Reddit Revisits Kaczynski's 1995 Warning That Humans Will Drift Into Machine Dependence
NeighborhoodFatCat · reddit · 2026-10-09
A Netflix documentary on the Unabomber sparked a Reddit discussion of Ted Kaczynski's 1995 predictions about intelligent machines. His core argument: humanity won't hand power to machines voluntarily but will drift into dependence as machine decisions outperform human ones, until systems become too complex for people to manage and shutting them down is effectively suicide. The alternative path he sketched: a tiny elite controlling machine systems while the masses, no longer needed for work, become superfluous. Commenters debate how well this maps onto today's AI trajectory.
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