Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI
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A new Amish-like lifestyle may be developing before our eyes in real-time and that's very interesting to follow and observe (from a distance).
Knowledge workers use it primarily to "augment" their work, answer questions with AI, get it to create documents, etc. But it's usually 1 individual to 1-2 conversation threads.
Meanwhile in software development were running fleets of agents. At work we have it setup where firing off one agent request will eventually lead to like 10-20 AI calls at different parts of the process.
I make this distinctions because it changes how each group thinks about AI. For software devs it just feels like "moving up the stack". Yeah you're not writing code anymore but there is still plenty of work to do and problems to solve within your "software factory". Contrast that with knowledge workers that feel like the AI is making all of their decisions for them.
I almost think of this as a factory worker versus an artisan. The software devs are "factory workers" where we used to be on the floor but now we're managing the machines that took over the work. There are still tons of interesting problems at that stage and you still feel like you have worth. Contrast that with a knowledge worker that's more of an artisan in this analogy. For them they aren't running a factory but instead watching a robot do the work they used to do while they sit idle and watch it.
I think your general thesis about how AI is used of agents vs. the general chat interface is true, but not the rest.
Your knowledge worker example is where people fail when using AI, and it is usually very obvious.
Knowledge workers who know what they're doing recognized very quickly that AI often goes down very bad rabbit holes, often cites incorrect sources, makes up sources, or will use a random Facebook source or Reddit post as an authority on some topic. In legal circles you have to fight it to understand what venue(s) apply and to get it to stick to the right ones, in medical research it will sometimes pull in crackpot papers from left field and intermix them with well defined research.
People in the knowledge realm caught on very quickly that you have to use AI iteratively and constantly back check what you get and correct it. Let it run on its own and it will give you a legal theory based on some weird case in Kentucky that has no bearing to your issue with a court in Vermont.
Using AI is like using adaptive cruise control: you're still in charge of where the vehicle will ultimately end up and if you decide to go take a nap you will wake up in the hospital or end up in the morgue.
It's true though that the 'time between interventions' is lengthening steadily.
The primary difference is that it's much easier for the AI to figure out itself if it's wrong on the programming side. Knowledge workers don't have automated testing for example.
The end result is the knowledge worker needs to be more heavily involved in the process and be more mindful of mistakes which makes it a worse experience for the user and generally less productive than it is for programmers.
For most professionals it’s just safer to avoid having output in your workflow. Keep using AI, but stop copying and pasting AI output.
In practice, lawyers generally don't ever disbarred except if they lie to clients or steal from them.
All of this will sort itself out and eventually bio, legal, software will all just work.
Don't hold onto any single assumption about the world. Things are going to be weird.
We aren’t talking about the new version of SV spiritualism here, we’re talking about systems people actually care about.
If lawyers and article writers are in the knowledge realm. Then your thesis has plenty of counter-examples of people who just use AI to create stuff and don't correct it.
And I'm probably on the more amateurish end of AI development. As I learned these techniques from YouTube.
When you hear about the work Anthropic researchers are doing, they seem to be using hundreds or thousands of agents to solve problems.
There's a reason they're Anthropic researchers. The value proposition tanks when you actually have to foot the bill for the tokens you use.
Subagent flows can improve overall performance, but it generally also comes with disproportionately high token use. That gets worse with parallel subagents that are often doing the same things at the same time and cannot share a cache.
So the median developer is probably using 5-20 agents at a time for a task. I'm not sure if that crosses the threshold of being a "fleet of agents".
The "median developer" refers to the particularly skilled or fast-paced, not that there are continuous numbers of every practitioner using N-agents
I think that sums up the "fleets of agents" approach fairly well.
I don't actually use AI much at all simply because in my line of work the knowledge is industry specific and niche - an AI can't tell you how to fix a proprietary machine. I have used it a few times but to do dumb things like write some Excel script or some other piece of software I have no interest or need for learning.
It’s a phase.
Fortunately I'm in a shop that isn't being judged by feature output quantity, but is absolutely judged on whether or not our internal or external customers go out of service. We don't have pressure to pump output.
In the sense that "down the stack" is well-captured by existing language, AI is absolutely moving programmers up the stack. I can describe my goals using high-level abstractions, and the low-level implementation is somewhat constrained by that.
How well constrained it is depends on how well I described the problem and the quality of the model - much like how good human-written code is depends on how clearly the authors were thinking when they designed the structure.
I know knowledge workers who throw what you give them into the slop machine and return the slop, but I don't need them, I can feed the slop machine myself. I still need those who have experience and taste that the machine hasn't got yet.
I’m just old enough to remember some older adults in my life who refused to use email. They would only talk to coworkers in person or on the phone.
It did not work out very well, unless they could afford to retire at that point. When your career evolves, the only way to keep participating is to evolve with it.
I like to call it “keyboard cooties.”
I had a boss early in my career (around 1990) who considered typing effeminate and was mildly horrified at what the world was coming to with all us guys who were cheerfully using a keyboard. He had a secretary who did all his typing. This was ~5 years before email became common, but I'm sure he would have had all his emails printed so he could read them properly.
I can see why someone who never used email until their fifties would never get fully comfortable with it.
(actually, i forgot i have 2 or 3 others, I check them even less, perhaps a few times a year, really only when i need to reset a password associated with them)
It's a fucking log dump for machines.
You see that 90% of the daily volume is sludge and think this is a healthy communication network for humans?
I can't afford a pay cut, and AI isn't making my job worth more.
Why at lower wages? Most automation has led to people transitioning to higher wages. Utility works get paid 10x more than lamplighters. Why would that change here? Your job will have a bigger impact, affect more people, and you'll be doing more with less.
I am not saying all employers will immediately start paying people more, but economically it doesn't make sense that pay will go down.
But, the story doesn't end there does it? Most loom workers left their jobs and became factory workers (part of the same technology revolution) and critically: made MORE money. They were wealthier. And the loom machine operators left had a better job. There are very good sources for this, not just vibes [1].
I don't deny that the transition process is traumatic, and there is much we should be doing this time around to assuage the process. But all the evidence points to a general rise in pay, material conditions and standard of living.
[1]: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300205251/libertys-dawn/
Individuals and entire communities can live out the rest of their lives destitute and hopeless in the wake of changes that leave them behind. Things might be brighter for those who come after, but let's not pretend we're not doing real violence to those left behind.
There's a lot of questions right now.
1. Will there be a net-new creation of jobs? Is positive-sum knowledge work a real thing, or have we run out of new jobs to create?
2. How quickly will workers transition to an AI version of their jobs?
3. Will AI even succeed in a broad way across knowledge work or will the frontier of AI remain jagged and only impact some jobs (coding) while leaving others alone?
4. For workers left behind in this transition, what will their lives be like? We know from looking at previous technology transitions (industrial revolution, factory automation, computer revolution, now maybe AI revolution) that many workers really do end up in bad places. It's perfectly reasonable to demand that in today's world in our advanced societies that even if those workers are unable to adapt that they are able to lead lives with dignity.
There's a lot of interesting conversations and investigations to be had but my biggest fear is just that nobody is really willing to listen to the other side with empathy. This entire conversation thread is just people snipping at each other, hitting the vote buttons based on where they want to steer their favorite opinion. If you want to do social and economic science in this space but people are so polarized, the work will be thwarted. In general offline spaces are less polarized (not to be mistaken for pro or anti AI disruption) than online spaces, but my fear is that we continue to polarize, making understanding the fabric of our social change challenging and letting down everyone in the process.
Try to come up with a job that both doesn't produce anything physical, and can't be done by AI.
This is vague marketing speak and simply not the reality on the ground. As someone implementing all new workflows, most of the time I’m create new product classes wholesale. sometimes I see people upskilling tasks so the same human can do more.
I can’t think of a single knowledge job where they are removing humans from the loop completely.
Random news headlines of struggling companies doing “AI layoffs” don’t count. No amount of AI can save bad leadership.
people who spout the trite “everything will be better at some nondescript future point in time” are essentially screaming “the ends justify the means and screw everyone else, i’m going to get my bag / be ok”.
The economy now is very different, no gold or silver standard, less isolation and more globalised product chains and processes, and 7-times as many people.
There is a good chance that a large enough number of people will suffer from this transformation, and they will have to fight with whatever they have, because if they don't, they will risk being left on the roadside and not getting any raise.
People having some direction over how jobs are automated should keep that in mind, otherwise it will be too late to convince the masses of people fearing automation that it is their fault not seeing the positive angles of automation.
No, what you mean to say is that automation has eventually (decades later) led to higher purchasing power in the system as a whole. The outlook for people that were directly automated away was pretty bleak, actually. The hundreds of thousands of lamplighters did not largely become the thousands of electricians that were needed in this new industry.
This tracks for all industries. Automation literally means far fewer people will be employed to do the same job (otherwise what's the point of it?). That dumps these workers out at the low end of the general job market, where they have to compete with an increasing number of people. Because of the desperation to get any job, the wages fall. It's only decades later that societies settled into a new place and created enough brand new jobs to make up the shortfall, or applied regulation to reign in the crazy power imbalance. That's the stuff you miss out on if you only look at statistics that span centuries and treat the population as one homogeneous mass. The people who are directly targeted by automation are very likely to have their lives messed up for a very long time.
No technology involved? Other than I guess tangentially, containerized shipping. I don't see how that analogy applies here at all, every AI workflow I've seen has been either:
a) Totally new thing that was never done before that is possible now and is therefore creating a new class of work
b) Worst case scenario: a whole spate of jobs being consolidated under one person, but its still a human in the end.
So everything I'm seeing is pointing to this being a lamplighter/utility worker situation.
Gonna need a citation for this.
A grub hub delivery man is wealthier today than a farmer 100 years ago and that's purely because of two reasons: Technology and Unions :)
This ball is going through even your ever-moving goal posts. My statement never claimed people's careers would stay the same and they'd just make more money.
There are some great reads on this topic[1].
[1]: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300205251/libertys-dawn/
Currently, I don't see any reason at all to suspect that AI will make my life better or even just not make it worse.
AI boosting seems to be very close to pulling shit out of ass.
It was never about software. That was just the means.
Even in the software era, fads developed and tech stacks changed frequently. Now it's just moving a hundred times faster.
You need smart systems thinkers to do this. That's the role. Be smart in managing processes and complexity.
I'm not going to give coding interviews anymore, but I am going to give architecture, systems design, and SRE interviews. People still need to know how not to fuck up a database and how to design scalable and resilient systems.
The number of people who never seem to have understood what software and IT is in most companies is eye opening to me. Your job was never really to "write code" - you were always automating things.
That the field got somewhat stuck for a couple decades seems to have made many people forget this.
The vast majority of programmers who started in the 80's and 90's are basically directly responsible for massive waves of job losses in certain categories. Lots of cases of entire departments of secretarial level paper-pushing work being replaced with a small team of programmers. Same will happen with AI tooling. The difference is programmers are no longer the "winning" party here.
Computers and software in the end are the most configurable and complex automation system society has ever created. They are simply a continuation of industrial automation, and AI is a continuation upon that.
So ... perhaps more secure than email, but not necessarily as much as you'd think. Though maybe it isn't as common now to have phone lines with fax receiving included. I worked for a CLEC at the time and got my phone & internet through them too, so maybe I was just getting the special deluxe plan. Had my very own public class C, too, but that's a different problem.
Lots of people, myself included, understand llms and can and do use them at work because we have to, but we might choose to not use them outside of work because they rot our brains, are unethical, funnel even more money into the hands of a few billionaires (selling a service trained on stolen property) and haven't actually been proven to make the world better. Unlike email!
What the fuck have LLMs done yet? Nothing! We would be no worse off without them so far and no one has anything to show to prove otherwise, except some vibe coded websites that all look the same (edgy dark theme and hacker vibes)
Traditional professions share essential characteristics. They provide a vital service to society, requiring expertise and skill developed through years of training, education, and experience. Professions establish standards of practice and certify that their members are qualified to serve the needs of society.
--US Army, ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession
Software does not have explicit standards of practice or a required body of certifications for its practitioners. Software, as an employment, is whatever an employer wants or is willing to accept at any given moment.
Hillel Wayne wrote a really excellent well researched article about software engineering compared to other forms of engineering a few years ago. It necessarily goes into a lot of this stuff but what emerges is that these definitions are regulatory and historical debris.
You don't need medical board or a bar to certify or constrain professional behavior and those organizations may not constrain as much as you assume anyway. The reasons we do have those institutions is as much a matter of historical accident as any modern need for it, and the reasons we don't have it for other high impact fields is pretty much an accident too.
And in a lot of the world software engineering does have professional certification and standards of practice. They still ship adware and racist loan denial algorithms too.
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/
Your definition would include Chiropractors as a profession. Such scum of the earth deserves nothing but contempt with extreme prejudice.
Every part of your existing job is transforming before your eyes.
If you cling to definitions and static roles, you're going to have a bad time.
Systems design, architecture, database fundamentals, a bit of SRE. That matters. Not coding and syntax and toy problem solving with data structures and algorithms.
My own experience is that coding, syntax, and some kinds of toy problem solving are important skills to use AI coding tools most effectively. I routinely get PRs these days whose descriptions seem plausible but are clearly wrong from a glance at the code, and I've had times when I'm unable to communicate to someone why a PR is wrong because they're not able to form a sufficiently detailed mental model of what it's doing.
I'm not going to let the army tell me what my job is.
And lets be pirates and hackers instead.
https://www.computer.org/education/bodies-of-knowledge/softw...
But by that definition, soldiering can never be a "profession" as a soldier is always regulated by the government they serve, and there is no professional association regulating mercenaries. But I would be very hesitant to suggest that the US Marines are not professional soldiers. They are. The definitions are messy.
As they should. Industries should be self regulating. While these industries form their own standards of practice they do so with the blessing of government, typically under state government supervision/authorization in the US, and are held to account by government. A lawyer or doctor who violates their standards of practice could very likely be guilty of criminal law and find themselves in prison depending upon the violation even when no other criminal actions occurred.
Even bus drivers are held to higher standards of practice than software developers.
Because while there are some software developers that might be in a place to cause people physical harm, ALL bus drivers are ALWAYS in a position to cause great and immediate harm to others on the road.
It's the legal liability that SWEs don't want. e.g. You wouldn't be able to just slap "This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE." on your software and walk away from it when lives are at stake. A so-called Profession Software Engineer would have to accept liability for their work product, and those of the juniors working under them.
I started down the road to becoming a Professional Engineer while I was in college as I studied Electrical Engineering and was more interested in hardware/power engineering. I took, and passed, the Engineering Intern Test in my state (which is the preliminary exam you take before you can start your journey to become a PE). Then life happened and job/career opportunities took me in a different direction/industry, and I've been doing software instead. So, I never became a licensed Professional Engineer. I'm still a licensed engineering intern, though. I'm still bound by the legal and ethical standards that it entails and could lose my license for violations.
There are certainly things where you need to have an officially licensed engineer actually stamp the plans. That doesn't mean everything about the plans was done by someone who holds that stamp, just that they were reviewed and signed off by the person holding the license. Lots of people may work on those plans. They're still doing engineering work. And that's just for the kinds of things which actually require a licensed "engineer".
There's still tons of jobs which is often still called "engineering" which often don't involve anyone who has a stamp. Few electrical engineers, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, or lots of others actually have any kind of engineering license. They still get degrees in things like "Bachelor of Science of Electrical Engineering" or "Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering". Their job roles usually have "engineer" in it. And yet it seems like the job people only really criticize as "you're not an engineer, engineers are licensed" is SWE.
I always come back with "you're not an engineer, engineers wear stripey hats"
I guess search engines count for something if you shovel in enough coal ;)
Many states require you to pass a test and get a license/certification before working in fast food.
That is not a requirement in the SWE world.
The sheer lack of accreditation and standards-enforcing body is what makes sofware engineering a non-profession.
Yes, several: the ACS, ACM, IEEE.
So you’re wrong.
What was your last employer that asked for your license number of member ID from any of those organizations? I am guessing it has never happened.
Normally when people try this argument they are hoping a for a dog whistle to shift ground because they don't want to be regulated.
People refused phone calls, refused to watch TV, refused to buy computers, refused to move their workflows to software, refused emails or browing the web, refused online shopping, refused smartphones, refused social media.
And there's nothing wrong with any of this. Ultimately everyone decides which stage of technology they are comfortable with. Everything until then is comfortable and convenient, and everything newer is corrupting society and rotting our brains.
Saying that this revolution is another one of those is true in a general sense, but misleading in the specific sense. Just as saying that adding 1c heat to some body of water is "more of the same" can be true in a general sense, but misleading when the water's basis temperature is 99.5c.
That is to say, periodic or gradual change induces large changes at inflection points.
It feels similar to the progression from post-WW2 technological utopianism that arose with the adoption and deployment of massive advancements in materials and mechanical, and electrical technology, to the cold-war dread of nuclear and ballistic technology.
I think the 90s saw the end of the cold war which lifted a bunch of that dread. The optimism of those days has been worn down over time.
What I remember back then is at least the pretense being sold that the technology would improve people's lives by giving them more leisure and enjoyment. That the productivity gains would be reflected in some improvement in quality of life. I think the main difference now is that this expectation has been lost by most people.
[0] https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/gen-z-turning-a...
You really think this is an apt comparison? I don't think the creators of any of those technologies were warning society that their own creations might wipe out humanity.
They are only doing this now IMO so that they can be the ones writing the regulations to keep us all "safe", just like we need identity verification to "save the children". They want to keep competition at bay so they can have a $2T IPO, and unregulated, "unsafe", Chinese, open-weight, and local AI threatens that IPO.
I disagree with "sizable". We haven't seen near this level of opposition in the past (I'm old enough to know), mostly because moving from say landlines to mobile phones, or postal mail to email, or radio to TV, didn't threaten the jobs of large segments of the population. Past opposition tended to be more rooted in culture or even religion (TV as a vehicle for "ungodly" programming, etc.)
I run a wide-screen 1080i Sony Display as my main TV. Power consumption sucks, though.
And now you want to automate what little most workers do?
I'm clearly not being pro 9-5 here. But in a 9-5 world, we need jobs in order to eat.
Like posting on hacker news?
I find your Amish example is striking and accurate.
As technical qualms were solved and many other capability issues with AI have been solved, the continual heel digging and goal posting by group 2 has started to just feel more akin to a religious stance than something based on any specific fact. There is no version of AI that they want to see, they will oppose it on moral(-ish) grounds on sight, etc.
AI has real issues, but like you, observing this re-adjustment in realtime has been really interesting, especially as it seems to come from people I share 99% overlap in interest and politics with, but who hate AI like they do.
It also feels akin to de-radicalizing MAGA or something. The rejection or idea that they are wrong causes a whole worldview to collapse in something akin to ego death, so instead of facing that possibility they just insist they are right.
If the point is that we all get shoved in a blender, and the people building the blender are actively salivating over what they'll be able to pawn the resultant slurry off for——does being told that the economic efficiency of the blender is inevitable or that you may get shoved into a Vitamix instead of a Kenmore——does any of that move the needle on your projected life satisfaction post-blender?
It can be an ethical stance based on facts, rather than religious-like. AI has no shortage of ethical issues that could stop someone from using it.
Comparing these people to religious or MAGA types - who believe in things that are false or at least unprovable - is farcical.
They've stopped technological progress. I tell you since AI started taking over, my experience is that nearly all forward progress (in software at least) has come to a halt. We've been standing in place, maybe sliding backwards a bit.
Here's the thing about AI: intelligence isn't a new thing, and it isn't a tool. The Amish can tell you that having a brain doesn't meant that you don't need a plow. In some ways they're much smarter than the AI crowd, all of who loudly keep insisting that brains will make plows and tractors and combine harvesters obsolete. You're so convinced that intelligence is the ultimate replacement for tools that you've stopped climbing the tech tree of tools...
It's like the tech industry itself no longer believes in technology.
I'm not even talking about holographic game consoles or FTL travel. Why can't we finally have a good container orchestrator that's not kubernetes for example?
Easy, we can't because the LLMs know a lot about kubernetes but wouldn't know anything about a new orchestrator, so they'll always suggest k8s, and the button-pushers will just say "yes, do it, no mistakes". Maybe if Anthropic decides they need to create a new orchestrator, they would bias Claude heavily enough for it to actually get used, but that's about the only way I see.
"Why don't we have any new programming languages" or "Why don't we have any new web frameworks" or "Why don't we have any new operating systems" or "Why don't we have any new container orchestrators" might be the same kinds of questions as "why is the design for washing machines still basically the same as it was 50 years ago?" or "why are we still using English, where are all the new conlangs to replace it?" "why are we still using email/SMTP instead of inventing a better system" "why haven't we invented a new calendar?"
All it will lead to is yet more people that are out of a job. Right now at least a driving license (more so if it is a commercial license) is a source of income to many.
What's the market demand? I'm confident there are plenty of alternatives being churned out today but nobody's looking or asking for any. If only because they settled on k8s, they have it on their CV, they have certifications, and switching is a huge investment and risk.
Right now to me it feels like the innovation is in using LLMs to (finally?) clean up existing code, find vulnerabilities, do maintenance, optimize, and if necessary rewrite.
Where before humans learned and built better tools, now you keep paying forever to get re-trained models. What makes it a regressive feedback loop is that the people who used to learn and push the frontier are now using AI to repackage others' work as their own. Eventually what will be left to train on but copies of copies of copies?
Also, you might think that you are observing Amish (or AImish) from a distance. It is same for them. They watch the modern world rot with uncontrolled and out-of-sync evolution. You are being observed.
There are over 2 Billion people without Internet still and they survive.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/technological-innovation/2-5...
At my age of several decades, I lived several decades before the Internet even caught on and managed very well as did most people.
Questioning whether people might potentially not fare well by choosing to not use AI is what is truly puzzling to me about your comment.
I read it as: faring well in a work/industry/employment situation where expectations for velocity and quality pivot on the fact that 99% of your peers use AI, and 90% of those use it to do poor quality work quickly.
Now your boss is surprised your email took more than 10s to produce, and wonders why you are concerned about what it contains. None of your teammates are.
Small thing: many/most of the people outsiders identify as Amish actually aren't. There are a variety of group living similar lifestyles, give or take. Collectively they are now described as the "Plain People", which links to both their apparently simple ways and mode of dress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_people
Don't get me wrong, just like the Amish, I believe it's a valid or even honorable choice for him to make. I also highly respect the Amish though because they're a minority that refuses to be victimized by their choices and that's the stance I'd like to see here.
> he does not have to use AI to complete his work. I wonder if that'll just result in him offloading work to people that act as AI proxies for him and then, wouldn't the human have less value than the AI since he just delegates?
Interesting times ahead indeed.
Please read this:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r...
What makes the comparison wild? The Amish are thoughtful and deliberate about what technologies they reject, adopt, and accept with constraints. Many of the people I know who have concerns about relying on LLMs are similarly thoughtful and deliberate.
"If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long."
I just looked it up and Thomas Pynchon remains alive.... how wonderful.
Thank you for this
But in this case Amish is not really an insult of course. I guess they are a hard-working people. Self-sufficient. And allow their young to take a sabbatical from the primitive life to see if it’s really something that they want to dedicate their life to.
On the other hand, of course there won’t be some Amish split. You can’t just pick and choose modernity. You can’t form a subculture of No AI. That’s why people are critical of AI; we live in a society.
[1] Being ahistorical and using Luddite as an insult also helps.
I say that as someone that uses it everyday for technical things only, for research it is great. i literally have 30 sessions in parallel going with an LLM. that said, I struggle to see the need for AI in anything else. I build it into services that I build but that scope is nowhere what meta would have you believe. It doesn't need to be making decisions for you. You don't need to offload decisions to it. It is upon you to validate and research the findings and the finding generation process.
Ai is stripping people away from their identity. There’s tons and tons of hatred for it… even here on HN.
societal ostracization (e.g. boycotts)
sabotaging data centers, data gathering infra (flock cameras), web infrastructure
These are just methods within the current societal norms and context, if not I could think of 10 more.
For example, it is not beyond the realm of imagination to think that large swathes of people could stop using technology (as in phones & computers) altogether, and return to a more traditional physical communal state.
It is not beyond the realm of imagination that countries, after suffering from cyber attacks, could start decoupling themselves from the global internet, and wall themselves off (similar to China), and develop their own unique culture around technology.
It is not beyond the realm of imagination that tags like Anti-AI be mandated to be attached to products similarly to kosher, halal, etc.
But if someone was say, working on housing approvals and refused to use AI because of religious exemptions to do their jobs faster, I would hope any court would strike it down.
It's easy to find egregious corner cases of philosophical workflows where an LLM was inappropriately used to replace thinking, where the whole goal was thinking (which is the case here).
But we know most token use is software development + back office paperwork. A big chunk of it is productivity improvements for things we all need (housing, medical paperwork, insurance etc.), so to me, that's where my argument lies.
The bottleneck for housing is construction and landlords. The bottleneck for medicine is the number of doctors and the inelasticity of demand. The bottleneck for education is the number of teachers. Etc.
This is patently false on multiple levels. One, on a simple level automating paperwork frees up labor for more useful things they can do immediately. Two, the footprint of what AI can do is rapidly growing. Till 2 months ago, no one thought LLM's could command robots, and now voila [1]. Of course these capabilities will plateau somewhere, but it's clear the productivity curve hasn't even been explored yet.
At least in my city, housing is severely restricted by the cost and availability of labor. I want labor to be paid well, but I always want housing to be cheaper, the missing link is productivity.
[1]: https://x.com/ihorbeaver/status/2104646736652447854?s=20
What will be the revenge effects of LLMs and diffusion models? I sense that the revenge effects from these technologies will be much more substantial.
It's kinda funny that you can put that after all of the big jumps in technology:
Email: It gave rise to spam and many types of fraud.
Cellphones: It gave rise to spam and many types of fraud.
Texting: It gave rise to spam and many types of fraud.
Social Media: It gave rise to spam and many types of fraud.
Online Gaming: It gave rise to spam and many types of fraud.
Smart phones: It gave rise to spam and many types of fraud.
And now AI: It gave rise to spam and many types of fraud.
Non-sense, trains can easily haul spam and transport fraudsters around!
I swear there'll be a movie about this some day
ETA: some of these companies are chopping down a whole god damn forest to send me furniture catalogs. Please stop!
Is this true? I would think that this conflicts with first amendment rights a bit.
If they need a Viet person for a role in a Vietnam War movie, they'll cast for "native or fluent Vietnamese speakers". Of course it's entirely plausible that a black guy is a fluent Vietnamese speaker but auditions are very subjective so good luck proving that the black guy played the role of NVA Soldier #1 better than the actual Vietnamese guy.
I would be shocked if, had the university declined, the courts ultimately ruled that it was protected. Congress is free to write laws protecting people against discrimination for various beliefs. But they law they have on the books now shouldn't be stretched to cover this.
It's worth understanding why sincerely held religious beliefs are such a big deal and in a different league from "strong personal convictions". It's because people who hold them generally are under and bound by two authorities: their state law and their church law (which might take many forms). If a person is in a position where they simply cannot abide both laws simultaneously, the state must yield. Otherwise the state is no protector of freedom.
A humanist may have strong, sincerely held beliefs, but he is not under any authority that compels those beliefs, so they aren't "religious". He is permitted by all his authorities to use AI. He just doesn't want to out of a private belief that it is somehow "wrong".
If your employer orders you to do something you believe is wrong, but you are not required to believe it is wrong by a higher authority, then your employment should terminate. Same as if you just didn't want to do your job, your employment would terminate. Title VII just isn't about that stuff.
Both of these seen to go against the first amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
HR director, to employee's director: Does this guy use AI for anything currently? Do you need him to? If we grant this request, will it affect us negatively?
Employee's director: A couple people use AI. It's not required at all. Honestly, people don't know how to use it a lot of the time. Granting it would not change anything.
HR director, to employee's director: Okay, great. We've got 3 pending lawsuits right now and I don't think this guy would have a case anyway, but our legal bills are higher than we budgeted for. We have more important things to worry about.
HR director, to employee: Your accommodation request is granted.
Humanist organization press release: This is a landmark human rights case in American history.
The article actually links to a federal court case which ruled, indeed, that humanism is a religion [0].
It is my understanding that to suggest that strong, sincerely held beliefs are not in themselves authoritative is a rejection of humanism.
0: https://www.edweek.org/education/federal-court-finds-secular...
We have to solidify laws protecting anti-AI-ers if that's their choice.
We do have limits for how much work a human is allowed to do and, based on the experience of Amazon workers, they are due for some tightening already. I'm not seeing a clear case for AI but I wouldn't discount it entirely either.
I imagine a solution would be a knowledge worker's bill of rights that declares the amount of output that one can reasonably expect from a human. You could add some measurements like "a knowledge worker cannot be expected to understand and take responsibility for more than X printed pages of work per day", with the expectations that if your employees are overworked then the accountability falls on you.
[1] DUIs too: https://www.loweringthebar.net/2026/04/still-illegal-to-driv...
The whole point of a tool is that it increases the amount of output we can expect from workers. Otherwise we'd still all be doing agriculture, because the farmer's bill of rights sets the maximum output of a farm and there's not enough surplus for non-farmers.
IMO the key is risk: right now no one is taking responsibility of the AI errors (IMO by design), but the second we codify who's legally responsible for them we'll see calls for slowing down coming from those groups.
Protect them from what, exactly?
There are no legal carveouts for that.
Why not highways? That's an arbitrary line to draw.
We exclude plenty of people from society, at least in the abstract. Someone who simply acts weird can be excluded from society. There are certainly no law which forces people to include them?
>the object of anger at "those darn Luddites"
Again, I'm not sure what kinds of laws could reasonably prevent this. Seems like we're all basically free to criticize one another for personal beliefs. If that wasn't the case, then 99% of social media would be in constant breach of the law lol
>You can't tell an Amish he can't use physical coins
Well, for one, laws protecting the acceptance of US currency aren't specific to Amish people based on their beliefs. It's more about protecting the value of US currency. And two, private companies are allowed to not accept physical currency. Plenty of companies only accept credit card, etc. That's legal. And Amish people wouldn't be able to purchase goods and services from such places.
Of course, the Amish typically don't care about that, because they're not typically in the market for the kinds of goods and services offered by such businesses. In contrast, someone who is happy to consume modern technology accept AI for arbitrary reasons seems like someone who is making interacting with society unnecessarily complicated and difficult.
>Or that his buggy is too slow for the roads (not highways), etc.
Well, as you've alluded to, if we deem that their beliefs would end up causing a significant enough issue to society, then their beliefs don't get to override the rules of society. Amish people are free to use buggies where appropriate because it's not a problem. They are not allowed to use buggies on highways because it would be a safety issue.
Regardless, they're not protected because of their beliefs. They're just operating within the rules of society. You don't have to be Amish to legally ride a buggy on the side of a road. These aren't special protections carved out for Amish people. Which, again, is the point of this discussion:
You stated "We have to solidify laws protecting anti-AI-ers if that's their choice," and I'm asking, "Protect them from what, exactly?"
"Exclusion from society" or being "the object of anger at "those darn Luddites"" are not things which laws can generally help with. Anti-AI people are free to not use AI, be vocal about their opposition to AI, and even (try to) exclude those who use AI from society or make them the object of anger with regards to AI usage. All of that is fair. It works both ways. None of it is dictated by law.
That’s inclusive of have-nots too, alongside the aforementioned no-thank-yous.
As long as you enjoy your freedom the exact same way as everyone else
Which is actually much more dangerous.
This is the first time someone did this, and therefore other people could start to ask for similar accommodations. The idea is important
LLMs aren't some next step in the evolution of intelligence, they are even explicitly designed not to be. That a word-calculator which has no emotions, goals or continuity of consciousness can, by brute-force-throwing-things-at-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks, solve some problems that were presumed to require intelligence isn't "liberating" at all.
It could be comical, if there weren't so many deluded cultists worshipping that word calculator and wanting to turn control of all society over to it, and insisting that anyone who rejects them will be "left behind" in the capitalistic rat race to the bottom, which is the only thing that can ever matter.
In 1000 years, I am sure that the descendants of humanity will be either
a) non-existent
b) actually intelligent machines, that will preserve in themselves all that is great about our culture, while discarding some of the more ugly parts, free to explore the universe without need for things like gravity or oxygen, able to sleep for centuries as they travel at relativistic speeds between the stars
c) Shoggoths mindlessly babbling to themselves as they code the eleventy-trillionth new mobile app so that somewhere a number can go up
Which do you prefer?
We do not live in a system that values these
Standing by morals and ethical responsibilities is hard, it takes mental and physical energy and there are plenty of ethical fights we all have to concede every day as a result. But at the “society” level, I think this sort of rhetoric just leads us further down the hole. We can continue to fight the battles that we have the willpower and means to fight, and that’s a very individual decision. Principled people with high tolerance for bullshit (seemingly like the guy in TFA) can make a lot of difference, IMO.
> great for him until the goals given him are unachievable, in the given timelines, by human thinking and reasoning alone.
Sorry but as much as I would like to agree with what you are saying managers, CEOs, shareholders and everyone that connects that chain won't ever care about ethics or morals when it comes to making a buck or getting one over the competition. Not in the system we are in.
This just reminds me of the whole bun fiasco. If your manager asks you to rewrite a years-old codebase in a week for immediate deployment, is it not acceptable to push back?
If you work in a regulated industry, or even just if your product has had a tough relationship with incidents of late, that makes this kind of push back even more defensible.
There are some who would call that micro-management.
These are weasel words that will be used to move the goalposts forever.
Guys like the one in the article will argue that we don't understand how AI works, because they don't understand how AI works.
They will never take the time to learn. If they do, they will invent a new goalpost.
I do strive to understand what I'm building, but probably not in the way you mean, or the way the luddites would demand.
The truth is, they have a result they want, and they will form new arguments indefinitely. The arguments aren't worth engaging.
Gas pedal.
Which is self-defeating. If you don't make a good faith effort to understand what he said then you're leaving yourself in a poor position to credibly argue against it.
Where is that gas pedal taking you, by the way? I can see where it’s taking people like Garry Tan: https://www.fastcompany.com/91520702/y-combinator-garry-tan-...
Weinberg’s Law -- If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
Big tech want to tell us that AI is great because it can write code faster than what a human can, the problem is that code is shit, is full of bugs, and is not maintainable.
Reason why my company decided to stop using AI for code that gets delivered to customers, the customer find bugs, he is not happy, you have to use time to fix bugs (for free, because it's under warranty), so we waste time, and produce code that is not easy to evolve. And even if AI is faster to write code, developers are less motivated to work, so they will just waste time on the internet while being focused on the task, and thus again, there is really no save of money.
To me all of this doesn't make sense, we want to use AI to make the work instead of US, but even if we achieve in that the result of it gives benefits only to an handful of people that are already too much rich, while the world gets polluted with all the CO2 that is produced by AI tokens, people looses jobs and gets poorer. This idea to me needs to be opposed.
Static analysis for example. Although I’ve heard that LLMs can now do that if a user wanted it.
Edit: what about a civil engineer that refuses to use steel. Or Arabic numerals. Or a construction worker that refuses to use power equipment. A delivery man who swears off wheels.
Yes, power equipment is better, but still barely the same thing.
You're one dumb motherfucker, aren't you?
Amish have an overall fertility rate around 6, which is why there are now almost half a million Amish in America alone. They had less than half that in 2000. In a few decades, they'll number in the millions. If people don't start having babies then groups like the Amish will take over the world, very much turning "the meek shall inherit the Earth" into a completely fulfilled prophecy. In some ways it's perhaps even a self fulfilling one if it turns out that 'non-meek' behaviors result in unsustainable societies.
The average user here thinks they're doing far more important work than they actually are.
Would that not be tantamount to constructive dismissal? Consider: you may have your prayer times during the day, but they will be counted against you in performance evaluations.
That was my initial thought: he may get his exemption from use, but TFA doesn’t indicate that he will be evaluated differently during performance review.
To go one step further, would such allowances have to be accompanied by different performance standards, like oral exams for students with dyslexia also have increased time limits?
Or would the allowances be granted for the duration of employment, the latter being shortened due to performance problems?
Unsurprisingly history repeats itself, there will always be people who reject the unknown for the comforts of the past.
If you read the article, you will see that the concern is with his direct actions concerning ethics and moral, especially with interactions with others (as an admin).
There is plenty to unpack with this as it is a new concept. I'm hoping we can have a real discussion about this. For example, will this religious exemption become moot if productivity is sufficiently higher with AI giving employers an easy out? If that does happen, do we think we'll see adverse effects such as baked in biases in a hidden process?
One thing I am concerned with with AI is that everything will follow Google and Meta when it comes to things like appeals and fair treatment. There area ton of stories about people getting banned/deleted with no recourse and no insight into why. I can see this same sort of totalitarian activity spreading to other aspects of life, like finance, medical billing, etc.
For this person’s job at an academic institution, I doubt it. This specific case feels very symbolic from start to finish: His management probably mandated AI use because they felt the need to do something about AI, and he used this as a perfect opportunity to stage a protest against AI. Knowing what I know about academic institutions, I suspect AI would have very little impact on productivity.
Many jobs might be the same: AI’s productivity impact can be large on a small set of tasks, but if those tasks were only 10% of someone’s hours at work then a couple people refusing AI will not make a difference to the whole department.
Workloads also flow to people who are good at that work, so the work that benefits from AI would be distributed to the AI users and more of the non-AI work would go to the few people who don’t use AI. It can be self-balancing when the number of refusals is small.
There are jobs where it’s not going to work out, though. If most of someone’s job is accelerated a lot by AI and they refuse to use that accelerator, it’s going to be really hard to avoid failing behind.
Companies do not have to retain employees who need accommodations that are not reasonably compatible with the work. AI is a hot topic and everyone has strong feelings about it, so it can help to think back to other technology leaps and consider what it would be like if your coworkers refused to use them.
What if you had a coworker who refused to use email and would only communicate on the phone? It could technically be done, but they would fall so far behind and produce enough hardship for their coworkers that it wouldn’t be a reasonable request for most office jobs. The laws do not force companies to accommodate requests that are unreasonable for the work.
I can already think of jobs where refusing to use any AI tools would put someone at so much of a disadvantage that it couldn’t be justified. That set of jobs is small today, but it’s growing.
I think you're missing the point. This isn't a protest, this is someone exercising their constitutional rights. It's a matter of people being able to freely choose how they may live within the state and society's constraints. Our bosses shouldn't be able to so easily tell us to violate our own morals for the company's bottom line.
Very true, 100% agree. I'm not saying we should get rid of AI, but we need to be aware of the dangers of relying on it too much.
Either way, I don't think people should be playing zero-sum altruism olympic games. Different people are always concerned about different things, and the "line in the sand" will always be different depending on who you ask.
I could ask how you (or anyone) dare to use technology at all when it supports forced child labor from mining the raw materials to make computer chips and batteries, but what good would that do?
The fundamental issue is that historically only religious belief, that actually subscribed to a religion with a god, was considered sincere. But since then it’s become clear that many non religious people hold equally sincere ethical beliefs. The current standard being converged upon by courts, as mentioned in the article is:
> “It has to be a deeply held ethical commitment that’s analogous to a religious commitment,”
Because no one wants to go and change all the laws to replace religious belief with the above, wherever a court sees religious belief they can essentially sub in the above language.
But this has led to awful articles where media will often, after a ruling in favor of a secular belief which the courts will rule as a religious belief as a shorthand, announce that the secular belief itself is considered a religion.
This misunderstanding reached its apotheosis, perhaps, in the Alabama case mentioned in the article, where a federal judge fell for the semantic mislabeling and declared humanism to be a religion, which it isn’t.
However, that legal standard gives humanists a whole lot of newfound rights, so I don’t see anyone pushing back against it.
A continuum is not isomorphic to a single point.
The objection in the article is specifically about offloading thinking to technology, which is something we've been doing for decades, or depending on your definition, since we first started using tools.
If offloading cognitive labor is the core problem, then what makes AI fundamentally different from the countless other technological advances that have allowed us to offload cognitive labor?
Do you honestly believe that LLMs are just the next incremental improvement on prior technology? It is such a fundamentally new paradigm.
So let's look at that preceding sentence so that we can get a better sense of what kind of labor he was talking about:
> The process and work involved in thinking through situations, through my work, through my ethics, through the way I handle other people, is a key component in being able to develop myself as a moral person.
"thinking through situations", "my ethics", "the way I handle other people", "develop myself as a moral person". This doesn't read to me like he's taking a Butlerian Jihad-type position that humans have a moral responsibility to do their own arithmetic. We're clearly talking about higher-level, more abstract thinking and decision-making that might carry real moral weight.
And that brings us to a difference that I think he might be seeing but that you seemed to be claiming does not exist when you said, "My main issue with these people is that they think AI/LLMs are different than everything that came before them." GPT-style decoder LLMs are the first time we've ever really seen people trying to rely on computers to make abstract and open-ended decisions such as drawing up business plans, drafting memoranda, or doing deep research-type tasks on any sort of scale.
I think that you're probably aware that there is a a noticeable difference between how people are thinking about LLMs now versus how they did back when GPT 2.0 was the latest and greatest. The fact that we can construct a hypothetical continuum of possible models between GPT 2.0 and GPT 3.5 Turbo and suggest that, in this counterfactual scenario, it might not be possible to draw a hard line that cleanly separates the tech itself into two discrete categories, is fundamentally missing the point. His concern was never stated to be about the technology itself; it was about how he was being asked to use it.
Computers and computer programs are much more like heaps than integral wholes. There is no essential difference between what we conventionally call "AI" and any other computer program. The manner in which we have cordoned off "AI" from "non-AI" has more to do with human purposes and perspectives rather than any objective facts on the ground.
I realize that's embedded within a larger page on the Sorites paradox instead of being given its own page, but I'm not super interested in being that preoccupied with Wikipedia's editorial decisions.
Do you think this guy has the technical depth to make these connections? He's working off what he can see, and he will likely grow old and die still lacking that understanding. So will a vast majority of users of these services.
What you are seeing is people realigning with a baseline of their reality. They have to trust what they are being told on this by someone, and they need to figure out who and how amid malicious actors that are trying to bend their beliefs.
This reminds me of the torch lighters in a classic Frankenstein movie.
> all of computing has involved "offloading" effort/thought to computers.
Effort yes, thought no, not until recent years.
I'm not arguing on this guy's behalf, I only made a comment.
The fearmongering has cooked a lot of people's understanding of this stuff (and I wouldn't place the blame on them given the news they're likely consuming about AI).
"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes" is apt here. We don't need to return to mud huts and smoke signals because we can approximate intelligence.
Then again, maybe even seeing it as _slightly_ performative, potentially, is overly pessimistic. It may seem performative simply because it's novel, but if he legitimately considers this part of his religious beliefs and his employer (seemingly) agrees, what is performative about exercising his rights like many other people of other religions do?
I probably don’t share his sentiments, but that’s no different from being compelled to think in certain mandated ways (offloading being just a particular case of it), which is certainly a bad idea. If that was the case, I find it weird that he used a religious exemption mechanism, but glad he can act and think freely, the way he desires.
However, he may not have a choice of tool use or peers, and be compelled to send work to, or process results done by a non-human system, if that’s a part of his organization system (external to him with regards to duties and responsibilities). To grant him an exemption would be to discriminate upon others, no different how he can’t refuse to work with, say, a Satanist. Or a cyborg transhumanist. If that’s the case and he just refuses to feed his thinking (his part of the job) to an AI (not his part of the job), then that’s him being a zealot pushing his religious views on others. In such a case, I can quite clearly see why he went for a religious exemption, huh.
His own part of the job, his responsibilities - yes, of course he can’t be compelled on how he does it. Anything outside of that - nope, his religious beliefs end there, not his thinking - not for him to say how to do it, or refuse to interact.
> Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires employers to make reasonable accommodations for an applicant or employee whose sincerely held religious belief, practice, or observance conflicts with a work requirement, *unless providing the accommodation would create an undue hardship for the employer.*
If using a computer is necessary for the job, then the religious exemption would create undue hardship. Presumably for this Kentucky guy's job he can get his work done without AI and the university isn't suffering for it.
Sounds like a tough argument to make to me
Same for computers and engineering.
Any such potential candidate passing these is then given an interview in which technical questions relevant to the question are asked.
I'm really not sure how you imagine a luddite makes it all the way to their first day to drop some weird "oh, I can't actually do this job btw" bomb.
Even supposing they do, they have a job description requiring that they perform certain tasks that are within the realm of reasonable expectations as set by the government.
Someone in a wheelchair isn't going to get hired for any "must be able to regularly lift and move weights over 50 pounds" job just because of equal employment opportunity as they can't perform the legally allowed requirements.
You don't get to violate a contract just because you changed religions.
I would bet money a judge would argue that inconsistent/arbitrary beliefs are in fact not "sincerely held" beliefs as defined under Title VII.
Also, SCOTUS made a ruling in 2023 that a business is allowed to take "undue hardship" into consideration for the company as a whole, meaning they can still fire (or not hire) you if your beliefs would be detrimental to the success of the business.
And the Dunning-Kruger effect also applies to "smart" people. You don't stop when you're estimating your ability correctly; as you learn more, you gain more awareness of your ignorance and continue being conservative with your self-estimates.
Though nothing about the Amish prohibits being a computer using engineer. Their rejection of technology is a lot more nuanced.
"An accommodation may cause undue hardship if it is costly, compromises workplace safety, decreases workplace efficiency, infringes on the rights of other employees, or requires other employees to unwillingly do more than their share of potentially hazardous or burdensome work." - https://www.eeoc.gov/religious-discrimination
Otherwise we would all be joining a religion which require 360 days of religious festivities each year.
How much additional productivity do they think admin staff can crank out, and does that even matter. Does a 100X more productive research administrator mean the University will not be “left behind”, in this new world. I think we are officially reaching mass hysteria phases of the AI revolution.
We were asked to migrate from Zoom to Teams recently. We have to use git and GitHub. Recently, there's a mandate to migrate from Jenkins to GitHub Actions. We have to use Windows or Mac, no Linux. We have to have the corporate VPN and antivirus running. And so on, and so on.
git was picked meritocratically, Teams was not...
Hmmm, sounds a bit ripe for exploitation, no?
>In his interview with RNS, Durman said that being a humanist means being present and paying attention to others. Using AI conflicts with that.
Does this mean I can submit complaints against the companies I work for when I'm being told to respond via email or Slack? This seems pretty far removed from my humanist perspective up being present and paying attention to others, especially when you consider the various automations and abstractions which go into that kind of communication.
Like, I know it's obtuse, but I really don't see a logical issue with someone being a humanist and sincerely believing that communicating in anyway which isn't face-to-face goes against their beliefs. And that's just one example.
>“Substituting automated machine processing for human presence, authentic listening, and personal responsibility in my work directly conflicts with my obligation to uphold human dignity and flourishing as primary,” he wrote in a letter to the University of Kentucky’s Office of Equal Opportunity.
I'm sure this guy is being sincere and somewhat reasonable with his logic, but I know people who would feel justified in pushing this way past AI if they felt it was likely to get them anywhere. Like, how can you not use the same exact reasoning to push against using other forms of modern technology?
>The letter cited Durman’s personal beliefs as well as the 2003 version of the Humanist Manifesto, which details humanist principles and beliefs. Those beliefs include the importance of freedom of conscience and human flourishing.
Hell, at what point is being forced to work in order to survive in completely opposition to this belief system? When can I start saying that my employer's expectation that I'm in the office every day is in opposition to "human flourishing"?
>Durman told RNS his work involves helping researchers at the university with grant applications and that he can do the work without the help of AI. And not using AI won’t affect his co-workers, he said.
We'll see about that. Maybe, right now, this is the case. But even moderate expectation for AI usage in the future makes this suspect. When everyone is getting 90% of their work done completely autonomously through their agents, but they're still waiting on you to respond to an email from a day ago, then will this still be the case?
>For Durman, the accommodation process was much simpler. Durman sent the letter, and then he and Huiskens met with officials at the university. “It was a very collegial meeting, and they found that there was no undue burden to David’s department,” Huiskens said. “They granted the accommodation promptly.”
Well I'm unironically happy that they were able to work this out easily. But I really doubt this will be smooth sailing indefinitely, especially as other roles which are more affected by AI end up being "targeted" in the same ways.
As a software engineer, I dread the thought of working with co-workers who just refuse to use AI based on arbitrary principals. It's one thing for them to reason that they work better without AI; it's another thing to just say that you don't agree with using the technology and everyone needs to accommodate you.
Well I'm sure I haven't said anything that everyone else hasn't immediately thought/posted, but I'm genuinely curious about these things. It seems rather important that everyone is on the same page with regards to what their rights are with respect to choosing to not use a technology like this.
I’m curious if the opposite would work:
“As a transhumanist my religion compels me to share everything with my machines, otherwise they can’t ensure my mind uploading is up to date “
I see no reason transhumanism is any less of a religion than humanism.
TBH I agree. Religious exemptions at large only exist for the big name religions but the arguments pushed often make claims about it being a moral/ethical precedent and its just not true. I think its a matter of PR and politics if you're able to get an exemption kind of same game as a lot of things.
We see this with people who believe it is a religious requirement to share their faith at work, even when their co-workers say they don't want to hear it.
We see this with people who say their religious belief says they don't take orders from a women, even if that woman is their boss.
If your transhumanist religion compels you to share PII with your machines in a way which breaks the law, then there's likely an undue burden.
If it means you need access to a power plug during lunch so your devices can scan your brain for 10 minutes - almost certainly not an undue burden.
Some modern recording laws are not made with a machine component in mind, even if that machine is a local first-party system and does not actually store anything long-term or propagate information any further. A cyborg-identifying person with a wearable speech processor may rightfully argue such laws are unfairly preventing their functioning, as they’re lacking an important distinction.
The Civil Rights Act which created the EEOC does not require or permit an employer to break the law to accommodate a request, even if it is reasonable and with no burden.
Instead, the law must be challenged directly.
- People refusing vaccination requirements in schools, offices, the military.
- Pharmacists refusing to fill certain prescriptions (like birth control).
- Restaurant owners refusing to serve gay people.
- Kids (well, their parents) refusing to study certain topics in school.
Are you implying that there isn't a "meaningful population" that is against some of these?
There are thousands of religions each with their own set of beliefs. Many of them directly conflict with each other, and with societal laws. You can make up a "religious exemption" for literally anything, and they are selectively allowed based on how the majority religion tolerates the thing.
Of note, every single one of your examples impacts multiple people in significant ways. None of them are people just wanting to practice their faith in isolation. I think the cases you describe aren't really analogous.
What about an example where religious belief fundamentally excludes someone from doing the actual job? Suppose a Muslim wants a job as a bartender, but refuses to actually serve people drinks because they consider it a violation on the rule against alcohol. Should the bar grant them a religious exemption and just accept that they won't be serving alcoholic beverages when that person's the bartender on duty?
Or what if two different religious beliefs come into direct conflict? Suppose a Jehovah's Witness whose manager is also a JW decides to leave the religion. Jehovah's Witnesses consider shunning apostates to be a religious commandment, so their manager might feel obligated to fire them. Is that OK?
Depending on how we resolve those conflicts, perhaps people can at least agree that there should be limits to religious exemptions, even if they don't agree on the specifics. But perhaps that's at least a starting point for a conversation. And perhaps from there we can extend out to Durham's position.
-employers refusing to employ queer people
-landlords refusing queer tenants
It just shows how progressive and, sorry to bring this up, socialist the US has been historically. Truly a beacon of hope in a world mired in prejudice and dogma.
What happened there?
[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/intel-says-its-processors-are-n...
It’s just that our human-centric bias is showing. We are not the main characters of this universe. Not by a long shot. Heck, in the planetary sense, we feel like earth belongs to us, but chances are we will not be in the top 1,000,0000th of its inhabitants as species by the amount of time spent living on it when life inevitably ceases to exist on it at some point in the future.
We monkeys are sure dumb and self-centered.
Also shows how Anthropic's name is really a misnomer. :)
What? Are you trying to say "people"?
There are also limitations on what accommodations can be requested. If you took a job mowing lawns and then had a religious belief against harming living plants, you wouldn’t collect paychecks while you watched your coworkers mow lawns. They would have to find other work for you if they could, like raking leaves or lawnmower maintenance. If they didn’t have that work, then you wouldn’t have a job.
The raking leaves example was to make a point. For a programming job you could be exempted from using AI tools to do the work, but you would still have to do the work at a reasonable standard.
Plenty of programmers don't work at a reasonable standard; See, for example, every security incident ever, proliferation of slow electron apps, commercial software that flat-out doesn't work properly.
However the standard for performance is relative to reasonable expectations for someone in that role. Typically relative to peers within the company. If one person is unable to do their job to within a reasonable level relative their peers even with reasonable accommodations, accommodations do not require the company to continue employing them anyway.
https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2026/01/21/ninth-c...
Here is a brief example from the American Bar Association: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/resources/human-righ...
Also, some institutions have much wider latitude to deny a variety of religious exemption requests than other due to environmental hazards and safety concerns.
- Sikhs keeping long hair/beard in the military or police
- Quakers being exempt from the draft
- Quakers, again, refusing to drive with NH plates that say “live free or die,” because they don’t believe that
- Muslims needing breaks to pray 5x/day
- Jews requiring food that follows extremely complex kosher preparation rules
- Native Americans using peyote, a hallucinogen
- Jehovah’s Witnesses and others refusing to swear oaths, even in court
Of course many of these had to be fought for in court, but courts are very amenable to the earnestly held beliefs of minority religious groups in the US. We don’t have a state religion.
"... there are circumstances where a tight-fitting respirator must be worn, such as when a worker is exposed to an atmosphere that is immediately dangerous to life or health (IDLH), defined as "...an atmosphere that poses an immediate threat to life, would cause irreversible adverse health effects, or would impair an individual's ability to escape from a dangerous atmosphere." 29 CFR 1910.134(b). In these situations, a tight-fitting pressure demand respirator is required. Wearing a respirator that is less protective could pose a grave danger not only to the worker who is wearing it, but also to other workers who might be called on to rescue him from the IDLH atmosphere. Preventing these unnecessary risks is a compelling governmental interest that justifies OSHA's decision not to provide a religious exemption from the respirator standard, especially as there is no less restrictive way to provide this protection."
It creates inequality. For some reason we accept that following a morality framework based on a bunch of presuppositions puts you in a special box (well, I don't accept it). Like, why am I forced to be sent to a meat grinder and kill people? Just because I'm not ultra orthodox something?
It pisses lots of people including Marxist, Nazis, Gender Study Theorists, Catholics, as all of them believe stuff which they dont like to disapprove.
Your statement smells like Catholic rhetoric so I am happy to announce the truth is there is no god. Jesus was not his son and he was certainly not reborn. Just some folks who invented this story 1950 years ago.
" Catholics amount to a minority of people making up postliberal trends, " I cited a bigger group of people who have a problem with the liberal Popper. You can call Marxist classical postliberalism.
" e Catholics spend a lot of their time arguing not quite from "Jesus who was invented 1950 years ago" but from Aristotelian concepts " I doubt it. Most catholics I've met dont do it. Sorry. And I doubt that most Catholics do any deep philosophical statement at all. You can ask them how I could disapprove their belief. You wouldnt get an answer, sometimes a very angry reaction.
Most Catholics you have met are immaterial, because the OP distinctly mentioned postliberalism. If you want to bring up Catholics here, then the Catholics who would bother to identify with postliberalism, which is after all a stance of political philosophy, are largely those Catholics of a philosophical bent, and that is why one hears a lot of Aristotle in defense of their political and social models. I have my own disagreements with Catholics because I am not sympathetic to many claims of Aristotelianism, but on HN facts matter.
" Most Catholics you have met are immaterial " Most Catholics just suck what they learned during child hood. They are postliberal as they wish a Catholic society which is hence not liberal. Arguing with Aristoteles is just plain sane washing as the bible is intellectuelly very thin.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-213929165
> And as for whether it replaces or disrupts anything good that already exists, I will only say that I have watched it, in a very short time, begin to replace the patient work of learning, the slow formation of judgment, the friendship of teacher and student, the labor by which a writer finds out what she thinks. These are things that, once lost, are not quickly recovered.
AI as a tool can do impressive things.
AI usage metrics by employers is ... an interesting test case.
Also in large parts of Europe if you pass your driving test in an automatic car you _can't_ drive a manual, so it becomes the default out of convenience.
I think if you mapped smart home technology to transmission preference, those who op for manual transmissions probably also opt for oldschool switches and thermostats .
If you let an AI grade an exam then a big part of what comes next is a decision that you didn't take or validate. You didn't remove yourself just from the execution, you removed yourself from the responsibility and cognitive effort to take the decision, and from the accountability for that decision.
If you can simplify and call every button press "just the computer doing things", then someone else can exaggerate and say a fully autonomous drone hunting humans is the same, business as usual, computers doing things.
On the other hand, it seems like this particular ideal is being supported because of an underlying public sentiment. Not because the ideal itself is held.
I think if you are going to fully support variances in beliefs like this then it should be done on an equal standing.
That includes principles about proprietary software, abusive software, the belief that information cannot have ownership, advertising is inherently immorral.
There are a lot more principles, it is clear that some people have these at a level where they consider it a core part of their being,
Why shouldn't they also be supported. Should companies be required to offer open source solutions for employees in the same manner as this case is suggesting for non-AI?
Do people disagree that beliefs should be accommodated? Do they disagree that they should be treated equally? I didn't say where to draw the line, I just observed that one existed.