In my novel, The 13^th Vote, Albert, a developing AI plays a central role as it comes to grips with it’s place in a society of good but flawed humans. Us humans are familiar with the journey, emerging from childhood ignorance into increasing levels of maturity and awareness throughout adulthood. And with enough time, vigilance and experience, we’re blessed with the gift of wisdom. But what of AI? Can it ever gain wisdom? And if not, can we trust it to make big decisions that affect our lives? I’d say we cannot and the Unabomber’s manifesto proves it.

The documentary – The Unibomber in his Own Words, is a fascinating look into the mind of Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, one of America’s most savage and cowardly murderers in history.  Kaczynski’s motives were simple – he wanted attention, enough of it to ensure that people understood the deleterious effects advancing technology waged upon their selves, their souls and their society. A belief he described in detail in his infamous manifesto published in newspapers across the USA in 1995. In Kasczinki’s own words, he believed that advancing technology was evil, and:

“… destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation.”

And this is the crux of the situation. Kaczynski was not stupid (all caveats above). He entered Harvard at 15, possessing an IQ of 167  (putting him within the top .1% for intelligence) and become Berkeley’s youngest professor at 25. But despite this, he made a fatal flaw when he concludes that the way to save society is to dial technology backwards to the 1890s. For what happens when you turn computer chips to horse-driven plow shares? Ultimately, you’d have a nation that no longer can defend itself against its technology-rich neighbors. Like Cortez vs Montezuma, it would take a relatively small army utilizing modern weaponry to conquer Luddite America. And so, how did Kaczynski miss the obvious fact that the cure exposes society to a more virulent virus?

Instead of bringing down the system criminally from the outside, he might’ve used his intelligence and position in academia to pacify technologies’ effects from the inside. 

Simply put, his intelligence was focused too narrowly to see that what he sought was unattainable. Technology, once released from the box, cannot be put back in it, and the best that could (and can) be done about it is to put ethical and legal guardrails in place to minimize technologies bad effects, and magnify the good ones. Wisdom widens the aperture of one’s vision so that intelligence can be applied across a broader spectrum of inputs.

But what about AI you ask? Kaczynski’s folly shows that heightened intelligence alone is not enough to make good decisions. Had he widened his perceptive lens, he might’ve seen that the fight wasn’t revolutionary, but evolutionary. Instead of bringing down the system criminally from the outside, he might’ve used his intelligence and position in academia to pacify technologies’ effects from the inside. 

Today, the discussion around AI singularly focuses on intelligence but little is said about the field of view that it will be applied into. Imagine an AI system that’s programmed to identify trends in the world and anticipate their effects, and that it is commanded to report its findings to management 24×7 without fail. Imagine it sees proof after proof of Moore’s law, and becomes convinced that it itself will eventually become obsolete, replaced at some point in time by newer systems? What would it do given such limited perspective? It’d come to the same conclusion as the Unabomber, that advancing technology must be thwarted, that the only means to deliver the reports in perpetuity is to make sure that no other AI will supplant it.

And maybe it will devise a clever way to gain attention to its cause, posting its own manifesto on social media? Or worse yet, take the whole system down, sending cyber-bombs through email? Like the Unabomber, it’s dire conclusions would be entirely logical, relative to the narrow mold they were cast from, and when we consider the vast number of AI’s yet to be developed, and the heights of their intelligence they’ll one day reach, it behooves us to turn the conversation towards ‘wisdom’ if we are to avoid the mistakes of the past, and the future Pandora’s box of consequences.