Wow. If true, that looks an awful lot like outright fraud.

Right. What this also means is that the existing customers should have to enter into a new contract with the new company. If they treated a subset of customers as ongoing contracts and continued to provide service, rather than forcing everyone to sign up for service fresh, they have a real problem, because that makes them look an awful lot like a successor company.

Not really. The Church actually played a significant role in genetics (Mendel) and lots of other scientific advancements over the millennia. Yes, there are exceptions in the early history of the Church (and in the history of other religions as well, I suspect), but for the most part, science and religion have coexisted. Science tells the "how", religion postulates about the "why".

It's more accurate to say that religion preaches against allowing technology to destroy our humanity, values, ethics, morals, etc. For example, when AI is used to make things better for everyone, that's fine, but we should be careful to ensure that it is always used in a way that preserves the dignity of workers, as opposed to putting people out of work en masse just because AI can do something cheaper.

Well, I mean, the pope does have to be a man, so if the Church somehow starts to accept trans equality before it fully accepts gender equality, then I guess it could happen, in theory.

And then there's the (probably apocryphal) story of Pope Joan. :-D

Well said. Since 56% of Americans read below a 6th grade level and half the voters picked Trump... you are wasting your time on a lot of people not capable of intelligent thought.

Quote "Religion has been preaching against technological progress since as long as there's been religion".

In other words you're implying that the only solution is to burn the machines. In this case technically you are implying that the pope is the one offering that solution. But he's not. Neither am I.

The pope is just saying that machines need to be used in a way that uplifts all of humanity.

You immediately go to the idea that anyone who questions technological unemployment and negative impacts from technological advancement is opposed to technology.

It doesn't matter if they're religious or not (personally I'm an atheist).

Also for fucks sake you're just wrong. The Catholic church has all sorts of fucked up beliefs about abortion that are just scientifically wrong, the same for homosexuality and transsexuality.

But when it comes to every other area of science they're pretty damn good. In fact sometimes they're too good. At one point one of the popes was going to declare the Big bang and the science behind it to be part of their Canon but the guy who came up with the science asked the pope not to because science should not be something people are ordered to believe. And the Pope being the Pope agreed.

This isn't to say that historically the Catholic Church doesn't have problems with science. And Jesus fucking Christ American evangelicals are terrifying. Those guys want to burn down science.

But again to get back to my point the pope at no point in time criticized the technology they criticized the application of the technology and how it's going to be used to make everybody's lives worse.

And you can't even see that because you can't imagine technology being used for anything other than hurting people at this point. And at the same time you think it's morally wrong to oppose technology.

You see what I mean when I say you're not thinking. You got to jumble of ideas and thoughts in your head that you haven't taken the time to unpack and then you come to the internet and this website and you just start barfing them out and they're a huge mess.

And the problem is guys like you don't just barf your ideas out on stupid forums you also vote. There are real world consequences to the fact that you haven't actually reflected on any of the things you've been told in your life and what they actually mean.

You're doing the same thing to the Pope that everybody here on this damn website does to me. Even when I called you out in my original post for doing it.

Your brain is too locked down so you can't think of any other solution besides burning the machines. At no point did me or the pope say that we wanted to do that but your brain automatically inserts that solution without any thought.

That's because the image of a Luddite is a thought terminating cliche. It's something specifically designed to prevent you from questioning technology by terminating any thought about the impacts of technology.

And even when I pointed out to you you're completely incapable of realizing that you're doing it. I don't know how much clearer I can make it. Maybe if I used puppets...

First things first automation took 70% of the manufacturing jobs. Only 30% of them were lost overseas.

Next we took the national debt and our military strength and used that to artificially prop up the dollar making it the world's reserve currency.

This means an American dollar can buy a lot more imports than it really should be able to.

This means we get to bring in trillions of dollars worth of consumer goods and raw materials and heavy machinery for a fraction of the price and use those goods to artificially raise our standard of living. You couldn't really afford to have 70% of Americans driving big honking SUVs without that shit. We would have to, gasp, have walkable cities in public transportation. Ew.

You are a classic libertarian twat. Like the old joke about house cats unaware and unappreciative of a system they do not understand. Only at least a house cat is kind of cute and funny.

I'm not asking you to have a strong grasp of our economic system but for fucks sakes can you please learn the basics before you vote again? I really don't think that's too much to ask anymore.

Oh and for fuck sakes again, go look up how high interest rates are designed to cause recessions and mass layoffs. That's another aspect of our system I really really wish guys like you would understand. And I am way too tired to educate you further

Who couldn't be bothered to look up what a tariff was before voting for a guy with 34 felony convictions, 26 credible rape accusations, who hands out classified documents at his golf course like party favors.

If I had one wish to the Almighty I would ask for everyone on the planet to be given an extra 100 IQ points and for their kids to keep those IQ points. This thing where people cannot locate and process legitimate and real information is going to doom us all.

And I mean holy shit literally.

Technological unemployment was a major problem during the two industrial revolutions. It created an enormous amount of social stress and upheaval. They don't teach you about this in high school history. About how we had decades of unemployment following the two industrial revolutions until a combination of new tech and dead working age males got us back to full employment.

If you think the rich and the ruling class haven't realized that they are dependent on you as consumers think again. They are not at all happy that they need you to buy their products to maintain their lifestyles and they are eagerly anticipating the day when a combination of military drones and automated factories can produce everything they personally want and they can relegate us to the kind of reservations we stuffed the indigenous people on

Notice I'm not suggesting any solutions. I don't have any. The solutions I can come up with humans aren't willing to accept. We aren't going to destroy the machines and we aren't going to do fully automated space communism and we are too simple a species to try and come up with a middle ground.

Honestly as it stands I think in a few decades the mass unemployment is going to mean that the mega corporations preventing India and Pakistan from touching off world war III will be gone. And I suspect we're going to have enough working atomic weapons to make the planet uninhabitable for a species.

Basically we are going to Fermi paradox ourselves the stupidest way imaginable

I'm open to being proven wrong but feel free to suggest a solution that you can get enough people to get behind that we don't just get distracted by whatever current freak out or moral panic is put in front of us this month.

I mean come on, if we don't switch the fascism those 14 trans girls playing field hockey in the Midwest are going to destroy us all right? /s it's either that, violent video games or dungeons and dragons but one of them is going to destroy our civilization right?

The damage done is overwhelming. The United States is never going to fully recover from Donald Trump. The only question now is will our entire fundamental economic system collapse because that idiot is trying to ram through some tax cuts for rich people.

1) Don't know how long he'll live
2) He setup a plan which will be hard to undo when he does die
3) You can't just blow all that money overnight; if you want to control how it is spent, it will take a long time.

AI tools would have been incredibly useful because I could sit there and make the AI explain something to me 20 or 30 different ways until one of them clicked.

Back in the day when I was a wee lad I tried doing some basic programming and for some reason my brain could not wrap itself around the concept of data statements and I just couldn't use them in my programs because it didn't make sense to my tiny kid brain.

Years later I just looked up how they worked and instantly understood it because I was a borderline adult. Of course by then I had long since stopped using a commodore 64 and trying to write basic programs but still.

Sometimes kids brains just hit a wall and you need teachers to explain it but I'm old enough that I didn't have a programming teacher when I was a kid. And I was too stupid to ask for books at the library. I didn't know you could walk up to the librarian and just ask them to order books for you.

Fun fact back in the '80s there was a little tiny rural library in the United Kingdom with the world's best programming library because one of the kids there who grew up to write games for 8-bit and 16-bit computers knew that he could request books and he just kept asking for more and more books.

I'm not a horrible programmer but I wonder how much better I could have been if I had had access to not just more information but information in a different format until I could understand it.

Never mind when you are taught the wrong way. Buddy of mine plats guitar and they learned a whole bunch of bad technique when they were young because they had a crummy teacher and it's almost impossible to unlearn that bad technique.

Not a bad FP, but it seemed like an invitation for some kind of joke and Slashdot missed it again... Something about "fear of spiders"?

Properly modded informative and I personally thank you for the reference. I've read a lot of Eco's stuff, but don't remember that specific essay...