The Unabomber: uncanny prophecies of a dangerous man

He predicted that machines would eventually displace people in the workplace and that this would ultimately put the human race at the mercy of technology. This was written on a typewriter at a time when the internet was in its infancy, desktop computers were large, boxy affairs too expensive for most of us, and artificial intelligence was a fringe science, treated with derision by most. He explained: "As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and 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.