Unabomber director reveals the eerie AI prediction Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto made 30 years ago

The director of the new movie Unabomber has opened up about how Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto contained eerily accurate predictions about artificial intelligence, while also emphasising that this should not be a reason to excuse his crimes. 

As is explored in the new Netflix film, Kaczynski was a mathematics prodigy who eventually abandoned his academic career to live a reclusive, off grid life. Between 1978 and 1995, he began a nationwide bombing campaign in the US, which killed three people and injured 23 others. 

Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber in the media, targeted people connected to universities, airlines and technology, believing advanced modern tech and the destruction of the natural environment to be a travesty. 

He outlined these thoughts in a 35,000-word manifesto titled Industrial Society and Its Future, published in 1995. Kaczynski was eventually arrested in 1996 after a nearly two-decade FBI manhunt. He died by suicide in federal prison in June 2023, at the age of 81.

Unabomber, which has landed on Netflix, darts between timelines to show Kaczynski’s earlier life as a Harvard genius and the sinister experiments he underwent that have been linked to the CIA’s Project MKUltra.

Alongside this, we learn about the FBI’s investigation into the crimes, with Shailene Woodley playing agent Joanne Miller. Joanne repeatedly faces pushback from her peers for her belief that the manifesto holds the key to capturing Kaczynski – almost like a linguistic fingerprint. 

But while Unabomber explores the manifesto through the lens of the 1990s manhunt, director Janus Metz believes some of Kaczynski’s writings have become eerily relevant more than 30 years later – particularly when it comes to AI. 

The AI predictions in the Unabomber manifesto 

In a conversation with the Boston Globe, Metz said that a lot of Kaczynski’s writings “foreshadowed a lot of things that are happening today with AI” and people’s fear over technology, but he quickly pointed out that “we can never, obviously, excuse his methods, what he did.”

Metz elaborated on this in a recent appearance on the Killer Thriller podcast, explaining, “If you take the violence out of his thinking, he wasn’t irrational. It’s interesting what he has to say about technology and the alienation of us as human beings. 

“And we’re only scratching the surface of what AI, et cetera, is going to do to us. And, you know, tech corporations and social media – we have no clue where that leaves us. And that’s what he’s reacting to, this sort of ‘where does technology take us?’”

Probably one of the strongest passages from the manifesto – which was originally published by The Washington Post after Kaczynski offered to stop his bombing campaign if his work was circulated – is paragraph 173.

In this section, Kaczynski predicts machines becoming increasingly intelligent and imagines people handing decisions over to them due to the results being better. He argues that this could happen without deliberate action, and that humans would then be at the mercy of machines. 

It’s certainly chilling to read given the conversations surrounding AI right now. Here’s the full passage: “If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. 

“We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. 

“But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. 

“As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. 

“Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. 

“People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.”

In the next paragraph, he argues an alternate scenario in which humans will still have control over machines, but only a select few he refers to as the elite. “Control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite – just as it is today, but with two differences,” he wrote. 

“Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system.”

Interestingly, he also further elaborates on his predictions for the impact of AI on work, which we’re already seeing play out today.

“But suppose now that the computer scientists do not succeed in developing artificial intelligence, so that human work remains necessary. Even so, machines will take care of more and more of the simpler tasks so that there will be an increasing surplus of human workers at the lower levels of ability,” he said. 

“(We see this happening already. There are many people who find it difficult or impossible to get work, because for intellectual or psychological reasons they cannot acquire the level of training necessary to make themselves useful in the present system.) 

“On those who are employed, ever-increasing demands will be placed: They will need more and more training, more and more ability, and will have to be ever more reliable, conforming and docile, because they will be more and more like cells of a giant organism.”

He’s essentially picturing a world where AI takes over not in a Terminator-style uprising, but by humans allowing machines to make more and more decisions, until switching them off is no longer possible. 

Ted Kaczynski’s updated notes on his manifesto 

It’s worth noting that a lot of the concerns in the manifesto predated Kaczynski. He later acknowledged that Industrial Society and Its Future “was never intended to be original”, saying its purpose was to present existing ideas about modern technology in a more accessible way.

In a 2007 postscript to the manifesto, written while he was serving a life sentence in federal prison, Kaczynski explained, “Its purpose was to set forth certain points about modern technology in clear and relatively brief form, so that those points could be read and understood by people who would never work their way through a difficult text such as Jacques Ellul’s Technological Society.

“The accusation of unoriginality is in any case irrelevant. Is it important for the future of the world to know whether Ted Kaczynski is original or unoriginal? Obviously not! But it is indeed important for the future of the world to know whether modern technology has us on the road to disaster, whether anything short of revolution can avert that disaster, and whether the political left is an obstacle to revolution.”

Another significant piece of context is that Kaczynski was focused on a revolution that dismantled industrial-technological society, and believed conventional political movements on both sides were incompatible with this objective.

And while some of his writing about intelligent machines may sound eerily familiar in 2026, it’s important to take what Metz says into consideration. Some of his warnings may be accurate, but this in no way excuses the violence he used to force his ideas onto society.

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Featured image credit: Public Domain/Netflix