Slashdot's devolution is almost complete.

It's over "Gun Control" where the reasonable debate happens.

The Left, ever the great manipulators of language, realized they had lost traction advocating "Gun Control," and are now rolling with "Gun Violence" as their fallback position.

The words have changed, but their loathing of the 2nd Amendment remains intact and unwavering.

The programmer trains the AI to see the N-word as hate speech. Fair enough. Then the AI reads the so-called "black twitter" where everyone refers to everyone else as the N-word, and the AI tracks it all as hate speech. Also fair, it's a goddam computer, not a socio-linguist. Ditto the Q-word for the so-called "LGBTQ twitter." Fair, and fair.

Hysterical. But fair.

Explain to me how creative works can even be encouraged to exist without copyright.

The best selling book of all time was authored before copyright was invented. Explain to me how that happened.

~Loyal

There should be a minimum age requirement for writers of "Tech Culture" articles such as this. But because game culture writers are just one tick below music reviewers on the journalism pecking order, we will forever be getting these painfully-latest-jargon-ridden analyses by some 20-something about the most amazing online experience ever! that was previously done to death and then some back on CompuServe.

So what is your model?

I get my choice? I think I'll pick...Charlize Theron.

So we have creeping automation that is working its way up the social-economic ladder. This is happening.

Absent the loaded adjective...I can accept that. So stipulated. Let it show in the record.

The why of that fact is that the users of that automation find it profitable to eliminate the cost of employing people.

Yeah, you're focusing on one part of what has to be at least -- at least -- a four-part system. Automation and employing people both have costs. Those costs can be initial, repetitive, and exiting. Whenever the cost of one type of interchangeable economic input is more attractive to a producer than another then it benefits him to use the more attractive choice. That removes that choice, those resources, from other users, but releases the other choice for other producers or consumers.

Now it is pretty incontestable that if the trend continues - and it will - at some point, we will hit a unpleasant point where manufacturers cannot squeak more profit out of a system that has been made very lean, coupled with and overall economy in which most of the population is nothing more than a drain.

Yeah...no. It's not as incontestable as you're letting on. You're neglecting, among a myriad of other things, the fact that there are advancements in productivity, and the fact that preferences change. As an example of the former I offer the cyanide process for gold extraction, and as an example of the latter I offer the buggy whip.

So if we use the current model, there will be a need for a massive culling...[massive deletion]

Given that your premise is false, none of your conclusions follow.

This is a massively complicated issue. 19th century economics will not solve it. Our lizard brain is not going to solve it.

Well...you're not going to solve it.

~Loyal

Ask me that when I issue a press release about my recommended website blocking guidelines.

Seriously. Has there ever been a more contrived or self-absorbed organization than the EFF? They lost their way when they moved out of D.C....

It would take about three seconds for any human to come up with a workaround that could justify doing just about anything and still technically conform to the laws. Less than three seconds if you allow the zero'th law.

That wouldn't matter, because Asimov's robots don't obey the sixty-three words of the three laws. They obey the literally thousands of thousands of positronic pathways created for them in the factory. The sixty-three words are a sort of executive summary of what the three laws require, so creating a workaround would be unavailing to the robots.

~Loyal

The whole point of the Three Laws was to illustrate the holes in the concept of the Three Laws.

You couldn't be more wrong. The three laws grew out of a conversation with John Campbell where Asimov asserted that the endlessly repeating Frankenstein's monster-type robot stories wouldn't happen in the real world. Designers would place safeguards around robots just like they place safeguards around every other dangerous thing. I'm reminded of an anecdote regarding a new energy source that was presented to a college class. It had the unfortunate traits of being an odorless poisonous gas that also happened to be explosive. The class was allowed to vote, and they voted to prohibit the energy source. It turns out that the energy source had been used for home heating for decades. Among other safeguards, designers added odorants and automatic shut-off valves for when the pilot blew out. Campbell challenged him to describe robot safeguards, and then challenged him to write stories about them.

EVERY Azimov Robot story was designed to show the unintended consequences of the Three Laws....

Susan Calvin would slap you backhanded.

~Loyal

Both Left and Right have them: The Evangelicals who think the world is 5,000 years old, and the Animists who believe that every species should be preserved, no matter the cost. Both sides refuse to acknowledge evolution. It is amusing to note how many of the self-righteous latter are so critical of the former.

No. They will cast Idris Elba.

And the Puritans thought liquor was pretty dangerous, too, and actually outlawed it here in the 1920s. Prohibition was an enormous failure, back then, because you cannot legislate morality. You can, however, today, hashtag something from benign to "evil," because most all of the sheep are corralled in the same social media/mainstream media pens. In the end it is not a government ban on Porn that should scare you, it's the SJW turning of Porn into a thought crime that is the real danger.

I don't know how much porn the Utah government downloads, but according to a researcher at Harvard, the *people* of Utah are quite the dawgs, which was my point.

Porn has nothing to worry about from the Right, and knows it I even read someplace that Utah is the state with the largest number of porn downloads, on the average. Porn *IS* terrified that the #MeToo and #KillHarvey and whatever other movements percolating up from the feminist Left that demonize the objectification of women will begin to impact porn consumption.