First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions we can’t make any conjecture as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. 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.

On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consist of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.

— ted kaczynski, industrial society and its future, 1995

the whole thing is kept here as a pdf for anyone who wants to read it. mirrored from archive.org.

it's bill evans' first posthumous release, originally recorded in late august 1977. it's put together from songs that were cleared for release but never saw the light of day before his death.

it must be one of my favourite albums ever made. even though it was never "officially" released by bill himself, it feels incredibly coherent. the piano has this perfect emotion to it, and combined with his soft touch it sounds almost dream-ish. so blue, in fact, that one may argue it's its own subgenre completely.

track 1 is devoted to his ex-wife Ellaine, who took her own life. she committed suicide by jumping in front of a subway train after bill confessed to falling in love with another woman. harry, his brother, shot himself two years after these sessions.

by the time of these recordings bill was in one of the worst mental states of his life. he resorted to drugs like cocaine and heroin, an addiction he struggled with his whole life. he stopped his treatment for hepatitis, a decision that would eventually take his life.

there's a feeling that bleeds through his playing. it sounds incredibly somber yet uplifting, but i'd disagree with you if you were to call it depressing. it has this hopeful tone to it, as if he doesn't want to mourn but appreciate the memories.

i wonder whether the album title was a question aimed at us, the listener, or meant for himself. after such a rough life, would you believe in spring?

i ask myself that question often, yet i'm scared that i'll never fully answer it. for now, my answer is "because we live". everything has a cause and effect, nothing escapes that, so neither does death. there's a reason icarus laughed when he fell out of the sky.

i prefer looking at the nature side. science tells us what happens when somebody dies: brain activity fades, the heart loses its ability to pump blood, and eventually you shut down. your cells and molecules are taken by nature to be reused in one of its many projects, and it's a beautiful concept. in reality, people never fully disappear or die out. they just become part of the very cycle that once brought them here.

i struggle with the religious side. i'm envious of people who believe in god, but i can't bring myself to do it, at least not with any of the abrahamic religions. belief like that requires a kind of trust i don't have, and no god worthy of worship would give innocent children incapable of sin cancer, let poor people starve, and commit genocide on its own creation.

the greatest thinkers and smartest people have all tried figuring this out, yet none of them grasp it. it seems the harder you try to seek an answer, the closer you get to insanity. and at the end of the day, all of that work is nothing but decoration, truly useless when one is faced with death.

so i've stopped waiting for an answer and started treating the question as evidence of something else: that i'm still on the living side of it.

the pressure to mask on the job is enormous. you're functionally a servant of the company you work for. their rules and guidelines and their way of doing things. i can't get around what that costs me on the way in. everything that's actually mine stays at the revolving doors.

at work i am basically dead inside. i'm there, but i'm also not?

i sort of rewire myself to want it. i change how i move, how i talk, how much of me is switched on and if you run that for long enough at some point a part of you starts going along with it and believing it.

it's the power dynamics that get me the most. i fucking hate it. the way things get asked. a task shows up like it's a gift, it's exciting or "a great opportunity", i think "fine, i'll do it. that's my role and that's what i'm here for. but please don't polish that turd. i'd rather have it warm and smelly. tell me it's tedious and i'll do it tedious."

the lying thing is also so annoying. they're not good tricks at all, and i can never tell if people actually believe them or if everyone's just too tired to say anything about it. i don't understand how people fall for it, and then i fall for it every week myself, so what does that make me?

as a kid i wanted to be a professional footballer (like any boy) and i struggled to imagine anything else existing at the time. i didn't understand why at the time but i do now. it had intrinsic value to me. the second i stepped onto the pitch everything fell into the right place, everything was correct.

nothing since has been correct in that way.

to me it's nothing more than a trade. you serve and you get paid, you spend the pay on serving yourself, and then money. money has no value. none of it. the only reason any of it works is that we all agreed to believe in it a very long time ago and nobody's revisited the decision since.

when a kid can't sit still for six hours at a time and can't hold focus on a worksheet constantly. so many people agree that something has gone "wrong" with the kid while nobody in that room asks whether six hours of sitting still is a reasonable thing to ask of a nine year old whose brain is learning and evolving at inconceivable speeds. the six hours are the norm so the kid must be the 'problem'.

they don't really care, the kid is easier to fix and force them to become tolerable to something that they in their deep nature find intolerable, you can be miserable in a way that doesn't cost anyone money and nobody comes to help.

the attention was never really missing either. instead it's just allocated to something that doesn't generate (enough) revenue for our profit-driven overlords. put the same brain on something that matters to itself and it will go nine hours without distraction. i was on the football pitch as a kid and my attention was absolutely flawless yet nobody diagnosed me at 11 on a sunday morning?

i wish more people would notice that we built a treatment industry around helping people meet a demand nobody ever really voted on. the schedule is never up for debate. neither are the eight hours, the open plan office, the endless sitting, the pointless, dreary meetings that could have been nothing at all, none of it is ever the thing that needs changing.

the system is the constant, it doesn't work but we like to pretend it does so it's unlikely to ever change. the disorder is the variable. every single adjustment runs in the direction of the system and it has for the past two hundred years, and the tell is that we don't even have a word for the opposite. there's no term for a job that's incompatible with a person because those are deemed to be called broke losers who can't hold down a job or something.

i planned to keep a list of my interests here. tidy little rows: jazz, film, hardware, philosophy and a bunch of stuff. but I scrapped that as you can't tell anything about a person from a list of nouns.

so it's a blog now, or whatever the term for that is in 2026. the plan is to write things down when they won't leave me alone.