| Hi, it's Drake in New York. Ted Kaczynski anticipated the world that gave us one of the most high-profile vigilantes since his bombing spree. But first... Three things you need to know today: • Broadcom's market value topped $1 trillion after a strong outlook for AI chip sales
• Apple will begin producing Airpods in India for the first time
• A court rejected TikTok's request to delay a US ban of the popular app in January Among the digital breadcrumbs left by Luigi Mangione, the suspected murderer of UnitedHealth Group Inc. executive Brian Thompson, is his Goodreads review of Ted Kaczynski's 1995 essay, Industrial Society and Its Future, better known as the Unabomber manifesto. It's been a tantalizing connection for amateur sleuths, and presumably for professional ones, too. How much did one extremist killer influence another? Mangione's review is positive if not, at four out of five stars, a rave. We might, he writes, be tempted to write off the Unabomber as a lunatic, "But it's simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out." To be sure, he continues, Kaczynski "was a violent individual — rightfully imprisoned — who maimed innocent people." Mangione doesn't specify that Kaczynski was also a murderer: among the dozens of victims of his mail bombs, three died. The Unabomber manifesto is indeed prescient, and perceptive about psychology and the compromises of contemporary, technologically-enabled life. "We can do anything we like as long as it is UNIMPORTANT. But in all IMPORTANT matters the system tends increasingly to regulate our behavior," Kaczynski wrote. It is also full of absurd generalizations of the sort one might expect from a man living in a mountain cabin with little actual human contact. And it doesn't specify how a campaign of terrorism against university professors, corporate executives and computer store owners — the victims of Kaczynski's bombing — would lead to the collapse of industrial society and its replacement by the purer and more primitive alternative he desired. It's the circumstances around the manifesto, however, that underline what a different world it comes from. The essay didn't appear on social media, or even as a blog post. Publishing something in 1995 still meant printing and distributing a physical object, in this case, a special section of the Washington Post. Kaczynski anonymously mailed his screed to the paper and threatened more bombs unless it was published. The US Department of Justice leaned on the paper to comply, in the hope that it might help identify the writer. It did: Kaczynski's brother recognized his writing, and alerted the feds. Before that, for years, all the authorities had to go on was a pencil sketch from a witness account of a mustachioed man in aviator shades and a hoodie. Contrast that with what Mangione allegedly did, and how we learned about it. The young computer science graduate never got around to publishing the manifesto he was working on, but when people went looking, his social media selfies and writings were there in the cloud waiting to be discovered. And instead of a pencil sketch, within hours we had photos from the cameras that blanket the environment we all live in. This is part of what Kaczynski, who died by suicide in prison in 2023, was warning against: "Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at many different points at the same time (crowding, rules and regulations, increasing dependence of individuals on large organizations, propaganda and other psychological techniques, genetic engineering, invasion of privacy through surveillance devices and computers, etc.)." Still, the future has turned out to be more complicated. Technology has proven to be a tool of violent disruption as well as control. The internet that let all of us instantaneously see Mangione's face and read his book reviews also allowed people to share files for 3D-printed handguns like the one Mangione is alleged to have used in Thompson's killing.—Drake Bennett OpenAI's ChatGPT sparked the public's imagination about the power of generative artificial intelligence when it was widely introduced more than two years ago. Companies viewed AI that could respond to written and verbal commands as a way to supplement their workforce. Now that thinking about chatbots and copilots has been left behind by what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman calls "the next giant breakthrough" — AI "agents" that can handle multistep tasks with little or no human supervision. Iconiq Growth and Bessemer Venture Partners were among the early investors who won big in last week's initial public offering by software startup ServiceTitan. Sam Altman and startup Perplexity gave $1 million each to US President-elect Donald Trump's inaugural committee. Embattled server company Super Micro has brought on Evercore to help the company raise capital. | 
Mashadipati Location Hotel Clove is located in the heart of Bandung, in a ...
No comments