[ad_1] Ted Kaczynski, the mathematics professor who became known as the Unabomber after making 16 homemade bombs that killed three people, is dead,
[ad_1]
Ted Kaczynski, the mathematics professor who became known as the Unabomber after making 16 homemade bombs that killed three people, is dead, according to a Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesperson.
Kaczynski’s body was discovered in his cell Saturday morning, officials said. He was 81.
He had been in a maximum security facility in Colorado but was moved to a medical facility in North Carolina in December 2021 due to ill health.
Kaczynski, who gave up a promising career to live as a hermit in a Montana cabin, went almost 20 years before finally being captured in April 1996 and is considered the most prolific bomber in American history.
The explosives he made, which he mailed or hand-delivered, also injured two dozen victims. After his arrest, he confessed to committing 16 bombings between 1978 and 1995, permanently injuring several of his victims.
To some, he was a folk hero for his pro-Luddite views and ability to elude authorities for years.
Kaczynski wrote a 35,000-word, anti-technology and anti-leftist manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” better known as the “Unabomber Manifesto”, which warned the world about how rapidly expanding technology would threaten and possibly ruin humans.
Ray Kurzweil, a principal engineer at Google and one of the world’s foremost experts on AI, or artificial intelligence, included a lengthy passage from the manifesto in his 2000 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, but he didn’t tell readers until the following page who the writer of the excerpt was.
“People would agree with what he wrote until they turned the page and saw who wrote it,” Kurzweil told the New York Post on Saturday. “He brought up issues we need to be concerned about but of course he did it in completely the wrong way. He attacked people who were valid researchers and for that he should be forever condemned.”
The screed was written under the pseudonym FC, or Freedom Club, and was published in the Washington Post and the New York Times in 1995 effectively by force after his promise to cease the bombings if a major publication printed it in its entirety.
The publication of the manifesto was Kaczynski’s undoing. His brother, David Kaczynski, now, 73, and his wife, Linda Patrik, recognised his writing style and called the FBI.
After a massive manhunt, Kaczynski was captured by police in his small plywood and tarpaper cabin in the woods outside Lincoln, Montana.
The tiny home, smaller than the jail cell where he lived his final years, contained explosives, two finished bombs and a coded diary.
Prior to being moved to the medical facility, Kaczynski had been held at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado since 1998 where he was serving four life sentences plus 30 years.
David Kaczynski could not immediately be reached on Saturday.
Despite his inclusion in Kurzweil’s book and his reputation among some as a canny truth-teller, Kaczynski was honest about who he was.
“I certainly don’t claim to be an altruist or to be acting for the ‘good’ (whatever that is) of the human race,‘” he wrote in April 1971. “I act merely from a desire for revenge.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Post and has been reproduced here with permission
[ad_2]
Source link
COMMENTS