You best start believing in ghost stories

I'm still hopeful that this ends up being mostly "normal" technology. Time will tell!

From my perspective keeping people working in unneeded jobs is the actual evil.

The issue here is mostly with the age old hyperrealism humans operated under, as a group. Truth works (at least worked) worse. The way reality was shaped had a clear productivity purpose, which one can argue is for a greater good (of the group). At the same time, this meant we took a road which might have very well landed us on a local maxima, and now it's quite hard getting down from it. We do not know how, as a group.

So we arrive at such funny situations, where the Pope is low key signaling people who have the power to, should come up with a new story to avoid chaos and pain, but disguised as "truth". Or signaling that humans cannot coexist without being busy working, since they've been pretty much bred into it across the ages, and they cannot function if this suddenly stops. Small groups might, but large scale it's bound to get ugly. But he calls this unemployment thing "evil", which in a sense isn't wrong, there's a serious risk of evil manifesting as a side effect of that, sure.

So keeping them busy is mostly a need to deal with the side effect of breeding humans into working units, across the ages. Evil if you don't, evil if you do.

I guess my point is that we do not know how to interact without it being need based, fundamentally. Because we and the environment selected for this. And the core issue here is we will stop needing eachother, basically, and we don't know what to do at that point. I mean as a group.

Edit: To add a bit more, one must understand that religion developed to consider as many as possible, everyone, and make it work. Fitting everyone and extracting value. Large scale pragmatism. Where techies are optimizing down, doing most with least possible people. The incentives are at odds, in this regard.

And neither of these two perspectives look great for us a group.

missed "Numberless are the world's wonders, but none more wonderful than man" from Antigone.