Unabomber Manifesto - ouroboros ponderosa

will be great suffering. So it is not all clear that the survival ofindustrial society would involve less suffering than the breakdown ofthat society would. Technology has gotten the human race into a fixfrom which there is not likely to be any easy escape.The future171. But suppose now that industrial society does survive the nextseveral decades and that the bugs do eventually get worked out ofthe system, so that it functions smoothly. What kind of system will itbe? We will consider several possibilities.172. First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed indeveloping intelligent machines that can do all things better thanhuman beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will bedone by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no humaneffort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. Themachines might be permitted to make all of their own decisionswithout human oversight, or else human control over the machinesmight be retained.173. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions,we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it isimpossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only pointout that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of themachines. It might be argued that the human race would never befoolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But weare suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turnpower over to the machines nor that the machines would willfullyseize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easilypermit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on themachines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all ofthe machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face itbecome more and more complex and machines become more andmore intelligent, people will let machines make more of theirdecisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions willbring better result than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may bereached at which the decisions necessary to keep the systemrunning will be so complex that human beings will be incapable ofmaking them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be ineffective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off,because they will be so dependent on them that turning them offwould amount to suicide.174. On the other hand it is possible that human control over themachines may be retained. In that case the average man may havecontrol over certain private machines of his own, such as his car orhis personal computer, but control over large systems of machinessome chance of making a lasting impression, we've had to killpeople.97. Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do notserve to guarantee much more than what could be called thebourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeoisconception, a "free" man is essentially an element of a socialmachine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimitedfreedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of thesocial machine more than those of the individual. Thus thebourgeois's "free" man has economic freedom because thatpromotes growth and progress; he has freedom of the press becausepublic criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders; he has arights to a fair trial because imprisonment at the whim of the powerfulwould be bad for the system. This was clearly the attitude of SimonBolivar. To him, people deserved liberty only if they used it to promoteprogress (progress as conceived by the bourgeois). Other bourgeoisthinkers have taken a similar view of freedom as a mere means tocollective ends. Chester C. Tan, "Chinese Political Thought in theTwentieth Century," page 202, explains the philosophy of theKuomintang leader Hu Han-min: "An individual is granted rightsbecause he is a member of society and his community life requiressuch rights. By community Hu meant the whole society of the nation."And on page 259 Tan states that according to Carsum Chang (ChangChun-mai, head of the State Socialist Party in China) freedom had tobe used in the interest of the state and of the people as a whole. Butwhat kind of freedom does one have if one can use it only assomeone else prescribes? FC's conception of freedom is not that ofBolivar, Hu, Chang or other bourgeois theorists. The trouble withsuch theorists is that they have made the development andapplication of social theories their surrogate activity. Consequentlythe theories are designed to serve the needs of the theorists morethan the needs of any people who may be unlucky enough to live in asociety on which the theories are imposed.98. One more point to be made in this section: It should not beassumed that a person has enough freedom just because he says hehas enough. Freedom is restricted in part by psychological control ofwhich people are unconscious, and moreover many people's ideas ofwhat constitutes freedom are governed more by social conventionthan by their real needs. For example, it's likely that many leftists ofthe oversocialized type would say that most people, includingthemselves are socialized too little rather than too much, yet theoversocialized leftist pays a heavy psychological price for his highlevel of socialization.Some principles of history