You make a good point that loss of some kinds of freedom might be compensated by gains of another kind. But I think you are incorrect in implying that by making this observation you are exposing a logical flaw in Kaczynski's argument. The things that you view as great about cars and computers (such as their ability to connect us with friends over long distances, say) are viewed with suspicion by Kaczynski. He thinks that, at the end of the day, these things are not fundamental to human freedom or happiness. At the same time, things that he thinks are fundamentally important are attacked in obvious ways by the omnipresence of cars and computers. Thus, his objection to these two technologies takes into account your idea that gains and losses need to be weighed against each other.
Of course, you can reply that Kaczynski is stupidly ignoring the positive effects of these technologies and that he is wrong when he asserts that the things that they give us are not fundamental to human happiness. To argue this, you will have to make certain claims about human psychology. Obviously there are plenty of things that we enjoy but that could be removed from our lives without causing great harm to us (Skyrim, for example). There are other things that are integral to our happiness (the love and respect of our family, for example). Kaczynski is arguing that technology attacks things in the second category while giving us lots of things in the first category. His underlying argument is that modern individuals have, through adoption of advanced technology, lost touch with fundamental sources of happiness. The setting in which to substantively debate Kaczynski is the setting of psychology, I think: what really makes us happy?
Kaczynski addresses this possibility explicitly in his 1995 essay "Industrial Society and its Future":
"Anyone who has a little money can have something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect. To make an impression on society with words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals and small groups. Take us (FC) for example. ... Even [if] these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people." [1]
The authors of this article write in their abstract: "Are there fundamentally random processes in nature? Theoretical predictions, confirmed experimentally, such as the violation of Bell inequalities, point to an affirmative answer. However, these results are based on the assumption that measurement settings can be chosen freely at random, ..." [1]
From its inception, quantum mechanics has used the language of probability to make calculations (this is the "Born rule" that another poster refers to), but this does not mean that the universe behaves randomly. Perhaps, as you suggest, this language of probability conceals human ignorance. To test this, we define a physical property called "realism" that says, roughly, "every experiment has a result that was knowable beforehand". If realism does not hold, then the results of some physical experiments are somehow randomly determined at the moment that the experiments are performed. A set of famous experiments (the "Bell's inequality experiments" [2]) have shown that, with certain assumptions, "local realism" does not hold, i.e. locality and realism do not simultaneously hold. Locality is the idea that it is possible to perform two experiments in sufficiently separated regions of the universe so that they cannot possibly influence each other. If general relativity were a complete theory, for instance, then we would have locality (because no signal could travel faster than light).
Almost all non-specialist physicists (physicists who use quantum mechanics but do not spend time trying to assess its foundations) accept locality and accept that the Bell experiments rule-out local realism. This means that they give-up realism, and these physicists say that nature is "fundamentally random". Some physicists try to give-up locality instead, and you will hear them talk about "non-local hidden variable theories". Other physicists, such as the authors of the linked-to "Nature" article, play carefully with the assumptions behind using the Bell experiments to rule-out local realism. For instance, they point-out the assumption that "measurement settings can be chosen freely at random". If this assumption does not hold, neither does Bell's proof.
All-in-all you are in excellent company if you say that physical processes are fundamentally random, but there are many specialist physicists who grapple with this question in their daily work.
This program tricks Dropbox into thinking that you own a file when all you actually have is hash values for each 4MB block of the file. Dropbox will add the file to your account whether you own a copy or not. There are two major consequences:
-This can be used for piracy of copyrighted files. If hash values for each block of the copyrighted file are distributed online then any Dropbox user can trick Dropbox into handing them the file. This is probably faster than using BT and, imo, it places the legal consequences on Dropbox.
-This can be used to sniff out what files other users have uploaded to Dropbox, which has serious privacy implications.
Of course, you can reply that Kaczynski is stupidly ignoring the positive effects of these technologies and that he is wrong when he asserts that the things that they give us are not fundamental to human happiness. To argue this, you will have to make certain claims about human psychology. Obviously there are plenty of things that we enjoy but that could be removed from our lives without causing great harm to us (Skyrim, for example). There are other things that are integral to our happiness (the love and respect of our family, for example). Kaczynski is arguing that technology attacks things in the second category while giving us lots of things in the first category. His underlying argument is that modern individuals have, through adoption of advanced technology, lost touch with fundamental sources of happiness. The setting in which to substantively debate Kaczynski is the setting of psychology, I think: what really makes us happy?