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Why Is the Vatican at a Tech Conference? (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a BBC report: As Bishop Paul Tighe sat down for our interview, he joked that not only is he probably the only priest at South by Southwest, but also the only person with grey hair. His presence here marks the first time the Vatican has attended the South by Southwest Interactive conference, and their panel - titled Compassionate Disruption - is one of this year's most talked about events. "In a world where increasingly [we're] not invited to part of conversations, I think if people are interested in having us, we're delighted to be here. "I want to learn and get a feeling for what are the things that are driving a generation of people who are in many ways shaping the world as we know it. He glanced around the room. "Really deep down, I see a lot of people looking for some sort of connectivity." That's certainly true -- though I get the sense for delegates here that means good wi-fi, rather than a strong sense of faith. So Bishop Tighe's mission is to get this industry to find real value in both.
Hard to put it any other way. Kudos to the Vatican for making the attempt, but a lot of developers aren't Christian or interested in their message.
The Catholic Church is a huge global organization with millions of 'employees' and 'customers'. Like any similarly large multinational organization, be it a corporation or an aide group or a supranational governmental body, it will have significant information technology needs. Of course they'll have an interest in technology and tech conferences.
I'd love to play a game where I'm reborn after his death, and I go around getting revenge with my Jesus powers. Turning water into wine, running over water, healing powers, fireballs, flight, spirit bomb....what's not to love?
I thought it was more of an arts/entertainment conference. The Wikipedia page says it focuses on "music, film, and interactive."
Or am I the only one that wouldn't call that a tech conference?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Speaking of whoring karma for the afterlife, here's the talk itself (missing from the reliably crappy article summary):
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2017/events/PP67508
When your community numbers over 1.2 billion people and you’ve been in operation for over 2,000 years, there’s a lot to consider when it comes to integrating new media and technology. The Vatican's iterative engagement of the "Digital Continent" stands in contrast to the velocity of mainstream technology adoption. Yet its unique approach to Twitter, Instagram and digital video have helped make the Pope the most influential world leader online.
This first-of-its kind SXSW discussion will shed light on how the world's oldest and largest community is adapting to and leveraging new media to encourage a new form of disruption: one guided by understanding, empathy and compassion.
MAR 12, 2017 | 12:30PM – 1:30PM
Primary Access: Interactive Badge, Platinum Badge
Secondary Access: Film Badge, Music Badge
Format: Panel
Event Type: Sessions
Track: Brands & Marketing
Level: Advanced
"I want to learn and get a feeling for what are the things that are driving a generation of people who are in many ways shaping the world as we know it. He glanced around the room. "Really deep down, I see a lot of people looking for some sort of connectivity." That's certainly true -- though I get the sense for delegates here that means good wi-fi, rather than a strong sense of faith. So Bishop Tighe's mission is to get this industry to find real value in both.
Translation: He's proselytizing or laying the groundwork to do so.
Duh. They want the latest know-how in "security".
...that there was a "Ghost" in the "Machine". ...
Hey look, this joke was inevitable.
This first-of-its kind SXSW discussion will shed light on how the world's oldest and largest community is adapting to and leveraging new media to encourage a new form of disruption: one guided by understanding, empathy and compassion.
or...more realistically, this was shoehorned in at the behest of an investor, program director, or local community/government representative because Jesus saves and this is Texas.
Good people go to bed earlier.
For anyone who's been paying attention, the new pope has been working hard to put the service and social commitments back to the front of the Church's mission... Reaching out to people who can and do make disruptive waves can mean a lot. There's so many cases where an app with the right niche in mind has revolutionized life for remote communities, and so many places where even small incremental changes can mean life or death for people...
They have a lot of skepticism to overcome, but I would like to believe they're trying to help the right people reach the right needs.
They are checking JesuitOS 2.0.4
In the tech area, I get the feeling that a LOT of computer scientists and engineers don't contemplate the moral implications of the software/hardware they are designing. Weather its GPS apps designed so badly using them while driving would definitely cause a crash, programmers working on data mining analytics for credit card companies, or smarter and smarter cars that are increasingly insecure and easy to hack, I think more thought about consequences needs to be done by the people making this software/hardware and not just pushing moral authority/decisions on middle or upper management. I'm not saying I want these designers to convert to a particular religion, studies show that just talking about the ten commandments can effect peoples decision making minutes later.
So maybe having a member of the congregation in the corner will subtly influence people in good ways
It's not unusual for large religious organizations to send representatives to tech conferences. As other have mentioned, they have technology needs too.
I remember having a nice chat with a priest from the Vatican Observatory when we attended an astronomy conference, At a conference on human-computer interaction, I spoke with a gentleman from the Mormon church's genealogy arm.
These were actual technology conferences with peer-reviewed publications, unlike the more arts and entertainment focused SXSW.
Sorta off topic, but sorta related...
I see a lot of people on the left angry about accusations of fake news directed at the media, but the Pope is a good example of that.
As a victim.
I am a Protestant and don't have heaping doses of respect for this Pope (his predecessor was significantly better IMO), but come on. The media frequently deliberately misquotes this Pope to make him sound like the Pope they want him to be.
We're entering a point where the state will have to start prosecuting the media directly for the content of their speech because they are damn near demanding a right to do stuff like this:
Headline: Mr. Smith and so hates $GROUP
His quote: I can see why some might want to harm them, but I don't believe in killing them.
Their summary: Mr. Smith said "[I]... believe in killing them."
He's going to realise why religions prefer access to children. Adults are a damn sight harder to bullshit.
Adults may be harder but not by a lot. One merely has to look at the number of born again christians to realize how susceptible adults are to religious bullshit. People desperately want to feel a sense of belonging to a community and to not have to say "I don't know". Churches (read cults) are really good at providing that and helping them feel good about it. The fact that it is based on a story that is objectively nonsense and made up doesn't seem to matter to a great many people. They'll believe anything you tell them as long as they get that good feeling. It's not so different from getting a high from drugs. Missionaries exist because they are effective. They don't have to convince everyone of their bullshit to be a success. They just have to grow the numbers of the faithful.
Religions get nearly all their followers from the most ignorant/impressionable. Both Christianity and Islam have both have spent centuries actively suppressing the threat of their followers getting informed/educated. We can see this in the existence of things like the secret Vatican library, and Sharia Law that denies women the right to attend school. I mean it was only since 1992 that the vatican formally accepted the earth goes around the sun.
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10...
The church are now under significant threat from technology as things like the internet have enabled information, knowledge and scientific research to flow far more freely then they can control. The bottom line is that people are leaving the catholic church in droves as they realise there's less and less credibility and need to explain things with "magic", so the Vatican realises they need to do something if they want to hold onto their gold palaces paid for by donations they continue to con out of of the poor.
>>https://cruxnow.com/church/2015/05/12/pew-survey-percentage-of-us-catholics-drops-and-catholicism-is-losing-members-faster-than-any-denomination/
It seems like this Vatican representative is filling exactly the same sort of role that Microsoft do at Linux conferences. i.e. trying desperately to figure out any small way that they can still appear to be relevant and to maintain their parasitic chokehold on a society that is increasingly aware of the fact that they add no value and their product is both expensive and crap compared to far better alternatives out there for free.
Despite evidence to the contrary the Catholic church holds on to the notion that Christianity (well their version of Christianity) is the exclusive keeper of morality. They think that only by believing in their particular belief system can a person have moral values. They are there as they are concerned about technologies such as AI lack moral and ethical standards according to the Catholic belief system.
If you look at the history of technology development (machinery, chemistry,...) you will see that the worlds various churches have had been involved in a lot of it.
Just imagine all the, "Excuse me. What does God need with a starship?" jokes.
Perhaps they're just looking for a way to transmit the holy spirit via networks. Then Catholics can just attend church by watching it on their big screen at home and using a tabernacle usb peripheral for getting the host blessed for communion. ;)
My faith begins with gravity and hwy lines - I have faith that the other people will stay in their lanes.
I believe in gravity 10,000x more than some all-knowing, entity, in the ski.
God, Gods, dogs as deities not so much. If God existed, having heard all those prayers to cure cancer, certainly that would have happened.
Don't get me started about the fairytales in the bible or any other religious books.
If you need some deity to scare you into being a good human, fine. Many people don't.
And SXSW isn't a tech conference, but I'd still like to go, if only to visit my old University and see some friends.
Slashdot was founded by students at a Christian college on a Christian college campus ... Hope College in Holland, MI.
And a simple search would have clued you in to this quickly: ...Unless you are making a somewhat sneaky point about the ethics of making claims without at least checking the facts first, in which case, well-played (sir or madam or other), well-played.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=ethics+vs+morals&pc=MOZI&form=MOZSBR
Because both them and many of the companies involved are basing their existence on fairy tales?
Because they Vatican. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I don't think you know what a Catholicism is then.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
There wasn't a question, so it's not a wrong answer. It's a relevant statement of fact in response to comments referring to Christianity or religion in general. The point remains that people of faith are involved in the tech industry, and everyone reading this statement benefits from this (i.e., slashdot wouldn't be here without people of faith).
The Vatican uses GNU/Linux both for their library servers,
as well as some info terminals.
“The philosophy of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is based on cooperation, common good and mutual benefit, and is in many ways consistent with the Catholic Church’s preferential option for the poor.”
With your weird non-native English, it's really hard to figure out what your point is.
Yes, Catholicism is one denomination of Christianity, and Hope College is affiliated with a different one.
Is the distinction truly relevant here?
It isn't the kids that donate millions to various religious groups or pay for mega churches.
Kids grow up and it's easier to brainwash them if you've already gotten to their parents. Organized religions know how to play the long game.
(Drums) Ba dum cheh...
I mean the guy who got in trouble because after his college buddy, Pope Urban VIII, asked him to publish the heliocentric hypothesis he did so in Italian with a dig in his treatise about the omnipotence of god.(Which is what actually got him in trouble.) I could point out that the 2 leading theories that they were considering, Tychonic and Copernican, are mathematically equivalent and make the same predictions. I could also point out that he had no actual evidence that the Earth moved, he tried to demonstrate that it moved with his tide theory but the problem that people at the time pointed out was that his theory got every fact about tides wrong except that there are tides. (It predicts that there's 1 tide a day, it's at noon, and it's always the same height. All of which are wrong.) The Catholic church are a bunch of control freaks but that whole anti-science thing is a myth.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Was Robert Langdon there?
I think I saw that movie...
...not only is he probably the only priest at South by Southwest, but also the only person with grey hair.
He's there looking for some fresh meat. Hide yo keeds, hide yo wife.
When they stop trying to get people killed by fighting against a simple and cheap preventative measure that can save thousands of people from AIDS, then I might start listening to them when they blather about moral issues.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."