“Why you should not use Uber (the car ride brokering company)”

Richard Stallman is engineering's smartest conspiracy theorist in the world. He's great at his sport, but getting to his level of expertise has clearly taken a toll on his ability to distinguish paranoia from reality. The tinfoil is doing something... The whole post is both objectionable and somewhat warranted/understandable at the same time.

"Then what will you do, if you don't want to tell Big Brother where you are going?"

RMS is right on again, as always. The problem is that the younger generation wants Big Brother to know everything, and that is sad and scary. One need look no further than the comments on this thread for proof.

We are not teaching our children the value of humanity, and the way that privacy creates a sense of self. "Self" is now what you make it on Twitter/Facebook/SocialNetDuJour. Sharing everything in a way that government/Facebook/Google can monitor ("Big Brother") is like breathing to the youth who've had iPhones since before puberty.

So many younger programmers think RMS is absurd. They don't even have context to understand where he comes from. RMS has been foretelling the future since the days of the GNU wars. He's an ideologue, yes, but one whose points have always been valid.

Even the term "Big Brother". It's from George Orwell's book "1984". I wonder how many younger programmers would know that.

> I'm personally unconvinced that it will create mass unemployment, but I don't call it crazy.

Why? It's quite inevitable that it will, unlike all previous eras, there won't be new jobs for humans because it's human thinking that's going to be automated. Robots destroy jobs, that's a fact; sometimes, that creates new jobs, but it's usually always far less jobs for far more skilled humans and that pattern is and must come to an end. Jobs that require smarter humans don't work for the vast majority of barely capable humans that exist.

Mass unemployment is coming, the masses aren't capable of knowledge jobs and labor jobs are being taken over by machines, what other possible outcome do you see?

Stallman isn't quite right on a few points. For example, you can summon an Uber via SMS or a mobile site. No app or smartphone required.

But let's address the core of his argument instead of nitpicking. Yes, Uber's behavior has been pretty unethical. They track customers and drivers. They mine their data to figure out who had one-night stands. They shirk regulations so they can expand quickly. But all of those points are moot for one reason: Uber is incredibly convenient.

People rarely sacrifice quality of life for their ideals. If you want to sink Uber, the activism route is not effective. The only way to win is to make a more compelling product. If your open source, non-tracking version is worse than Uber, only the tiny population of die-hard idealists will use it. I don't think RMS understands this, since he is one of the die-hard idealists.

"So what?"

The way of technology is to increasingly render people obsolete. This is great for some people for most its a threat to their ability to make a living.

The logical conclusion is not what you state but one conclusion his other is basic income and then you can automate away all you want.

There is an unfortunate tendency to think about technology replacing jobs as temporary until the workforce re-adjust yet the increasing reality is structural unemployment not just temporary.

This for instance is worrying http://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/d...

The luddite fallacy is well known by many yet there are an increasingly worrying trend that indicates that the fallacy is a fallacy itself.

The consequence is that as technology does what technology do, it will leave an increasingly larger and larger group of people unable to find new jobs.

The real competitors arent china, its automation and people really dont give it enough credit.