FOR almost two decades, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski terrorised America in a campaign against the rise of machines.
He killed three people, maimed 23 others and almost blew up a passenger jet — vowing to stop if newspapers published his “manifesto” which raged against industrialisation and technology.
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In chilling predictions of the debate going on today about artificial intelligence, he wrote: “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 decisions for them.”
Years before the rise of social media, America’s most infamous domestic terrorist — who was found dead at 81 in his prison cell on Saturday — also wrote how tech would lead to “greater social disruption and psychological suffering”.
But his ramblings have prompted online debate about whether — at the core of his madness — the bomber’s theories were ahead of their time.
Even the FBI, which cracked bizarre code sheets found at his home, called him a “twisted genius”.
Hours after his death, billionaire Tesla boss Elon Musk tweeted: “He might not have been wrong” in response to a tweet of Kaczynski’s quote that “the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race”.
But Kaczynski trod a fine line between genius and madman.
Homicidal maniac
Some believe a troubling experiment tipped him into an abyss of hatred and led to his schizophrenia.
As a student at Harvard, he was put through a series of mind-control experiments in which he was mocked, humiliated and subjected to military-style interrogations.
He also struggled with his sexuality, while his mum argued he had suffered trauma as a baby.
Kaczynski is believed to have killed himself in his cell at America’s Supermax prison in Colorado.
His death brings closure to victims of his murderous rampage between 1978 and 1995, when he mailed and hand-delivered 17 bombs to academics, airline employees and company executives.
His plot to blow up an American Airlines plane from Chicago to Washington in November 1979 failed when the bomb failed to detonate properly.
It was Kaczynski’s manifesto that finally brought him down in 1996.
It was published, on the advice of the FBI, by the Washington Post and his brother David recognised his writing style and told the cops.
The homicidal maniac — dubbed the Unabomber because he mainly targeted universities and airlines — was jailed for life without parole in 1998 after admitting his crimes.
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He refused to admit insanity in court and tried to sack his legal team because he didn’t want them to argue he was crazy.
He shared a cell on a block dubbed “bombers’ row”, where he struck up friendships with Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 in 1995 and Ramzi Yousef, who detonated a device in an underground car park at New York’s World Trade Centre in 1993, killing six.
Yet Kaczynski’s life could have been so different.
Born in Chicago to second-generation Polish Americans, he excelled at maths and won a scholarship to Harvard, one of the leading universities in the world, when he was 16.
He had an IQ of 167 — in line with Albert Einstein and Brit Stephen Hawking who, 18 years after Kaczynski’s imprisonment, revealed his own fears over AI, saying: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
On leaving high school, Kaczynski’s educational counsellor, Lois Skillen, wrote: “I believe Ted has one of the greatest contributions to make to society.”
After graduating from Harvard, in 1968, aged 25, he became the youngest ever assistant professor at the University of Berkeley in California.
Despite the promise of a glittering career, he suddenly quit “out of the blue” a year later.
He spent two years with his parents Wanda and Theodore, a sausage maker, in Illinois before moving into a dingy, 10ft by 12ft remote cabin he had built outside Lincoln, Montana.
He lived a simple life with little money and no electricity or running water, surviving on handouts from his parents.
In a rare interview, the killer later said: “I hate the system . . . I got out of it by living in the mountains but the system wouldn’t let me alone.”
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The first glimmer of his unhinged nature came in 1975, when developers started building near his cabin and he sabotaged equipment.
Isolated from society — other than to borrow politics and philosophy books from a local library — Kaczynski dwelled on his hatred of the modern world.
He spent years seeking revenge on those he thought were behind the march of tech and the decimation of nature.
‘Something was off’
He sent his first letter bomb in 1978, to Northwestern University Professor Buckley Crist Jr.
The crude pipe bomb was found in a car park at the University of Illinois with Crist’s address on, but it had not yet been mailed.
The finder forwarded it on to Crist, who said: “I knew right away something was off. Kaczynski wasn’t that good at his craft at the time. The bomb sort of malfunctioned when it went off. Unfortunately he got better at it.”
Crist, 81, told the New York Post he had “some sympathy” for the Unabomber, adding: “We’re about the same age. We had similar backgrounds. But obviously he did terrible things.”
He might not have been wrong. The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Tweet by Elon Musk after Unabomber’s death was announced
Kaczynski’s first fatal attack killed computer shop owner Hugh Scrutton, 38, who found a bomb in the car park of his store in 1985.
Nine years later advertising executive Thomas Mosser, 50, was murdered after a nail bomb was delivered to his New Jersey home.
His “crime” was to repair the tarnished image of oil firm Exxon after a spill in Alaska in 1989.
A year later Gilbert Murray, 47, a timber lobbyist, was killed by another of Kaczynski’s devices — many of which were marked with the letters FC, which he later claimed stood for Freedom Club.
In between his first and last killings, Kaczynski left 23 people maimed.
In 1979 he tried to explode a Boeing 727 by sending a letter bomb which was put in the cargo hold, but failed to go off properly.
He sent his next bomb to United Airlines boss Percy Wood, who was left with cuts and burns over most of his body.
For years Kaczynski was only known by an FBI sketch that showed a man with a moustache in a hoodie and sunglasses.
Designed to humiliate
He was caught in 1996 after his brother David and wife Linda Patrick noticed Kaczynski’s writing and style of grammar from the published manifesto.
David’s courage in contacting the cops brought the FBI’s longest and, up to then, most expensive manhunt to an end.
In 2011, the technology the bomber railed against helped raise £150,000 for the victims and their families in an online auction of his personal items, including his sunglasses.
Questions still remain about how one of America’s brightest academics turned into a serial killer.
He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in jail, but those who knew him point to other factors that may have contributed to his mental illness.
His mum described him as a “happy baby” until he was put in hospital isolation at nine months with a severe case of hives.
Others believe a university experiment Kaczynski took part in at Harvard could have contributed to his mental health problems.
Harvard psychologist Henry A Murray’s study into mind control was widely reported to be part of a CIA program codenamed MK-Ultra, inspired by techniques used on US Korean War prisoners.
It reportedly involved mock interrogations which belittled the belief systems of participants and was designed to humiliate them.
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CIA director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of the files related to MK-Ultra in 1973, but Kaczynski mentioned his role in the experiment to Professor Alston Chase, who wrote a book about the Unabomber.
Prof Chase, who died last year, later said: “He is an intellectual and a convicted murderer and, to understand the connection between these two faces, we must revisit his time at Harvard.”
It also emerged that Kaczynski may have been confused about his sexuality after a psychiatrist’s report in 1998 revealed the killer’s desire to have a sex change.
While academics and environmentalists will argue whether Kaczynski was correct in his predictions before his descent into madness, many of his victim’s families do not care.
Jonathan Epstein, whose geneticist dad lost several fingers after the Unabomber posted a package to his family home in California in 1993, said: “I was glad to hear the news.”
Grace Macaskill
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