“Industrial Society and its Future”: the writings of the Unabomber

> But it's a world where the biosphere and humanity are not threatened with existential destruction.

That's unfortunately false. The technology stack needed to divert asteroids is significant; bringing humanity to a pre-industrial revolution doesn't guarantee the safety of the biosphere, it guarantees the biosphere is unmodifiable by human activity. That leaves the biosphere vulnerable to threats that humans could use technology to intervene against but will be unable to.

> No need to "ignore" anything.

If one doesn't ignore the death and suffering but instead condemns humanity to it purposefully, with the flip response "But in a technological society, people will die anyway," that's misanthropic, and that's the part where his philosophy demands humans act other than they will. Fewer humans are suffering and dying---even with the threat of climate change---in a world where we have a technology stack that can move vast resources around.

Avoiding the death of billions of people by crashing the industrial infrastructure so billions of people die is a non-solution. Practically, nobody will go for it. Philosophically, nobody should go for it; it's the solution of throwing up one's hands and saying "into Nature's good graces we should go," and Nature's graces have never been good. "Red in tooth and claw" is the moniker she tends to carry.

There's no guarantee that if we keep the industrial society, billions die to climate change. Technology gave us the power to shape the climate and (if we choose to invest the time and effort) it can give us the power to shape the climate beneficially. If we pull the technological society up by its roots and return to the pre-industrial society, billions die from starvation, disease, and natural disaster, as we are no longer able to move resources to help them.

> Technology is just what people do. It's not divorced from nature, or from humanity; it's the process of using nature's laws to make nature more palatable for our existence.

No, it is its own thing. It only makes nature more palatable for humans because it progresses and survives that way.

From chess I learn that if someones brain is large enough he can completely wrap it around the opponents thoughts and set up a beneficial situation which will only become obvious when it is to late for the opponent.

Now extend that asymmetry to a human vs a machine. If the machine is sophisticated enough (and why not since it isn't limited in the ways we are) it can effortlessly set up a situation for us that we cant possibly comprehend. Just look at us trying to make sense of black box machine learning. Similarly large corporations are set up globally either by evolution or by design to control absolutely everything.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

We puny humans think we run the corporations then we go follow our job description by the letter. The job description or shall we say our life is duplicated from previous jobs elsewhere that are pretty much the same.

We have managers who are in charge, or no wait, they just follow orders.

Then surely we have a board of directors who make choices? Or wait, they are obligated to make revenue for investors, keep the numbers cosy etc Humans have not much freedom beyond conception for which they might be rewarded with bits of paper and extra large concrete boxes?

But what about government? Surely our democratic machine is there to make happen the will of the people? Or maybe not? If you have enormous amounts of money you can exercise a tiny bit of influence. 99% of the laws are already written - to keep people safe and preserve the status quo. Safety isn't power.

People are just tools to the machine. Disposable tools.

So there you have it... The machine is now spying on your every move. You really think you can still change anything without its permission?

You can even talk to it, fill out a support ticket and it will respond. A human will be granted limited freedom to advertise its benevolence. Real or imagined doesn't even matter at this point.

No disagreement, but consider the end of Asimov's "I, Robot" collection of stories.

The world was always too complicated for humans to control their destiny. We built systems to reconcile that. So instead of being subject to the cruel whims of nature, we're subject to the designed whims of our systems. It's an improvement.

Sure, we could follow the Unabomber's example and burn it all to the ground, but to what end? So we can starve and struggle again, shaking our fists at an uncaring and cruel fate that has never cared whether we have enough to eat, our bodies are ravaged by disease, or the waters have risen or the fires have scorched us? Technology at least gives us a fighting chance to do better than that.