.


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

RAY: I would expect the intelligence that arises from the Singularity to have great respect for their biological heritage. GEORGE 2048: Absolutely, it's more than respect, it's ... reverence. MOLLY 2004: That's great, George, I'll be your revered pet. Not what I had in mind. NED: That's just how Ted Kaczynski puts it: we're going to become pets. That's our destiny, to become contented pets but certainly not free men. MOLLY 2004: And what about this Epoch Six? If I stay biological, I'll be using up all this precious matter and energy in a most inefficient way. You'll want to turn me into, like, a billion virtual Mollys and Georges, each of them thinking a lot faster than I do now.

—ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD This brings us to the issue of relinquishment, which is the most controversial recommendation by relinquishment advocates such as Bill McKibben. I do feel that relinquishment at the right level is part of a responsible and constructive response to the genuine perils that we will face in the future. The issue, however, is exactly this: at what level are we to relinquish technology? Ted Kaczynski, who became known to the world as the Unabomber, would have us renounce all of it.31 This is neither desirable nor feasible, and the futility of such a position is only underscored by the senselessness of Kaczynski's deplorable tactics. Other voices, less reckless than Kaczynski's, are nonetheless likewise arguing for broad-based relinquishment of technology.

Advanced medical treatments require expensive, high-tech equipment that can be made available only by a technologically progressive, economically rich society. Clearly you can't have much progress in medicine without the whole technological system and everything that goes with it. The observer I am quoting here is, again, Ted Kaczynski.33 Although one will properly resist Kaczynski as an authority, I believe he is correct on the deeply entangled nature of the benefits and risks. However, Kaczynski and I clearly part company on our overall assessment of the relative balance between the two. Bill Joy and I have had an ongoing dialogue on this issue both publicly and privately, and we both believe that technology will and should progress and that we need to be actively concerned with its dark side.


pages: 339 words: 95,988

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

airport security, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Broken windows theory, crack epidemic, desegregation, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, George Akerlof, information asymmetry, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, mental accounting, moral hazard, More Guns, Less Crime, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pets.com, profit maximization, Richard Thaler, school choice, sensible shoes, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, War on Poverty

The black boy from Daytona Beach was abandoned by his mother, was beaten by his father, and had become a full-fledged gangster by his teens. So what became of the two boys? The second child, now twenty-eight years old, is Roland G. Fryer Jr., the Harvard economist studying black underachievement. The white child also made it to Harvard. But soon after, things went badly for him. His name is Ted Kaczynski. BONUS MATERIAL ADDED TO THE REVISED AND EXPANDED 2006 EDITION The original New York Times Magazine article about Steven D. Levitt by Stephen J. Dubner, which led to the creation of this book. Seven “Freakonomics” columns written for the New York Times Magazine, published between August 2005 and April 2006.

.: Publications International/Signet, 1994); and Cleveland Kent Evans, The Ultimate Baby Name Book (Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International/Plume, 1997). EPILOGUE: TWO PATHS TO HARVARD THE WHITE BOY WHO GREW UP OUTSIDE CHICAGO: This passage, as well as the earlier passage about the same boy on pp. 141–42, was drawn from author interviews and from Ted Kaczynski, “Truth Versus Lies,” unpublished manuscript, 1998; see also Stephen J. Dubner, “I Don’t Want to Live Long. I Would Rather Get the Death Penalty than Spend the Rest of My Life in Prison,” Time, October 18, 1999. THE BLACK BOY FROM DAYTONA BEACH: This passage, as well as the earlier passage about the same boy on p. 142, was drawn from author interviews with Roland G.


pages: 385 words: 105,627

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom by Simon Winchester

Berlin Wall, British Empire, David Attenborough, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Great Leap Forward, index card, invention of gunpowder, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Ted Kaczynski, trade route

There was an oddly chilling coda to Needham’s brief visit to Chicago in the spring of 1978. He had been invited to give three public lectures at Northwestern University. For his second talk he decided on the topic “Gunpowder: Its Origins and Uses.” One of those who came to hear his lecture was a wild-haired loner of a mathematician, a tragic, brilliant man named Ted Kaczynski. A short while earlier, professors at a Chicago branch of the University of Illinois had summarily rejected a brief essay Kaczynski had written on the evils of modern society, and one mathematician there had heard him mutter, bitterly, that he would eventually “get even” with those who had spurned him.

On May 24, six weeks after sitting through Needham’s lecture, Kaczynski fashioned a wooden-cased explosive device made of gunpowder and match heads, and mailed it to one of the professors who had rejected him. It was intercepted, exploded, and injured a campus security guard. There were no clues as to who was the perpetrator of the crime, and the incident marked the beginning of an extraordinary, bizarre, and frightening period in modern American history. Over the next two decades Ted Kaczynski, who lived alone in a remote shack in the mountains of Montana, went on to send waves of carefully made and ever more lethal bombs to academics, killing three people and injuring more than twenty. The press and the FBI called him the Unabomber. He remained at large until his arrest in April 1996.


pages: 185 words: 43,609

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

If there are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world-changing companies yet to be started. This chapter will help you think about secrets and how to find them. WHY AREN’T PEOPLE LOOKING FOR SECRETS? Most people act as if there were no secrets left to find. An extreme representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at UC Berkeley. But you’ve only ever heard of him because of the 17-year terror campaign he waged with pipe bombs against professors, technologists, and businesspeople.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

* Examples of excellent books on technology which do not really consider the way in which technological advances and changes will be shaped by politics include Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 and Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence. The opposite is true as well: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die barely mentions technology at all. * Once questions of freedom and the human spirit are invoked, it’s impossible to know how far opposition can go. Between 1978 and 1995 the ‘Unabomber’, aka Ted Kaczynski, sent 16 bombs to targets that included universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23. Kaczynski, a Harvard maths prodigy who had disappeared to live off-grid in his twenties, was motivated by a belief that technological change was destroying human civilisation and would usher in a period of dehumanised tyranny and control.


pages: 194 words: 49,310

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

Another long-view service has been suggested by Esther Dyson. Every so often the public is gripped by a great mystery. Who kidnaped the Lindbergh baby? Who was behind the killing of President Kennedy? Did Dr. Sam Sheppard murder his wife? Who was the Unabomber? Time has solved two of these. Math instructor Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber; and the convicted Dr. Sheppard was innocent back in 01954.3 DNA analysis forty-four years later proved that a window washer, Richard Eberling, not only killed Mrs. Sheppard but raped her first (something never mentioned in the celebrated trial). The Long Now Library could preserve rich archives of such mysteries so that they can be relived in light of what eventually is discovered.


pages: 253 words: 75,772

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald

air gap, airport security, anti-communist, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, Edward Snowden, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Rubik’s Cube, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Ted Kaczynski, WikiLeaks

I didn’t want them to think we were dealing with someone unstable, particularly since, having spent many hours talking to him, I knew that he was exceptionally rational and deliberative. My fear was quickly validated. “This is going to sound crazy to some people,” Gibson pronounced. “Some people and pro-NSA media types will say it’s a bit Ted Kaczynski-ish,” I agreed. “But ultimately, the documents are what matters, not him or his motives for giving them to us. And besides, anyone who does something this extreme is going to have extreme thoughts. That’s inevitable.” Along with that manifesto, Snowden had written a missive to the journalists to whom he gave his archive of documents.


pages: 267 words: 82,580

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

He wants to get rid of it: Facebook, computers, telephones, electricity, steam-powered engines – the lot. Anarcho-primitivism is a branch of anarchist philosophy, which believes in stateless, non-hierarchical and voluntary forms of human organisation, based on simple, pre-civilisation collective living. The most infamous neo-Luddite of modern times was the American Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. From 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski sent sixteen bombs to targets including universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring twenty-three. In his 30,000-word essay ‘Industrial Society and Its Future’, Kaczynski argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom brought about by modern technologies requiring large-scale organisation.


pages: 281 words: 79,958

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, Asilomar, autism spectrum disorder, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, food miles, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, invention of gunpowder, John Elkington, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, placebo effect, precautionary principle, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, Skype, stem cell, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, twin studies, Upton Sinclair, X Prize

They were the worst industrial accidents in history—one inflicting immense casualties and the other a worldwide sense of dread. The message was hard to misinterpret: “Our lives depend on decisions made by other people; we have no control over these decisions and usually we do not even know the people who make them,” wrote Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, in his essay “Industrial Society and Its Future”—the Unabomber Manifesto. “Our lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our food or how much pollution into our air; on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is. . . .


pages: 277 words: 86,352

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias by Kevin Cook

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, crisis actor, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, friendly fire, index card, Jones Act, no-fly zone, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Peoples Temple, QAnon, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, wikimedia commons

In 2022 he consulted on a sequel to Paramount TV’s 2018 miniseries and a Netflix documentary about Waco, both scheduled for 2023. CLINT VAN ZANDT, Noesner’s replacement as lead negotiator at Waco, headed the FBI’s so-called Silence of the Lambs Behavioral Science Unit and led the profiling team that helped capture Unabomber Ted Kaczynski in 1996. Looking back on his time at Waco, Van Zandt said watching the CEVs insert tear gas on April 19, 1993, was “akin to sitting on the bow of the Titanic and watching the iceberg approach.” ATF agent JIM CAVANAUGH, the first Waco negotiator, shed tears during testimony for the House of Representatives’ inquiry.


pages: 333 words: 86,662

Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, cotton gin, Frank Gehry, Grace Hopper, informal economy, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, jitney, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, rolodex, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Y2K

They’re totally insane. And they are armed to the teeth.” “That’s an ATF job. I never work with the ninja tobacco-inspectors.” “Uh, okay … how about a military washout kid who’s got a borderline, white-supremacist, paranoia thing? He’s buying fertilizer and he hired a rental truck!” “Tell it to Ted Kaczynski! I don’t do loners. There’s way too many of ’em. I need a case with some meat on it, like a good RICO thing.” “I’m with you here.… Okay, maybe I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel, but how about a private mafia of trench-coat-wearing high-school teenagers who want to shoot all the jocks in their gym class?”


pages: 317 words: 98,745

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

The neutron bomb was an enhanced radiation weapon under development during the Carter and Reagan administrations that would kill people while leaving buildings and infrastructure intact, through a highly concentrated dispersal of radioactive material. (Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev memorably described it as a “capitalist bomb” because it would destroy people, but not property.) Stuxnet-type weapons, on the other hand, are more like something inspired by Unabomber Ted Kaczynski: they would target industrial-technological systems, but leave people alone. The attraction of technology that allows one to believe in sanitary or “virtual war” has a long pedigree. Political scientist James Der Derian has spent considerable time turning over the argument, and believes that the appeal of high-tech means of fighting clean wars comes from it being “the closest we moderns have [come] to a deus ex machina swooping in from the skies to fix the dilemmas of world politics, virtually solving intractable political problems through technological means.”


pages: 360 words: 101,636

Engineering Infinity by Jonathan Strahan

augmented reality, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, gravity well, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, post scarcity, quantum entanglement, Schrödinger's Cat, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski

Complex quantum processes generated them and some theorists thought the number might be quite few. If so, Warren could not reach some timelines. Already the cage had refused to go to four target murderers, so perhaps his opportunities were not as large as the hundreds or thousands he had at first dreamed about. He had already shot Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabomber." That murderer had targeted universities and wrote a manifesto that he distributed to the media, claiming that he wanted society to return to a time when technology was not a threat to its future. Kaczynski had not considered that a future technology would erase his deeds. Kaczynski's surprised gasp lay behind him now.


pages: 327 words: 97,720

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo

Alfred Russel Wallace, biofilm, butterfly effect, Celebration, Florida, classic study, corporate governance, delayed gratification, experimental subject, gentrification, impulse control, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, placebo effect, post-industrial society, Rodney Brooks, Ted Kaczynski, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, Walter Mischel

Accordingly, there are no easy-to-assign labels where loneliness is concerned. When a deranged man named Russell Weston Jr. stormed the U.S. Capitol in 1998, his picture appeared on the cover of Newsweek under a banner headline: “The Loner.” The media applied that same vague judgment to the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, to President Reagan’s assailant John Hinckley, to the Virginia Tech mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui, and to any number of other socially marginalized individuals. However, our studies of a diverse group of healthy young adults show that everyday folks who feel the pain of isolation very acutely—people who may feel tremendously lonely—have no more in common with the dangerously troubled souls who make headlines than does anyone else.


pages: 405 words: 103,723

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism by Ruth Kinna

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, complexity theory, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Herbert Marcuse, intentional community, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, late capitalism, means of production, meritocracy, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, New Journalism, Occupy movement, post scarcity, public intellectual, rewilding, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, union organizing, wage slave

He became active in labour and left-wing politics in the 1960s and was arrested in 1966 at an anti-Vietnam protest. In his writing, Zerzan first explored the emergence of trade unionism and industrialization. This led to a study of technology and civilization in the 1980s. He attracted international attention in the 1990s when he began a correspondence with Ted Kaczynski, the ecological activist better known as the Unabomber, and refused to condemn his bombing campaign. Having settled in Eugene, Oregon, in the 1980s, Zerzan also became strongly linked to the anarchist movements that mushroomed there which helped catalyze the anti-capitalist activism of the noughties.


pages: 337 words: 96,666

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The devastating Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, itself purportedly a reprisal for the grotesquely mishandled standoffs at Waco and Ruby Ridge, catalyzed radical militia movements and fed into the enduring siege mentality across many law enforcement agencies. The decades-long bombing campaign carried out by Ted Kaczynski, a brilliant Polish-American mathematician with a mix of apocalyptic and pro-environmental beliefs, sowed fear throughout the nation’s institutions well into the 1990s—and in the end, salvaged the reputation of the scandal-plagued Federal Bureau of Investigation. Many other incidents—the anthrax letters of the 2000s, the brazen Olympic Park bombing of 1996, the killings of abortion clinic doctors and the activities of radical pro-animal activists, the Weathermen, the mysterious 2013 attack at a California power station,20 and on and on—are all but forgotten in the annals of history, but should serve as a reminder that terrorism is a looming and profound threat.


pages: 343 words: 102,846

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

In Yale computer scientist David Gelernterl’s novel 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, an homage to the great era of institutional futurism, the author recreates a time when we believed we could shape the future in amazing ways collectively through our institutions.45 But here’s the thing: he wrote the book while recovering from a package bomb sent to his office by the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. The bomb blew off most of his right hand and left him almost blind in one eye. Ironically, by then, like Kaczynski himself, he had become disillusioned with technological change. But unlike Kaczynski, who sought to kill scientists in order to bring a halt to technological change, Gelernter believed in the opposite problem: that we had lost our fervor, our collective faith in the revolutionary possibilities of technology to build a better world for all.


pages: 349 words: 109,304

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton

bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, crack epidemic, Edward Snowden, fake news, gentrification, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, Ross Ulbricht, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the market place, trade route, Travis Kalanick, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

Some of these newer artifacts sit on the Hubbard Concourse in the contemporary Newseum at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks away from the White House. The relics at this museum hail from some of the biggest criminal cases in American history. In one corner of the exhibit there is an old wooden cabin, barely big enough for a man, that belonged to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Nearby a pair of thick black sneakers sit, their bases torn open; they were worn by the Shoe Bomber, Richard Reid, when he tried to blow up an American Airlines flight in 2001. And then, farther along in the exhibit, a glass box contains exhibit number 2015.6008.43a, which is a silver Samsung laptop.


Bit Rot by Douglas Coupland

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, bitcoin, Burning Man, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, index card, jimmy wales, junk bonds, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, McJob, Menlo Park, nuclear paranoia, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, young professional

In 2015 you can probably buy a mis-spellcheck as a forty-nine-cent app from the iTunes store…or upgrade to Mis-spellcheck Pro for another ninety-nine cents. What a strange world. It makes one long for the world before DNA and the Internet, a world in which people could genuinely vanish. The Unabomber—Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski—seems like a poster boy for this strain of yearning. He had literally no data stream, save for his bombs and his manifesto, which ended up being his undoing. How? He promised The New York Times that he’d stop sending bombs if they would print his manifesto, which they did. And then his brother recognized his writing style and turned him in to the FBI.


pages: 400 words: 108,843

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", active measures, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, collective bargaining, cotton gin, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, plutocrats, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

“Well …,” I said, thinking out loud about what I was going to tell the reporters waiting in the hallway outside Reid’s office. “Well, this could be good …,” I started. Reid threw back his head, laughing. Judge Merrick Garland is a wonderful human being with an impressive record. At the Justice Department, he had overseen the federal investigations into the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, and the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. His credentials as a jurist were unimpeachable, and he had been confirmed to his current job on the U.S. Court of Appeals D.C. Circuit with Republican support. For eighteen years, he tutored children at a public school in a low-income neighborhood of Washington, DC. And his personal demeanor was so kind and wise, White House aides had started referring to him, affectionately, as Dumbledore, the sagacious wizard from the Harry Potter books.6 But he had no chance to make it to the Supreme Court, and Reid knew it.


pages: 444 words: 117,770

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

The greatest accelerant of human progress imaginable, it will also enable harms—from wars and accidents to random terror groups, authoritarian governments, overreaching corporations, plain theft, and willful sabotage. Think about an ACI capable of easily passing the Modern Turing Test, but turned toward catastrophic ends. Advanced AIs and synthetic biology will not only be available to groups finding new sources of energy or life-changing drugs; they will also be available to the next Ted Kaczynski. AI is both valuable and dangerous precisely because it’s an extension of our best and worst selves. And as a technology premised on learning, it can keep adapting, probing, producing novel strategies and ideas potentially far removed from anything before considered, even by other AIs. Ask it to suggest ways of knocking out the freshwater supply, or crashing the stock market, or triggering a nuclear war, or designing the ultimate virus, and it will.


pages: 443 words: 125,510

The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities by John J. Mearsheimer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, Clive Stafford Smith, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal world order, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs

The evidence is overwhelming that humans are psychologically disposed to want to be part of a society. Humans are hardwired to want frequent interactions with other humans, including people outside their immediate families. Hardly anyone moves to a remote area and cuts off all contact with the outside world. Even Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber, continued to interact with American society, albeit in limited and wicked ways. The Survival Imperative Survival is the foremost reason that humans naturally operate in groups larger than the family unit.42 For starters, individuals need sexual partners, not only to satisfy their desires but also to help create and sustain families and the species more generally.43 The need to reproduce is common to all species, and for primates that necessitates looking for sexual partners beyond one’s immediate family.


The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

The prospect of receiving a bomb in an unknown package caused thousands of people to refuse perfectly legitimate mailings. The bombs killed three people and wounded twenty-nine. Before his identity was known, the FBI referred to the mail bomber as the ‘‘Unabomber,’’ which was an acronym for ‘‘university and airline bombers.’’ The university part was certainly appropriate for Ted Kaczynski. Born in Chicago, he was an intellectually gifted child who was also shy and aloof. He skipped two grades, graduating from high school in 1958 and entering Harvard at the age of sixteen to major in mathematics. Kaczynski graduated in four years to attend the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and earn a Ph.D. in mathematics.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

“Some part of your world—the town you live in, the company you work for, your school system, the city hospital—will hang there in a sharp color image, abstract but recognizable, moving subtly in a thousand places . . . fed by a steady rush of new data pouring in through cables . . . infiltrated by your own software creatures, doing your business.”37 It was a vision so all-encompassing and transformational that it spurred mail bomber Ted Kaczynski to break a six-year hiatus in 1993, and dispatch the incendiary missive that narrowly missed taking Gelernter’s life. Mirror Worlds foretold with astonishing accuracy the way sensing, networking, computation, and visualization are converging in our world today. But what’s really interesting is how over and over Gelernter used cities to illustrate the power of tools that capture vast complexity in real time.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

But Thiel insisted. Gelernter was the smartest computer scientist he knew, he said—and, on top of that, Thiel added, Gelernter had been blown up by the Unabomber. In 1993, not long after publishing a book about the coming prevalence of virtual reality, Mirror Worlds, he received a package from Ted Kaczynski, the former Berkeley mathematician who’d been sending letter bombs to technologists and others whom he believed were contributing to a dystopian future. Gelernter was severely injured and lost part of his right hand in the explosion. In a way, this made Gelernter a technology martyr, which impressed Thiel, though it completely derailed the conversation with Trump.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

In a famous exchange dissected by theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, Thamus warns Theuth about writing, arguing that “those who acquire it will cease to use their memory and become forgetful.” Today, someone making the equivalent argument about, say, smartphones making us less smart—would be called a Luddite. The list of critics of invention and “progress” is endless; it includes Sigmund Freud, Henry David Thoreau, Ted Kaczynski, and certain Amish sects. In Walden, Thoreau famously wrote, “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at.” But to argue that we should return to a more rural, nature-centric mode of life is not Luddism, it’s pastoralism.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

Once you really believe, you can always find new evidence to support your beliefs. There are now millions of Americans counting on a nonsupernatural apocalypse. They got a bigger tent when the term preppers became common in the 1980s, a rubric encompassing everybody from hardcore survivalists to wannabes and lookie-loos, from that Ted Kaczynski–ish guy who carries his AR-15 into the diner to the nice couple down the block with a basement room full of whey powder and antibiotics. Preppers are to survivalists as evangelicals are to fundamentalists. Of course, the premise of prepping and survivalism isn’t necessarily delusional. It’s possible some sudden catastrophic breakdown of systems could occur and last for months or years.


pages: 586 words: 186,548

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

There was extensive discussion of the downsides of GNR—Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics (which means AI)—in my book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, which came out in 1999 that led Bill Joy to write his famous Wired cover story in January 2000 titled, Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us. MARTIN FORD: That was based upon a quote from Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, wasn’t it? RAY KURZWEIL: I have a quote from him on one page that sounds like a very level-headed expression of concern, and then you turn the page, and you see that this is from the Unabomber Manifesto. I discussed in quite some detail in that book the existential risk of GNR.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Then there is “Climategate,” a manufactured scandal in which climate scientists’ emails were hacked and their contents distorted by the Heartlanders and their allies, who claimed to find evidence of manipulated data (the scientists were repeatedly vindicated of wrongdoing). In 2012, the Heartland Institute even landed itself in hot water by running a billboard campaign that compared people who believe in climate change (“warmists” in denialist lingo) to murderous cult leader Charles Manson and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” the first ad demanded in bold red letters under a picture of Kaczynski. For Heartlanders, denying climate science is part of a war, and they act like it.26 Many deniers are quite open about the fact that their distrust of the science grew out of a powerful fear that if climate change is real, the political implications would be catastrophic.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Murray, “A Guaranteed Income for Every American,” Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2016. 69. Studies of the effects of basic income: Bregman 2017. High-tech volunteering: Diamandis & Kotler 2012. Effective altruism: MacAskill 2015. CHAPTER 10: THE ENVIRONMENT 1. See Gore’s 1992 Earth in the Balance; Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), “Industrial Society and Its Future,” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm; Francis 2015. Kaczynski read Gore’s book, and the similarities between it and his manifesto were pointed out in an undated Internet quiz by Ken Crossman: http://www.crm114.com/algore/quiz.html. 2.