Several years ago, James R. Fitzgerald, a retired F.B.I. agent, found himself rereading an abstruse tract of political philosophy called “Industrial Society and Its Futureaaffgame,” written by a former University of California mathematics professor named Theodore John Kaczynski.

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Fitzgerald first encountered Kaczynski’s treatise in July 1995, shortly after Kaczynski anonymously mailed the typewritten manuscript to The Times and The Washington Post, demanding its publication in exchange for his promise to stop killing people with package bombs. Fitzgerald’s photocopy of the original was dog-eared and marked up with color-coded annotations he made while trying to discern clues to the identity of the author, then known only as the Unabomber.

To this day he has no particular sympathy for the author. But there had always been passages in Kaczynski’s indictment of technological civilization that gave him pause. “Boy, I don’t really disagree with this comment,” he recalled thinking, “and I don’t really disagree with this statement — but damn it, he’s a killer, and we’ve got to catch him!”

When we spoke recently, Fitzgerald recited one of Kaczynski’s numbered paragraphs, 173, which had been on his mind in light of artificial intelligence’s rapid advance: “If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions,66jogo we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave.”

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And there was Paragraph 92, which Fitzgerald remembered, and reconsidered, amid the Covid-19 vaccine mandates of which he was personally skeptical. “Thus science marches on blindly,” Kaczynski wrote, “without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research.”

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The influx of so many people fleeing various oppressions in Latin America and West Africa, all coming in such rapid sequence, has placed enormous burdens on the system, but it has not wrecked it. From the very beginning, the crisis revealed the willingness of ordinary New Yorkers to generously extend themselves, even as the rhetoric out of City Hall, steeped in resentment and a sense of futility, hardly encouraged it.

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