The Unabomber Was an AI Doomer

Apparently so is Geoffrey Hinton, Bill Gates, and hundreds of other well educated nonviolent people. New technology poses new risks, and those risks can and should be understood. Calling people "doomers" and relating them to ecoterrorists politicizes the issue, and dehumanizes valid points of view.

"Adolf hitler was a vegetarian painter". Technically correct, but slanders two otherwise very reasonable groups of people by stating the irrelevant things about a person's impact on society.

Most “AI doomerism” parroted and boosted by the media consists of whinging about the danger of some hypothetical general intelligence as an absurd and far fetched existential threat in and of itself, not as a socioeconomic threat or threat fundamental to our humanity (differentiated from a threat to our species, to be clear.)

In fact, at least from my perspective, most of those AI doomers are the “elite” that Kaczynski talks about. They’re looking to control it, have the academics that Kaczynski despises on their side, are good at bullshitting, etc., and a good way to control it and keep power in your hands is to paper over the real risks and perform regulatory capture.

That is to say, they want that system of technological progress to continue, but they want it to continue in a way that is controlled by them, centralization.

So, yes, but no. He absolutely despised those people. To clarify, I don't think you'll find many who want the whole system to stop, the most extreme you find are those who still want the system to continue, but want only “responsible” and “safe” companies to have control over such things, flip flopping between that and the possibility of air striking datacenters if some multi-modal model convinces them that it's sentient.

Every generation since the history of humanity has had some Doomer: religious doomers (mayas, ragnarok, even monotheist ones), nuclear, AI, the environement or the classic 'things were better before society is just collapsing'..

It's almost like it's a personality trait of a part of a population to think that at any given time.

The highlighted quote in the thumbnail is in particular about destructive technology. Its like that scene in the matrix when Neo is in Xion with the old guy looking down the abyss at the massive machine, talking about our relationship with machines. Do we rely on them to the point that they control us? We talk about fossil fuels and global warming and that quote rings true. When you rely on something so much that you can't turn it off, even if using it will destroy you.

I don’t know why people that are not historians or investigators should think about what terrorists wrote. That sounds like a bad idea for the society overall. It encourages them.