Kaczynski lived in a remote Montana cabin while carrying out his mail-bomb terrorism.

Chillingly telling or heavy-handed and selective fearmongering? You’ll have to decide for yourself over at Nick Carr’s always provocative Rough Type site.

Carr has posted three cautionary quotes that have a lot in common; the difference is two of them are from respected AI thinkers and one was written by the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski. Check out Kaczynski’s quote below and click through to Carr’s post to see how others have echoed him (unintentionally) in years since.

1995: “[As] machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make 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.”–Theodore Kaczynski