Harvard man killed by ChatGPT?

by philg

“Ted Kaczynski, ‘Unabomber’ Who Attacked Modern Life, Dies at 81” (New York Times):

After his arrest, Mr. Kaczynski’s extraordinary biography emerged. He had scored 167 on an I.Q. test as a boy and entered Harvard at 16. In graduate school, at the University of Michigan, he worked in a field of mathematics so esoteric that a member of his dissertation committee estimated that only 10 or 12 people in the country understood it. By 25, he was an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mr. Kaczynski’s manifesto — published jointly by The New York Times and The Washington Post in 1995 under the threat of continued violence — argued that damage to the environment and the alienating effects of technology were so heinous that the social and industrial underpinnings of modern life should be destroyed.

Is it fair to say that this Harvard graduate predicted the destructive effects of social media? The NYT and Joe Biden certainly agree with Ted K regarding “damage to the environment”. Do we think it is a coincidence that he dies just a few months after ChatGPT went live?

Separately, this part of the NYT article makes me sad:

The home had two windows set on high; they caught light but kept the home hidden. Agents could not see inside. On April 3, 1996, one of them shouted that a forest ranger needed help. A thin, shaggy man emerged from the cabin. He was grabbed from both sides.

I do not think that our government should take advantage of Americans’ instincts to help each other in order to make arrests.

From the full manifesto:

19 thoughts on “Harvard man killed by ChatGPT?”

  1. Uncle Ted was unstable and unsubtle and as ideologically driven as any party apparatchik.

  3. I read the manifesto years ago and it just seemed like something an above-average but arrogant college sophomore would write. Tedious and clichéd throughout. The media seemed to like it, I suppose because it echoed what they had been saying, and most of the comments on her death (Ted was a transgender [1]) still seemed appreciative of her “philosophy”.

    Oh well. I suppose if she had said anything counter-narrative it would have been suppressed.

    [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/09/12/gender-confusion-sex-change-idea-fueled-kaczynskis-rage-report-says/eb33b946-8595-427d-af4c-9ccaada45935/

  4. I read the “Unabomber Manifesto” in the 90s. In my opinion it had some interesting points (most of it is disorganized crap). The “dangers of technology” have been discussed since humans learned how to control fire. “Social media” is probably no more subversive than the printing press was centuries ago. We don’t know much about our universe, but we know that all seems to be subject to change and for humans change is happening fast.

    Also, there is in my opinion a tendency to idealize the “non industrial past” or the “life of hunter gatherers” (a good example is Harari’s “Sapiens”). We are what we are, we have no control.

    Sending bombs by mail is certainly not the answer. The “Unabomber” deserved to die in jail.

    • Probably he died 10 years later then if he stayed in his shuck in a dump forests without access to modern medicine. Like simple living enthusiast and anti-farmer raving maniac Henry David Thoreau of Mascachusetts who died at ripe old age of 44. The Unabomber was about to retire anyway, with his high IQ he got on Fed Social Security/ taxpayer – provided medical care for life program.

  6. > Harvard man killed by ChatGPT?

    “AI” means auto-generated bullshit, so I think not. Bullshit is a major aspect of the human condition, hence the excitement over this advance.

    As for Kaczynski, I think he was on to something, his pointless murder campaign notwithstanding. The curse that industrialization brought isn’t its psychological effects, or not directly, but the “mouse utopia” conditions that it made possible.

  7. I’m a little bemused – but not surprised – that nobody is talking more extensively about the cause of his death. He clearly was not in good health, having been transferred from ADX Supermax Florence to the Florida Medical Center in Butner, NC “for health reasons” in 2021, which is where he croaked.

    Let’s see: He was 81 years old at the time of his death and had spent at least 24 years in the Supermax facility. I don’t think anyone here would last very long at ADX Florence, as a result of the horrific starkness of the place, if you’ve ever seen pictures of the inside.

    Now we’ve got everyone+dog in the media saying that prison officials suspect suicide. Where are his medical records? Are they going to perform an autopsy to validate their speculations?

    I found this interesting, from his wikipedia entry:

    “In school, he skipped two grades. He later blamed his parents for seeming to prize and cultivate his intellect over his emotions…“He was never really seen as a person, as an individual personality,” a high school classmate, Loren De Young, told The Times. “He was always regarded as a walking brain.”

    To be sure, a lot of very smart people get treated – and even enjoy being treated that way, but many do not. Add in some endogenous schizoform disorders, which apparently he was never treated for, and he reminds me of the infamous Colorado Theater shooter, James Holmes.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Holmes_(mass_murderer)

    He was accepted into an advanced graduate neuroscience program and was in WAAAAY over his head. His parents knew something was amiss with him, but similarly thought his big brain would carry the day and he would be just fine. He wasn’t just fine and his peers knew about it. He quit the program, his self-imposed social isolation intensified, and the rest is history.

    In no way do I mean to imply a connection between your children and the Unabomber, or James Holmes, but I can guess that they’re also very intelligent and precocious. The big difference is that they seem to be very well-adjusted, happy kids with a great Dad who dotes on them and exposes them to lots of other things in the world aside from “book learning.”

    I think starting with the most straightforward explanations to seemingly inexplicable things is the best. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” – Variously attributed to Einstein. It’s a good principle because it shifts the burden of proof to the more complicated explanations. Nobody has proven anything at this point, as far as I can tell.

    Also, TK derided both the Left and the Right, claimed he was not a fascist, and not an environmentalist fascist especially. He leveled most of his criticism at the Left, and said that while he agreed more with Conservatives, he thought (I’m paraphrasing) that they were too much talk and not enough action – an observation I’ve shared on many occasions.

    • Of course, there are also plenty of disaffected, maladapted and disgruntled or mentally ill people who are very smart indeed but don’t go around living in the woods sending bombs through the mail over a period spanning decades. They get help, or something changes, or they just keep it to themselves and work on it. These are very, very rare events and to my mind is part of the reason they sound so similar. In “Medical School 2020” one of the psychiatrists also admits that the #Science of mental health is best characterized as being “in the Stone Age.”

  8. @Philg: You wrote:

    “I do not think that our government should take advantage of Americans’ instincts to help each other in order to make arrests.”

    I agree completely, and the time it took for the FBI to find and arrest him (with 40 agents – an Army Platoon’s worth!) with those techniques underscores to me the shocking incompetence of the modern FBI. It took the high-echelon pressure of no less than Janet Reno to prod the NYT and WaPo into publishing his manifesto, which was recognized as TK’s writing by his BROTHER, which cracked the case and led to his arrest in 1996!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

    Who’s in charge here? His first bombing was perpetrated in May (9th and 25th) 1978 on the two Northwestern University professors, who suffered “minor cuts and burns.” The last was April 24, 1995, so it took almost 17 years – and his brother’s recognition – to catch him. I understand that he went to considerable lengths to obfuscate the origins of his weapons (he *was* intelligent) but he was up against what many Americans who watch TeeVee regard as the most formidable investigative agency on Earth:

    “In 1979, Kaczynski became the subject of what was, by the time of his arrest, the longest and most expensive investigation in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)”

    That’s a long time to catch a guy whose modus operandi for the crimes stayed pretty much the same. I can understand a year…five years…maybe 10 years — But 17 YEARS? How many “Mythical Man-Months?

    Obligatory “How are you celebrating Pride Month?” reference:

    “For a period of several weeks in 1966, Kaczynski experienced intense sexual fantasies of being female and decided to undergo gender transition. He arranged to meet with a psychiatrist, but changed his mind in the waiting room and did not disclose his reason for making the appointment. Afterwards, enraged, he considered killing the psychiatrist and other people whom he hated. Kaczynski described this episode as a “major turning point” in his life:”

    So we have a man who began fantasizing intensely about transitioning into a woman – but hated the doctor and wanted to kill him. Can you make this stuff up? Did he ever try to fulfill those fantasies? Usually when someone has “intense sexual fantasies” they try to fulfill them with doctors or not. I used to have my hair cut by one of them when I lived in Chicago. He/She was a tragic person in my view. Finally he/she was able to save up the money for hormones, lost about 60 pounds, became something of a waif, but one night I was celebrating New Years Eve at my -exes insistence at a gay club. I was shocked by someone coming up behind me, grabbing me by the shoulders, turning me around, and sticking his/her tongue down my throat dressed in a slinky bias-cut little number – no warning and no permission asked. It was one part of my -exes idea of a #Scientific experiment to see if I might be closeted. I wasn’t.

    Whew.

    • She probably only though you were gay because you know what “bias-cut” means.

    • @MV: Heh. Probably that was a part of it, but basic fashion terminology isn’t very hard to learn in the largest gay neighborhood (Boys Town) in the Midwest. I have more to say on this subject – some of it is even funny – but it would lead us far off-topic.

  9. So… Ted’s “right” to not be fooled into being arrested is more important to you than him stopped from horrifically killing more people, and paying a price for his past crimes?

    • I’m pretty sure he still would have been arrested if they hadn’t lied to him with a reason to leave the cabin.

      False dichotomy.

  11. Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber) was subject to an
    abusive psychological experiment at Harvard. The experiment lasted three years, was lead by Henry Murray. While it might be too far-fetched to claim that CIA experiments produced a terrorist, subjecting sensitive and probably already psychological unstable 17-year old to several years of professionally conducted psychological abuse didn’t help, for sure.
    Slightly related, it seems that Charles Manson was subject of similar experiments. There is a book which seems to be well researched (review of a book in Rolling Stone) (20 min video, interview with an author on Joe Rogan show).

  12. (maybe there was trouble with embedded links, better with explicit links):
    Ted Kaczynski was subject to an abusive psychological experiment at Harvard.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Psychological_study
    The experiment lasted three years, was lead by Henry Murray.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Murray#Harvard_human_experiments,_1959%E2%80%9362
    While it might be too far-fetched to claim that CIA experiments produced a terrorist,
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
    subjecting sensitive and probably already psychological unstable 17-year old to several years of professionally conducted psychological abuse didn’t help, for sure.

    Slightly related, it seems that Charles Manson was subject of similar experiments. There is a book which seems to be well researched:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHAOS:_Charles_Manson,_the_CIA,_and_the_Secret_History_of_the_Sixties
    Rolling Stones review of a book:
    https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/manson-murders-chaos-book-helter-skelter-869860/
    Interview with an author on Joe Rogan Show (20 min excerpt):
    href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvvxB0Ju1OA

  13. The Chicago Tribune reports this morning that although suicide was the cause of death, he also had late-stage cancer. So ChatGPT probably wasn’t much of a factor here.

  14. It is a shame that such a smart man turned evil because of damage to the environment and technology. Without damage to the environment we would be living in caves not asphaltic cities. Without technology we would eat very basic, raw things, and have no ChatGPT. BTW, I dont, understand what this Web site had to do with his demise. I understand he had cancer.

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