The passage, not the manifesto

The question

«6 в 1» asked whether the Unabomber manifesto said anything about AI, then asked to think again about how to enter it correctly and whether it was worth entering at all.

What the text says

It did. «Industrial Society and Its Future» was printed in The Washington Post on 19 September 1995 under the threat of another bomb. Paragraphs 172-174 suppose that computer scientists build intelligent machines, and then take two cases. If the machines decide for themselves, people gradually come to depend on them so much that turning them off would amount to suicide. If control stays with people, it rests with a small elite. The paragraphs were read in the copy of the text on the Post’s own site.

Why the record is not about the manifesto

In 1995 nothing new about machine intelligence became known: the text was read as a manifesto against industrial society. It was taken up as an argument about machines only four years later. First Ray Kurzweil quoted the passage in his book. Then Bill Joy quoted it in Wired in April 2000, in «Why the future doesn’t need us». A 1995 mark would carry that later weight back in time, and it would give a text printed under the threat of murder exactly the prominence its author demanded.

So the record went to Joy’s article (evt-0932), and the manifesto lives inside it: the paragraphs, the day of publication and the path to Joy. Kaczynski is not made a person of the atlas. On the «Safety» line the article stands between Good (1966) and Bostrom (2014), where there was nothing before.

What turned up on the way

Joy’s footnote says both papers printed the manifesto. The Post’s editor’s note and CNN’s report that morning say otherwise: it appeared in the Post alone, and the papers split the cost. The record gives both claims, each with its source. There is no link to Bostrom’s book: a search of it finds «joy» only in «tears of joy».