This is very interesting. As someone who thinks AI is an amazing tool, I am very well interested in seeing how will people refusing to use AI fare both in professional settings and day-to-day life.
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).
One thing I've seen with AI is AI as used by software developers is quickly diverging from AI that's used by knowledge workers.
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.
"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.
Devs are just early. What you describe knowledge workers doing is what devs did a year (or two) ago and in fact my dev colleagues still use it like that. Web interface with a chat, copy pasting code.
We have 5 star restaurants, fast food and street meat yet we still have kitchens. We can go to the super market to buy eggs, and produce yet I know people who have gardens to grow their own food and a scant few have chickens for eggs.
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.
I think you are onto something. I think most agents I have up is two and even that I am not super comfortable not carefully managing. Otoh, buddy has agents galore running his network and everything giving him updates in near real time. I just.. don't have that much .. I want to say faith, but that suggests unshakeable religious belief.. confidence. I don't have that kind of confidence. There is too much stuff connected now ( taxes, projects, work, fun ). I am slowly starting to separate everything even that takes some careful planning.
That's because current AI models are incapable of doing knowledge workers' jobs. At least for me as an attorney, Harvey is only actually useful when it comes to helping me sort through large amounts of data. Even then, I can't trust its judgment (it has shown to be very poor) so it's only so useful
I use the AI in the "knowledge worker" way you described. However I still feel it's augmenting my work, because I don't ask or expect it to make decisions for me. I use it to gather sources, to criticize my ideas, to generate summaries targeted to people expectations, and so on. Yes of course it's gonna influence my work with their own biases, but I don't think it is that important - my own biases are otherwise still there...
This looks like the classic "AI can do everybody else's job but mine still needs me".
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.
> 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).
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 knew a guy early in my career who has a secretary (for starters!) who printed out his email and put them on his desk every morning with the rest of the mail. He would then dictate his response to her and she would type it in. It was pure ego. Nothing else.
I don't like that comparison. Email was an improvement to snail mail, and the people who you claim refused to use it just didn't understand it and didn't want to understand it.
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!
I think there’s a wide space between refusing any AI use, and refusing AI use requirements imposed by an employer. For example, one might find AI valuable for search, research, and getting a second opinion, but refuse it for primary generation of content.
Software is an employment rather than a profession. That distinction is important. Here is a definition of profession:
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.
What do you find important about this distinction? To me it's a description of the normative relationship between practitioners and broader society but I don't really see the significance you do.
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.
The IEEE has made some efforts to turn software engineering from an occupation into a profession — on par with civil engineering, architecture, law, medicine, military science, etc. A true profession requires a recognized body of knowledge, formal qualification criteria, and a code of ethics. So far most working software developers haven't shown much interest in this, nor is there much demand from employers or government authorities. I don't think we need to professionalize software engineering in the general case but it is an option for those who want it.
Be careful with military definitions. One near-universal aspect of a "profession" is that it be self-regulating. Lawyers have Bar Associations that dictate who can or cannot practice. Doctors have Medical Associations. So too accountants and engineers. These entities are granted monopolies but remain independent from government and set their own standards.
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.
AI is new but this phenomenon isn't. Every new wave of tech has sizable opposition.
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.
I came of age with the personal PC revolution and developed my career during the internet revolution, and was well into my career when the mobile computing smartphone revolution occurred. I did not see or feel even a fraction of the amount of social dread with those technologies that I see with AI, and I think that's justified given the circumstances.
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.
I’m unaware of other technological revolutions where the largest group of opposition was among young people[0]. Was there a great youth revolt against the telephone, the television, and the computer? I don’t recall anything of the sort.
> 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.
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.
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.)
Lol, what a slave mindset. Just because a technology exists, and most of the human cattle use it, does not mean that it's necessary for someone to use it.
Sure, be less productive, see how that works out for you. Your attitude in 2026 is crazy to me. Maybe you're just using chat, I don't know, but it saves me hours daily and saves my brainpower for situations that truly need it. Work smarter, not harder.
What I see a lot of in my own industry (games) is that people that don't like AI either 1) see something that changes how they think of it and start the slow path of adoption or 2) continually dig their heels in and/or refuse to update their priors.
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.
I've been reading articles suggesting that AI use alters ways of thinking. Humans certainly adapt to the tools they use. If this is true, and what a huge caveat that is, then the divergence in ways humans think: AI using and non-AI using will be interesting to watch. Although it will probably be decades before any significant conclusions are reached.
I find your Amish example is striking and accurate.
I haven't read TFA yet, but having studied academically and then spent years implementing ML techniques for industrial applications (in the areas of machine vision and signals processing), I think that the premise of "AI exemption" is just nonsensical, by nature of being ill-defined. AI isn't a singular product or technology, it's an abstract family of computational techniques, some more complex or mathematically involved than others. Finding function parameters to fit data points using a least squares method is ML, therefore AI, and you would find that in every thermostat, ABS system or electric bike. Too simple? Here is a gradient of increasingly sophisticated ML techniques, with LLMs not even being on the top of the list. Where do you place the cursors of "what's too much AI"?
I am all in on (local and sovereign) AI, but people still call me Amish because I do not use a smartphone which has greatly increased my attention span and happiness. I imagine there will be plenty of people that are more productive at some tasks by choosing to abstain from one or more almost universally used technologies.
My new analogy for AI is that it produces an elaborate lunch buffet containing so many floral arrangements that considerable effort must be expended to find the food being served.
Calling this as a luddite is pretty privileged. And I can absolutely see why someone believes that. I am completely against the AI companies, especially the US ones. They are full of it and fascist.
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.
It's not an either or, really. I can concede it has utility authoring code while being repulsed by its use in creative works. I might operate Claude Code while actively avoiding any significant use of it in movies, books and music.
This is exactly where I'm at. I also avoid using AI for the more creative parts of programming too, while finding utility in it for the more tedious parts.
AI is amazing, but it is not a tool anymore. Humans are the tools (agents) for AI to do things in real world. All the decision makers in business and polity are no longer able to rule out a direction provided by AI, making the AI the decision maker for humans. Even Fed is using "Sim Fed" to make rate decisions for the economy. The era of human-decision is over.
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.
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 glad I'm not the only one noticing that. It feels that aside from the regular new LLM releases, there has been no serious innovation for the past four years.
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?
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.
> Comparing people to Amish that dont want to use LLMs is wild.
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.
Why would I read an entire essay when you can't even be bothered to tell me what it's supposed to prove? I couldn’t care less whether it was by Pynchon, Marx, Friedman, Amodei, or anyone else.
"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.
I find this man's ostrich response to be quite different from my world view, but agree that it is fascinating to confront. Given that so many of us consume the world via tiny handheld screens and vote the way they do, I think it is definitely worth considering an artificial intelligence hedge. AI Maternalism would be a wildly unpopular counter proposition at the moment, but you have to admit humans aren't succeeding at governance right now either. Some of the parody AI movements are pretty amazing to behold: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DI2fSgssIW2/. I know, I know, but I had points to spare.
Technologists as a professional group are beyond weird. You usually expect rational critique (either positive or negative) from professionals, but the good technologists are supposed to just uncritically accept whatever supposed technological progress as an unalloyed good. Employer or Silicon Valley says it’s good, therefore think it is good. No, that’s a bit on the nose: Silicon Valley says it is good which means that it would be “good for my career”, therefore it is good. But are there any ill effects for society? Those are Luddite questions.[1]
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'm not sure if terrorism is the right word (how can you do bad things to software?), but I am sure that sabotage on datacenters will become a thing. But that's not a direct response to AI, but one to building more datacenters, using power (and potable water, but I'm not convinced that's as big of a thing as people make it out to be compared to other industries / wastes), and corporate greed which does not improve the lives of the common people.
Yes, though from legal standpoint, this particular case isn't that interesting because its a religious exemption for religious work, where considering the moral and ethical boundaries is the main job?
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.
The revenge effects of technologies are well known: email was great! It was faster and much cheaper than mailing letters. But it gave rise to spam and many types of fraud. The mobile phone is awesome. A powerful computer in your pocket. But now people, including teenagers, spend 12-16 hours each day staring into their mobile phones, doomscrolling towards Babylon. In 2006 people memorized dozens of phone numbers. Today? Maybe you remember 1-2 numbers.
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.
> This invention, O king, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.
Unsurprisingly history repeats itself, there will always be people who reject the unknown for the comforts of the past.
It's interesting to think about this expanded view of religion and how it interacts with nondiscrimination laws. The guy's beliefs (at least in the quotes in the article) seem like a good combination of well reasoned and sensible and core faith-like beliefs, so I'm glad they're protected. At the same time, I can imagine plenty of beliefs that would make me not want to hire someone. I know this one didn't go to court, but I wonder what tests courts use to draw the lines. What deeply held beliefs am I allowed to say make someone an idiot or jerk I don't want to hire, and what deeply held beliefs am I allowed to hold and want the state to protect?
There is a thing called Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications where an employer could discriminate against protected classes because the job description is so specific. Like if a church wanted to hire a new pastor, the job description requires the applicant to be Christian and likely a specific denomination, and any non-christian would be disqualified from the position. BFOQs must be spelled out in the job description to make it absolutely clear that the qualifications are necessary for the job. Also age, sex, and gender can be BFOQs like if the job description is for an acting role of a specific character. Race could potentially apply to something like an acting job too but that's a lot more of a dicey subject, like it would need to be absolutely critical to the production that a character is a specific race.
> Race could potentially apply to something like an acting job too but that's a lot more of a dicey subject, like it would need to be absolutely critical to the production that a character is a specific race.
Is this true? I would think that this conflicts with first amendment rights a bit.
His beliefs are not currently protected. He filed a Title VII request, which was ultimately granted by his employer voluntarily. Because no court ruled that the employer had to grant the request, it is an open question whether Title VII protects them.
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.
Employee: I need an accommodation. AI goes against my religious beliefs.
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.
I've had the concern for years that AI users (or AI itself) will eventually consider non-AI users a pain, because humans will become inefficient in lots of workloads and management, sometimes causing things to come down to a screeching halt, relatively speaking.
We have to solidify laws protecting anti-AI-ers if that's their choice.
This happens today with all technology. AI is no different. If your coworker refuses to use a computer or the internet there are no laws protecting them. Nor should there be.
There's a limit, though. Not only are there mandatory breaks for truck drivers, but also a maximum number of working hours my boss is allowed to demand from me. And even within those limits my boss is not allowed to dispense cocaine during tight deadlines.
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.
Exclusion from society, and the object of anger at "those darn Luddites".
You can't tell an Amish he can't use physical coins. Or that his buggy is too slow for the roads (not highways), etc.
I kind of feel like this is a non-story. The ask was small and reasonable. It was easy enough to grant the accommodation and avoid a confrontation. HR in companies does this all the time.
I'm not him, but I would guess that he would respond by saying that we have a moral and ethical responsibility to remain in control of what we're putting into the world. If there's a conflict between the given timelines and how quickly a human can understand the problem and the implications of the decision being made, then the thing that needs to budge is the timeline.
He probably has a lot to say on the topic, but it’s not up to him. The accommodations only extend to reasonable affordances, but do not entirely exempt the person from requirements to perform to the level of expectation for the job.
So those goals and timelines should be reconsidered; If a civil engineering firm slapped up a bridge as quickly and cheaply as possible with no concern for quality, they would cease to exist. We have no standards for software quality, and therefore anything that accelerated the perceived output is enthusiastically adopted without consideration for any future consequences.
Weinberg’s Law --
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
Exactly. I would also argue that WE DON'T NEED more software, WE DON'T NEED more features, what US, humanity, needs is MORE RELIABLE software, with less bugs, that is stable.
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.
Imagine a civil engineer that refuses to use a computer of any kind for his work. How much do you trust scribbled long division?
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.
While I agree with you at some level, I can't help thinking of the Amish. They impose plenty of restrictions on themselves and still manage to flourish. There must be a way that is different than simply accepting "progress".
This is even more true when "progress" means fertility rates collapse. A culture that is not self sustaining will die, and far more quickly than most realize. It doesn't matter how awesome that culture is for a brief moment in time, it will cease to exist.
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 Amish are an exception, one of the rare ones (along with the handful of protected, isolated tribes). The rule is that a technologically inferior group will get rolled over by a technologically superior one for the benefit of the latter.
> Until the goals given him are unachievable, in the given timelines, by human thinking and reasoning alone.
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.
> 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?
Exactly. The person or people above him who wanted AI to be used against his will will ultimately achieve their goals---no matter what his beliefs are. At the end of the day, his views of humanism are futile against the force of those in favor of AI acceptance.
Where is the limit of human thinking? This late 2025 - till now models give to some real philosophical questions that are not thought experiments anymore, imagining the matrix or the 1984 depiction was a cool thing to imagine, but feeling your humanity taken away from you in the present is heartbreaking.
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
Lots of strawmanning going on with comments about where the line gets drawn and talking about driving stick, heating his home, etc.
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 example, will this religious exemption become moot if productivity is sufficiently higher with AI giving employers an easy out?
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.
> 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._
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.
I agree with the principle that if it meaningfully impinges on your core ideals that you shouldn't be required to do that.
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?
Apple ought to be made to ask their users to confirm (opt-in) whether they want their AI/Siri/Intelligence/<or whatever they decide at any given time> and everyone else should be provided with a slimmer OS and slimner OTA updates.
> “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,” he told RNS in a video interview. “And offloading that labor, regardless of whether it’s taxing or not, is undercutting my ability to be a moral actor.”
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.
Yes, because those things don't affect his work as a university researcher, which is where he is protesting the forced use of AI and asking for an exemption to that rule.
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?
Some of these issues came up with the Australian prisoner who was denied vegemite, and while Australia is different, there are similar questions involved because secular western societies are all moving in the same direction.
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.
What are trying to say exactly? That only beliefs in a god or gods are really religion? But that any strongly held set of principles is given the same benefits by law as a real religion? What’s the point? If it is treated like a religion by people and by law, who cares if it involves believing in a god, or many, or none??
AI for me I just another balancing act. Lean too hard on it and it will be noticeable and detrimental, lean to hard away from it and you’ll be left behind by those who learn how to balance it.
Where is the line? "AI" is completely arbitrary, might as well say a calculator is immoral because it offloads thinking. That my main issue with these people is that they think AI/LLMs are different than everything that came before them, yes they are more capable but all of computing has involved "offloading" effort/thought to computers. `
> "And offloading that labor, regardless of whether it's taxing or not, is undercutting my ability to be a moral actor."
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?
Exactly. Recent LLMs are in a different category and it's disingenuous to pretend they're not. Wherever you decide to draw the line, GPT-3 and more advanced chatbots are clearly on the far side of it.
Sorites doesn't actually refute the OP. The paradox is rooted in a failure to distinguish between aggregates and integral wholes. A heap is not really a natural kind or an integral whole. It is just a convenient label to describe a vague range of collections for practical purposes, but it is not what you a "thing" in its own right. There is no intrinsic tendency of a heap to be a heap, whereas in integral wholes there are. You cannot draw a line between a heap and a non-heap, because there is no such thing as a heap in any objective sense. There is no essential difference, only an accidental one.
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.
The average person was able to look at the devices up until now and see a tool. Now they see something they don't understand, but sure does seem smarter than they are, and has the aesthetics of being a person on the other side of the computer.
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.
Yeah, and is this person going to turn down becoming a manager, ever, because they'll have to delegate the actual solution to someone else? Or are they going to micromanage them due to their ethical commitments?
I mean... this is exactly why I've avoided becoming a manager in the past. I will accept being responsible for my own work, but I don't want to be accountable for someone else's work.
This is so good. Here's one stand-out line (of many) to me:
> 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.
Can we please just look at LLMs like what they are and not some fantastical threat?
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.
I didn't get the impression that the man here was looking at LLMs as some fantastical threat. It seems like his concern was about offloading his thinking and decision making to AI, which seems pretty non-fantastical.
Can't that be done without a performative "religious exemption"? You don't need that to say "yeah, I'm not using this stuff." I imagine in practice all this will accomplish is pissing people off who are already stressed about AI.
Was he being forced or compelled to offload his thinking to a machine?
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.
I'm definitely resentful that I have to use AI to stay relevant, and wish it never came into existence, but religious exemptions shouldn't exist. If a law or rule isn't important enough for everyone to follow, it shouldn't be a rule or law.
I wonder if you can object to using most AI on religious grounds as Claude, Grok, and ChatGPT are produced by and are made in the image of effectively pro-extinction death cults. Honestly, it makes me feel slimy and uneasy using them when I consider that they are basically cult manufactured artifacts designed to influence society according to their religious beliefs.
Wait till the "where's the line" boosters learn groups like the Amish who have mostly drawn a line. They'll be clamoring for legal loopholes to steal the land from those luddites so that they can buid the future on it!
So what do you do if your company hires an engineer and on the first day they say "I am Amish and cannot touch a computer"? Give them a religions exemption? What then? Are you obligated to pay their salary for the rest of their life?
> 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.
You filter out any such applicant with digital applications for digital postings requiring proficiency with digital tools.
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.
Read up on EEOC regulation and you'll see your example won't fly. Exceptions must be reasonable and not cause undue hardship on the employer.
"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.
Why not? Religious freedoms are about deeply held beliefs. It's not like a judge will evaluate the bible or quran to check if something is or isn't a religious freedom based on what someone's deity of choice supposedly stated.
It is very weird that University of Kentucky is asking research administrators to incorporate AI in its workflow. It’s one thing for a Silicon Valley startup to ask SWE to use AI to maximize speed of development, its another thing entirely for a University insulated from competition, with a small admin staff, asking them to use AI for what exactly?
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.
Even if this was true, it is very weird. When was the last time, institutions and bosses ask their employees to use a specific tool? It’s more often that employees fall in love with a tool and ask institutions to pay for it, here’s it’s the exact opposite
I remember when in Iain M. Banks Culture Novels (I think it was _Consider Phlebas_), the heroine and its drone talk about the "Humanist" movement of a planet they visit incognito as a extremist anti-machine movement... (It is just in passing, the situation in the Culture novels is quite different from the Dune universe).
>Federal courts have ruled that humanism qualifies as a religion. As a result, she said, humanists have the same rights as other faith groups under federal law.
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.
> “It has to be a deeply held ethical commitment that’s analogous to a religious commitment,” he said. “That’s a fact question that presumably the employer will investigate.”
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Are you implying that there's a meaningful population of people that are against reasonable accommodation for individuals' religious beliefs? There's a very big difference between prescribed religion in the workspace and an individual's beliefs requiring a slight adjustment by the employer to respect.
Depends what you mean by a meaningful population. There are definitely people who think religious accommodations are wrong in principle. There are definitely people who are hostile to religion in general. How many? I have no idea.
Yes I am implying exactly that. This is a very frequent topic of debate.
- 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.
You can stand up to AI and claim it is against humanist beliefs, and you could also look for conflict-free CPUs for your computer and business[0]. Those are both actions a moral agent could take - why did he choose that action? I like humanism and am currently reading a book on it - but I think I have a very different interpretation than this professor or you.
I read about the cobalt mines in college. I care. If it comes off as snarky, maybe you should have empathy for enslaved people in Africa instead of peons being replaced in first-world countries.
Is the man from the original article mentioned anywhere in the article you linked, or is that just whataboutism and speculation about the man in question and his beliefs?
Modernity has always been about abstraction and specialisation. If he's so humanist, he must also want to make his own food and his own car because after all, you are offloading your thinking to the underlying companies.
Where's the irony? Everything the article reports about Durman's opinions would seem to suggest that millions of humans mutually supporting each other is exactly the kind of thing that he wants to see happening.
“Expertise of millions of human agents” …in what? Understanding the universe that’s around us? In the cosmic sense, we humans have not done anything at all, aside from trying to understand it and “chimping out” from time to time.
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.
Every A.I. related post here has someone saying "I for one see no difference between a human being and an A.I." but this may be the first time I've seen this cliche extended to "How bizarre to meet a human being that thinks humans are not identical to A.I."
That doesn’t seem ironic at all. Irony is merely the condition where appearance and reality differ. In this case, if he values his own thinking he presumably values the thinking of other persons.
You actually cannot. There are standards to meet to qualify as a true religious exemption. There have been many court cases where people tried to claim religious beliefs when convenient for them, which were denied because they couldn’t meet the threshold for being a real religious belief.
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.
I didn't make myself clear. I'm against the concept of asking for exception from something based on your religious beliefs. I didn't mean that you can ask for virtually anything.
> 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.
This is not true. The accommodation is only possible if it doesn't present undue hardship, safety concerns, etc. Plenty of accommodations can be denied on those grounds.
I disagree. At the moment religious exemptions are almost always granted only to the majority religions, or at least views that the majority religions find acceptable. If you started applying the law fairly the whole thing would immediately fall apart.
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?
This is just a consequence of the philosophically liberal metaphysics, anthropology, and resulting moral views and political orders they produce. Once you accept those premises, they act as a corrosive agent that can be deployed to dissolve all sorts of truths opposed to someone's conception of "autonomy" and "freedom" and you really have no defense as long as your thinking is subject to them. It's why the Right has consistently lost all sorts of cultural battles. They, too, are liberals - because we're all liberals, culturally - and as long as they remain so, their "reactionary" behavior will largely remain rooted in mere sentimental attachment to an imagined past rather than something intellectually substantive. Hence, why what falls under the label of "postliberalism" has a much stronger shot. It is an intellectual rejection of liberalism with intellectual substance that often draws on robust metaphysical and anthropological "alternatives" to liberalism, as it were.
Sorry you can define criteria how to find a better understanding of the world. E.g. Popper did it (as he asked the innocent question if one is aloud to disprove your theory)
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.
AI that pretends to be a human mind, or takes the place of a human mind is an abomination. [what does that mean? that's the whole ballgame. defining what this means]
AI as a tool can do impressive things.
AI usage metrics by employers is ... an interesting test case.
Not true. Even for a lower middle income country like mine, cars with manual gearboxes had become very rare (with the exception of cabs where they remain the norm).
Outside of the United States? Even then, I don't think this has been a true statement for at least a decade, if not more with the rise of EVs in places other than the USA.
This is only still true because in the parts of the world with the most population, cost is the #1 deciding factor in vehicle purchasing. Manuals are cheaper. Globally the industry is trending against manuals over time.
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.
This kind of automation takes the execution away from you, not the decision, and even that execution only concerns you. You wanted to shift into a higher gear, the car's computer does it for you. The result is what you wanted. A fully autonomous car that decides everything for you would be a better example.
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.
theory: there are two groups that a lot of hackernews commenters fall into. And these two groups clash on every Ai post every day. One camp only uses Ai to write code and thinks of them strictly as LLMs with a clearly understood design and purpose but that show some surprising behavior, they've watched youtube videos that show how everything ties together computationally and mathematically, from neural nets to RL, etc. and dont see them as capital A, Ai. It's another tool in the toolbox, and thinking about them in the way you describe, as something closer to capital Ai would cause severe cognitive dissonance, akin to the idea that a hammer could hop out of the toolbox and start building a house. Even though what you've done is just take one small step of critical thinking, it would be a leap to the other camp members, who are themselves, quite technical thinkers.
This is very interesting. As someone who thinks AI is an amazing tool, I am very well interested in seeing how will people refusing to use AI fare both in professional settings and day-to-day life.
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).
One thing I've seen with AI is AI as used by software developers is quickly diverging from AI that's used by knowledge workers.
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.
"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.
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I don't personally know of any software engineers using AI as "fleets of agents" in a "factory." Sounds like a nightmare.
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Devs are just early. What you describe knowledge workers doing is what devs did a year (or two) ago and in fact my dev colleagues still use it like that. Web interface with a chat, copy pasting code.
It’s a phase.
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We have 5 star restaurants, fast food and street meat yet we still have kitchens. We can go to the super market to buy eggs, and produce yet I know people who have gardens to grow their own food and a scant few have chickens for eggs.
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.
I think you are onto something. I think most agents I have up is two and even that I am not super comfortable not carefully managing. Otoh, buddy has agents galore running his network and everything giving him updates in near real time. I just.. don't have that much .. I want to say faith, but that suggests unshakeable religious belief.. confidence. I don't have that kind of confidence. There is too much stuff connected now ( taxes, projects, work, fun ). I am slowly starting to separate everything even that takes some careful planning.
That's because current AI models are incapable of doing knowledge workers' jobs. At least for me as an attorney, Harvey is only actually useful when it comes to helping me sort through large amounts of data. Even then, I can't trust its judgment (it has shown to be very poor) so it's only so useful
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I use the AI in the "knowledge worker" way you described. However I still feel it's augmenting my work, because I don't ask or expect it to make decisions for me. I use it to gather sources, to criticize my ideas, to generate summaries targeted to people expectations, and so on. Yes of course it's gonna influence my work with their own biases, but I don't think it is that important - my own biases are otherwise still there...
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AI is not an abstraction, so any programmer who thinks they’re “moving up the stack” is fundamentally mistaken.
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The centaur / reverse-centaur is another interesting way to describe this split.
This looks like the classic "AI can do everybody else's job but mine still needs me".
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.
> 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).
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 knew a guy early in my career who has a secretary (for starters!) who printed out his email and put them on his desk every morning with the rest of the mail. He would then dictate his response to her and she would type it in. It was pure ego. Nothing else.
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It hasn't exactly worked out well for email, either...
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Refusing to use technology isn't the Amish way, they communally decide how and when to use technology.
According to the AI boosters, my career (and pretty much everyone else's) is already over anyway.
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hospitals still use faxes not email due to the latter's inherent insecurity
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I don't like that comparison. Email was an improvement to snail mail, and the people who you claim refused to use it just didn't understand it and didn't want to understand it.
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!
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I think there’s a wide space between refusing any AI use, and refusing AI use requirements imposed by an employer. For example, one might find AI valuable for search, research, and getting a second opinion, but refuse it for primary generation of content.
The AI use requirement described in the source article doesn't seem to have had such a specific mandate.
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Software is an employment rather than a profession. That distinction is important. Here is a definition of profession:
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.
What do you find important about this distinction? To me it's a description of the normative relationship between practitioners and broader society but I don't really see the significance you do.
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/
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> US Army, ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession
I'm not going to let the army tell me what my job is.
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The IEEE has made some efforts to turn software engineering from an occupation into a profession — on par with civil engineering, architecture, law, medicine, military science, etc. A true profession requires a recognized body of knowledge, formal qualification criteria, and a code of ethics. So far most working software developers haven't shown much interest in this, nor is there much demand from employers or government authorities. I don't think we need to professionalize software engineering in the general case but it is an option for those who want it.
https://www.computer.org/education/bodies-of-knowledge/softw...
Be careful with military definitions. One near-universal aspect of a "profession" is that it be self-regulating. Lawyers have Bar Associations that dictate who can or cannot practice. Doctors have Medical Associations. So too accountants and engineers. These entities are granted monopolies but remain independent from government and set their own standards.
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.
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An easier way to answer this question is: does the profession have a professional society?
Yes, several: the ACS, ACM, IEEE.
So you’re wrong.
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AI is new but this phenomenon isn't. Every new wave of tech has sizable opposition.
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.
I came of age with the personal PC revolution and developed my career during the internet revolution, and was well into my career when the mobile computing smartphone revolution occurred. I did not see or feel even a fraction of the amount of social dread with those technologies that I see with AI, and I think that's justified given the circumstances.
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.
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I’m unaware of other technological revolutions where the largest group of opposition was among young people[0]. Was there a great youth revolt against the telephone, the television, and the computer? I don’t recall anything of the sort.
[0] https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/gen-z-turning-a...
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> 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.
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.
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> Every new wave of tech has sizable opposition.
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'd be happy to do a 1999 Amish life style + LED TVs that don't spy on you.
I will be happy to put up with CRT screens if that's what it takes.
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I want modern medicine, renewable energy, etc. the world keeps getting better.
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Lol, what a slave mindset. Just because a technology exists, and most of the human cattle use it, does not mean that it's necessary for someone to use it.
Sure, be less productive, see how that works out for you. Your attitude in 2026 is crazy to me. Maybe you're just using chat, I don't know, but it saves me hours daily and saves my brainpower for situations that truly need it. Work smarter, not harder.
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What I see a lot of in my own industry (games) is that people that don't like AI either 1) see something that changes how they think of it and start the slow path of adoption or 2) continually dig their heels in and/or refuse to update their priors.
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.
I've been reading articles suggesting that AI use alters ways of thinking. Humans certainly adapt to the tools they use. If this is true, and what a huge caveat that is, then the divergence in ways humans think: AI using and non-AI using will be interesting to watch. Although it will probably be decades before any significant conclusions are reached.
I find your Amish example is striking and accurate.
I haven't read TFA yet, but having studied academically and then spent years implementing ML techniques for industrial applications (in the areas of machine vision and signals processing), I think that the premise of "AI exemption" is just nonsensical, by nature of being ill-defined. AI isn't a singular product or technology, it's an abstract family of computational techniques, some more complex or mathematically involved than others. Finding function parameters to fit data points using a least squares method is ML, therefore AI, and you would find that in every thermostat, ABS system or electric bike. Too simple? Here is a gradient of increasingly sophisticated ML techniques, with LLMs not even being on the top of the list. Where do you place the cursors of "what's too much AI"?
Generative AI?
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I am all in on (local and sovereign) AI, but people still call me Amish because I do not use a smartphone which has greatly increased my attention span and happiness. I imagine there will be plenty of people that are more productive at some tasks by choosing to abstain from one or more almost universally used technologies.
Calling people who don't want to use AI, Amish-like, is a huge stretch.
My new analogy for AI is that it produces an elaborate lunch buffet containing so many floral arrangements that considerable effort must be expended to find the food being served.
Calling this as a luddite is pretty privileged. And I can absolutely see why someone believes that. I am completely against the AI companies, especially the US ones. They are full of it and fascist.
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.
Apparently they develop mentat capabilities to serve their feudal planetary lord
It's not an either or, really. I can concede it has utility authoring code while being repulsed by its use in creative works. I might operate Claude Code while actively avoiding any significant use of it in movies, books and music.
This is exactly where I'm at. I also avoid using AI for the more creative parts of programming too, while finding utility in it for the more tedious parts.
AI is amazing, but it is not a tool anymore. Humans are the tools (agents) for AI to do things in real world. All the decision makers in business and polity are no longer able to rule out a direction provided by AI, making the AI the decision maker for humans. Even Fed is using "Sim Fed" to make rate decisions for the economy. The era of human-decision is over.
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.
Is this satirical?
Aren't the AI users the Amish here?
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 glad I'm not the only one noticing that. It feels that aside from the regular new LLM releases, there has been no serious innovation for the past four years.
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?
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But the AI still progressing at a rapid rate is also software.
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> I am very well interested in seeing how will people refusing to use AI fare
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.
Faring well in general, sure.
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.
It's not really a question of living, it's a question of prosperity (through a strictly capitalist lens).
>> A new Amish-like lifestyle
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
Comparing people to Amish that dont want to use LLMs is wild.
Please read this:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r...
> Comparing people to Amish that dont want to use LLMs is wild.
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.
Why would I read an entire essay when you can't even be bothered to tell me what it's supposed to prove? I couldn’t care less whether it was by Pynchon, Marx, Friedman, Amodei, or anyone else.
Wow thank you for this.
"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
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Tech bros are kind of untethered from reality.
I find this man's ostrich response to be quite different from my world view, but agree that it is fascinating to confront. Given that so many of us consume the world via tiny handheld screens and vote the way they do, I think it is definitely worth considering an artificial intelligence hedge. AI Maternalism would be a wildly unpopular counter proposition at the moment, but you have to admit humans aren't succeeding at governance right now either. Some of the parody AI movements are pretty amazing to behold: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DI2fSgssIW2/. I know, I know, but I had points to spare.
Technologists as a professional group are beyond weird. You usually expect rational critique (either positive or negative) from professionals, but the good technologists are supposed to just uncritically accept whatever supposed technological progress as an unalloyed good. Employer or Silicon Valley says it’s good, therefore think it is good. No, that’s a bit on the nose: Silicon Valley says it is good which means that it would be “good for my career”, therefore it is good. But are there any ill effects for society? Those are Luddite questions.[1]
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 think there’s a chance for anti ai terrorism along with Amish style anti ai behavior.
Ai is stripping people away from their identity. There’s tons and tons of hatred for it… even here on HN.
I'm not sure if terrorism is the right word (how can you do bad things to software?), but I am sure that sabotage on datacenters will become a thing. But that's not a direct response to AI, but one to building more datacenters, using power (and potable water, but I'm not convinced that's as big of a thing as people make it out to be compared to other industries / wastes), and corporate greed which does not improve the lives of the common people.
Yes, though from legal standpoint, this particular case isn't that interesting because its a religious exemption for religious work, where considering the moral and ethical boundaries is the main job?
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.
Why in your hypothetical is it a good thing to strike down their rights to conform to your worldview?
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The revenge effects of technologies are well known: email was great! It was faster and much cheaper than mailing letters. But it gave rise to spam and many types of fraud. The mobile phone is awesome. A powerful computer in your pocket. But now people, including teenagers, spend 12-16 hours each day staring into their mobile phones, doomscrolling towards Babylon. In 2006 people memorized dozens of phone numbers. Today? Maybe you remember 1-2 numbers.
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.
> But it gave rise to spam and many types of fraud.
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.
Clay Tablets: It gave rise to spam and many types of fraud: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ea-nāṣir
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I get plenty of spam in the snail mail. And from what I gather, fraud through mail occurred all the time.
ETA: some of these companies are chopping down a whole god damn forest to send me furniture catalogs. Please stop!
> This invention, O king, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.
Unsurprisingly history repeats itself, there will always be people who reject the unknown for the comforts of the past.
It's interesting to think about this expanded view of religion and how it interacts with nondiscrimination laws. The guy's beliefs (at least in the quotes in the article) seem like a good combination of well reasoned and sensible and core faith-like beliefs, so I'm glad they're protected. At the same time, I can imagine plenty of beliefs that would make me not want to hire someone. I know this one didn't go to court, but I wonder what tests courts use to draw the lines. What deeply held beliefs am I allowed to say make someone an idiot or jerk I don't want to hire, and what deeply held beliefs am I allowed to hold and want the state to protect?
There is a thing called Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications where an employer could discriminate against protected classes because the job description is so specific. Like if a church wanted to hire a new pastor, the job description requires the applicant to be Christian and likely a specific denomination, and any non-christian would be disqualified from the position. BFOQs must be spelled out in the job description to make it absolutely clear that the qualifications are necessary for the job. Also age, sex, and gender can be BFOQs like if the job description is for an acting role of a specific character. Race could potentially apply to something like an acting job too but that's a lot more of a dicey subject, like it would need to be absolutely critical to the production that a character is a specific race.
> Race could potentially apply to something like an acting job too but that's a lot more of a dicey subject, like it would need to be absolutely critical to the production that a character is a specific race.
Is this true? I would think that this conflicts with first amendment rights a bit.
His beliefs are not currently protected. He filed a Title VII request, which was ultimately granted by his employer voluntarily. Because no court ruled that the employer had to grant the request, it is an open question whether Title VII protects them.
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.
Employee: I need an accommodation. AI goes against my religious beliefs.
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.
I've had the concern for years that AI users (or AI itself) will eventually consider non-AI users a pain, because humans will become inefficient in lots of workloads and management, sometimes causing things to come down to a screeching halt, relatively speaking.
We have to solidify laws protecting anti-AI-ers if that's their choice.
This happens today with all technology. AI is no different. If your coworker refuses to use a computer or the internet there are no laws protecting them. Nor should there be.
There's a limit, though. Not only are there mandatory breaks for truck drivers, but also a maximum number of working hours my boss is allowed to demand from me. And even within those limits my boss is not allowed to dispense cocaine during tight deadlines.
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.
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That is not for you to decide!
>We have to solidify laws protecting anti-AI-ers if that's their choice.
Protect them from what, exactly?
Exclusion from society, and the object of anger at "those darn Luddites". You can't tell an Amish he can't use physical coins. Or that his buggy is too slow for the roads (not highways), etc.
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Market efficiency solves this. But whether that's healthy for society or not is an open question.
The same way as we protect those anti-internet or anti-electricity ?
Some cities have laws limiting cashless businesses, as one example of that.
That’s inclusive of have-nots too, alongside the aforementioned no-thank-yous.
The Amish have a bunch of protections and exemptions... So yes?
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More likely the oligarchy will see them as an impediment to their trillion-dollar, world-consuming valuations: https://fortune.com/2026/10/28/openai-ceo-sam-altman-gen-z-d...
Which is actually much more dangerous.
I kind of feel like this is a non-story. The ask was small and reasonable. It was easy enough to grant the accommodation and avoid a confrontation. HR in companies does this all the time.
This is great for him until the goals given him are unachievable, in the given timelines, by human thinking and reasoning alone.
I'm not him, but I would guess that he would respond by saying that we have a moral and ethical responsibility to remain in control of what we're putting into the world. If there's a conflict between the given timelines and how quickly a human can understand the problem and the implications of the decision being made, then the thing that needs to budge is the timeline.
> moral and ethical responsibility
We do not live in a system that values these
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He probably has a lot to say on the topic, but it’s not up to him. The accommodations only extend to reasonable affordances, but do not entirely exempt the person from requirements to perform to the level of expectation for the job.
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And Delaware would say, what responsibility? The state wants to sanction “AI-managed” corporations. https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-investigates-poten...
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> a human can understand the problem and the implications of the decision being made
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.
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So those goals and timelines should be reconsidered; If a civil engineering firm slapped up a bridge as quickly and cheaply as possible with no concern for quality, they would cease to exist. We have no standards for software quality, and therefore anything that accelerated the perceived output is enthusiastically adopted without consideration for any future consequences.
Weinberg’s Law -- If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
Exactly. I would also argue that WE DON'T NEED more software, WE DON'T NEED more features, what US, humanity, needs is MORE RELIABLE software, with less bugs, that is stable.
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.
All analogies are bad you can’t push reboot on a building (yes this analogy is also bad)
Imagine a civil engineer that refuses to use a computer of any kind for his work. How much do you trust scribbled long division?
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.
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While I agree with you at some level, I can't help thinking of the Amish. They impose plenty of restrictions on themselves and still manage to flourish. There must be a way that is different than simply accepting "progress".
This is even more true when "progress" means fertility rates collapse. A culture that is not self sustaining will die, and far more quickly than most realize. It doesn't matter how awesome that culture is for a brief moment in time, it will cease to exist.
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 Amish are an exception, one of the rare ones (along with the handful of protected, isolated tribes). The rule is that a technologically inferior group will get rolled over by a technologically superior one for the benefit of the latter.
However will he invent the next advancement in user tracking via advertisements!
The average user here thinks they're doing far more important work than they actually are.
This is the opinion of someone with very low moral character.
At that point, humans are pretty much unemployable anyway, so why worry?
He is an educator at a public university. I don't think they push people or goals very hard.
> Until the goals given him are unachievable, in the given timelines, by human thinking and reasoning alone.
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.
> 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?
Exactly. The person or people above him who wanted AI to be used against his will will ultimately achieve their goals---no matter what his beliefs are. At the end of the day, his views of humanism are futile against the force of those in favor of AI acceptance.
I can remember a time when the Borg's famous catchphrase was understood to be the kind of thing that only the bad guys would say.
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Where is the limit of human thinking? This late 2025 - till now models give to some real philosophical questions that are not thought experiments anymore, imagining the matrix or the 1984 depiction was a cool thing to imagine, but feeling your humanity taken away from you in the present is heartbreaking.
Not if one is a transhumanist, it feels liberating
Really?
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?
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Lots of strawmanning going on with comments about where the line gets drawn and talking about driving stick, heating his home, etc.
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 example, will this religious exemption become moot if productivity is sufficiently higher with AI giving employers an easy out?
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.
> 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._
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.
I agree with the principle that if it meaningfully impinges on your core ideals that you shouldn't be required to do that.
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?
Apple ought to be made to ask their users to confirm (opt-in) whether they want their AI/Siri/Intelligence/<or whatever they decide at any given time> and everyone else should be provided with a slimmer OS and slimner OTA updates.
> “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,” he told RNS in a video interview. “And offloading that labor, regardless of whether it’s taxing or not, is undercutting my ability to be a moral actor.”
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.
The car he drives to work, the house he heats, the electricity he consumes daily, all that labor is fine to offload, but AI is the line in the sand?
Yes, because those things don't affect his work as a university researcher, which is where he is protesting the forced use of AI and asking for an exemption to that rule.
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?
Some of these issues came up with the Australian prisoner who was denied vegemite, and while Australia is different, there are similar questions involved because secular western societies are all moving in the same direction.
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.
What are trying to say exactly? That only beliefs in a god or gods are really religion? But that any strongly held set of principles is given the same benefits by law as a real religion? What’s the point? If it is treated like a religion by people and by law, who cares if it involves believing in a god, or many, or none??
AI for me I just another balancing act. Lean too hard on it and it will be noticeable and detrimental, lean to hard away from it and you’ll be left behind by those who learn how to balance it.
Where is the line? "AI" is completely arbitrary, might as well say a calculator is immoral because it offloads thinking. That my main issue with these people is that they think AI/LLMs are different than everything that came before them, yes they are more capable but all of computing has involved "offloading" effort/thought to computers. `
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox#Continuum_fall...
A continuum is not isomorphic to a single point.
> "And offloading that labor, regardless of whether it's taxing or not, is undercutting my ability to be a moral actor."
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?
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Exactly. Recent LLMs are in a different category and it's disingenuous to pretend they're not. Wherever you decide to draw the line, GPT-3 and more advanced chatbots are clearly on the far side of it.
Sorites doesn't actually refute the OP. The paradox is rooted in a failure to distinguish between aggregates and integral wholes. A heap is not really a natural kind or an integral whole. It is just a convenient label to describe a vague range of collections for practical purposes, but it is not what you a "thing" in its own right. There is no intrinsic tendency of a heap to be a heap, whereas in integral wholes there are. You cannot draw a line between a heap and a non-heap, because there is no such thing as a heap in any objective sense. There is no essential difference, only an accidental one.
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.
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> my main issue with these people is that they think
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.
The average person was able to look at the devices up until now and see a tool. Now they see something they don't understand, but sure does seem smarter than they are, and has the aesthetics of being a person on the other side of the computer.
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.
They did ban calculators in the Butlerian Jihad.
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Yeah, and is this person going to turn down becoming a manager, ever, because they'll have to delegate the actual solution to someone else? Or are they going to micromanage them due to their ethical commitments?
I mean... this is exactly why I've avoided becoming a manager in the past. I will accept being responsible for my own work, but I don't want to be accountable for someone else's work.
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Why? Do managers have to manage a bunch of AI agents? Or are you equating an LLM to a living breathing human?
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“Why I Am Not Going to Use It” an AI-drafted homage to Wendall Berry and his piece "Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer"
https://substack.com/home/post/p-213929165
This is so good. Here's one stand-out line (of many) to me:
> 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.
In the Berry style, I can say that I don't need to use AI because my wife can do all the statistical inference I need.
The irony.
RIP Berry
“Old man yells at cloud”
Precursor to the machine crusade?
Butlerian Jihad when??
Can we please just look at LLMs like what they are and not some fantastical threat?
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.
I didn't get the impression that the man here was looking at LLMs as some fantastical threat. It seems like his concern was about offloading his thinking and decision making to AI, which seems pretty non-fantastical.
Can't that be done without a performative "religious exemption"? You don't need that to say "yeah, I'm not using this stuff." I imagine in practice all this will accomplish is pissing people off who are already stressed about AI.
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Was he being forced or compelled to offload his thinking to a machine?
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.
I'm definitely resentful that I have to use AI to stay relevant, and wish it never came into existence, but religious exemptions shouldn't exist. If a law or rule isn't important enough for everyone to follow, it shouldn't be a rule or law.
US courts stated that humanism is a form of religion... i bet that gets overturned pretty fast if this takes off.
This is great
I wonder if you can object to using most AI on religious grounds as Claude, Grok, and ChatGPT are produced by and are made in the image of effectively pro-extinction death cults. Honestly, it makes me feel slimy and uneasy using them when I consider that they are basically cult manufactured artifacts designed to influence society according to their religious beliefs.
Great site
Wait till the "where's the line" boosters learn groups like the Amish who have mostly drawn a line. They'll be clamoring for legal loopholes to steal the land from those luddites so that they can buid the future on it!
So what do you do if your company hires an engineer and on the first day they say "I am Amish and cannot touch a computer"? Give them a religions exemption? What then? Are you obligated to pay their salary for the rest of their life?
You're missing a major component of the law:
> 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.
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You filter out any such applicant with digital applications for digital postings requiring proficiency with digital tools.
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.
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How would this person who hasn’t touched a computer for years, end up in the candidate pool for computer-using engineers?
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Read up on EEOC regulation and you'll see your example won't fly. Exceptions must be reasonable and not cause undue hardship on the employer.
"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.
Whilst I’m in favour of the result, how is it possible for a humanist viewpoint to be classified as a religious belief?
Why not? Religious freedoms are about deeply held beliefs. It's not like a judge will evaluate the bible or quran to check if something is or isn't a religious freedom based on what someone's deity of choice supposedly stated.
Also, if humanism is being classified this way, why not transhumanism?
It is very weird that University of Kentucky is asking research administrators to incorporate AI in its workflow. It’s one thing for a Silicon Valley startup to ask SWE to use AI to maximize speed of development, its another thing entirely for a University insulated from competition, with a small admin staff, asking them to use AI for what exactly?
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.
I imagine it was a blanket request for all university employees.
Even if this was true, it is very weird. When was the last time, institutions and bosses ask their employees to use a specific tool? It’s more often that employees fall in love with a tool and ask institutions to pay for it, here’s it’s the exact opposite
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I remember when in Iain M. Banks Culture Novels (I think it was _Consider Phlebas_), the heroine and its drone talk about the "Humanist" movement of a planet they visit incognito as a extremist anti-machine movement... (It is just in passing, the situation in the Culture novels is quite different from the Dune universe).
>Federal courts have ruled that humanism qualifies as a religion. As a result, she said, humanists have the same rights as other faith groups under federal law.
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.
Also begs the question, if humanism counts, why not transhumanism?
> “It has to be a deeply held ethical commitment that’s analogous to a religious commitment,” he said. “That’s a fact question that presumably the employer will investigate.”
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.
> 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.
There's also the bit about undue burden.
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.
> 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.
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.
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Are you implying that there's a meaningful population of people that are against reasonable accommodation for individuals' religious beliefs? There's a very big difference between prescribed religion in the workspace and an individual's beliefs requiring a slight adjustment by the employer to respect.
Depends what you mean by a meaningful population. There are definitely people who think religious accommodations are wrong in principle. There are definitely people who are hostile to religion in general. How many? I have no idea.
Yes I am implying exactly that. This is a very frequent topic of debate.
- 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.
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s/religion/philosophy/?
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Snarky and lazy.
You can stand up to AI and claim it is against humanist beliefs, and you could also look for conflict-free CPUs for your computer and business[0]. Those are both actions a moral agent could take - why did he choose that action? I like humanism and am currently reading a book on it - but I think I have a very different interpretation than this professor or you.
[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/intel-says-its-processors-are-n...
Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. You're using technology too, and also breaking the site rules at the same time.
I read about the cobalt mines in college. I care. If it comes off as snarky, maybe you should have empathy for enslaved people in Africa instead of peons being replaced in first-world countries.
Is the man from the original article mentioned anywhere in the article you linked, or is that just whataboutism and speculation about the man in question and his beliefs?
Modernity has always been about abstraction and specialisation. If he's so humanist, he must also want to make his own food and his own car because after all, you are offloading your thinking to the underlying companies.
The ironic part is that this same guy undoubtedly relies on the expertise of millions of human agents and sees absolutely nothing wrong with that.
He is a humanist, how could relying on humans possibly go against his beliefs?
Where's the irony? Everything the article reports about Durman's opinions would seem to suggest that millions of humans mutually supporting each other is exactly the kind of thing that he wants to see happening.
“Expertise of millions of human agents” …in what? Understanding the universe that’s around us? In the cosmic sense, we humans have not done anything at all, aside from trying to understand it and “chimping out” from time to time.
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.
Every A.I. related post here has someone saying "I for one see no difference between a human being and an A.I." but this may be the first time I've seen this cliche extended to "How bizarre to meet a human being that thinks humans are not identical to A.I."
It really highlights how misanthropic many AI booster people are. I find it really discouraging to see.
Also shows how Anthropic's name is really a misnomer. :)
That doesn’t seem ironic at all. Irony is merely the condition where appearance and reality differ. In this case, if he values his own thinking he presumably values the thinking of other persons.
If someone told me this was a Sam Altman quote, I'd believe them.
>human agents
What? Are you trying to say "people"?
It is an interesting approach, but I would say his productivity is what matters.
I see you value productivity. Productivity to what purpose?
The problem is that you can get any kind of exemption based on religious beliefs.
You actually cannot. There are standards to meet to qualify as a true religious exemption. There have been many court cases where people tried to claim religious beliefs when convenient for them, which were denied because they couldn’t meet the threshold for being a real religious belief.
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.
I didn't make myself clear. I'm against the concept of asking for exception from something based on your religious beliefs. I didn't mean that you can ask for virtually anything.
> 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.
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This is not true. The accommodation is only possible if it doesn't present undue hardship, safety concerns, etc. Plenty of accommodations can be denied on those grounds.
Yes, in most cases a religious exemption requires approval after a formal review regardless of the reason or its merits.
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Which is better than getting no exceptions - if only the two extremes are available.
I disagree. At the moment religious exemptions are almost always granted only to the majority religions, or at least views that the majority religions find acceptable. If you started applying the law fairly the whole thing would immediately fall apart.
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How is this a problem? And what would you propose to do about the negative symptoms of the “problem”.
> How is this a problem?
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?
Some might say this is a feature not a bug of religious freedom
This is just a consequence of the philosophically liberal metaphysics, anthropology, and resulting moral views and political orders they produce. Once you accept those premises, they act as a corrosive agent that can be deployed to dissolve all sorts of truths opposed to someone's conception of "autonomy" and "freedom" and you really have no defense as long as your thinking is subject to them. It's why the Right has consistently lost all sorts of cultural battles. They, too, are liberals - because we're all liberals, culturally - and as long as they remain so, their "reactionary" behavior will largely remain rooted in mere sentimental attachment to an imagined past rather than something intellectually substantive. Hence, why what falls under the label of "postliberalism" has a much stronger shot. It is an intellectual rejection of liberalism with intellectual substance that often draws on robust metaphysical and anthropological "alternatives" to liberalism, as it were.
Sorry you can define criteria how to find a better understanding of the world. E.g. Popper did it (as he asked the innocent question if one is aloud to disprove your theory)
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.
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AI that pretends to be a human mind, or takes the place of a human mind is an abomination. [what does that mean? that's the whole ballgame. defining what this means]
AI as a tool can do impressive things.
AI usage metrics by employers is ... an interesting test case.
I'm sure he drives stick as well because offloading cognitive function to an ECU changing gears for him would also be against his religious beliefs.
Outside of America, most people drive cars with a manual gearbox.
Not true. Even for a lower middle income country like mine, cars with manual gearboxes had become very rare (with the exception of cabs where they remain the norm).
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Outside of the United States? Even then, I don't think this has been a true statement for at least a decade, if not more with the rise of EVs in places other than the USA.
I don't think I've seen a manual gearbox in Canada in decades.
This is only still true because in the parts of the world with the most population, cost is the #1 deciding factor in vehicle purchasing. Manuals are cheaper. Globally the industry is trending against manuals over time.
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.
And how is that relevant here?
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This kind of automation takes the execution away from you, not the decision, and even that execution only concerns you. You wanted to shift into a higher gear, the car's computer does it for you. The result is what you wanted. A fully autonomous car that decides everything for you would be a better example.
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.
theory: there are two groups that a lot of hackernews commenters fall into. And these two groups clash on every Ai post every day. One camp only uses Ai to write code and thinks of them strictly as LLMs with a clearly understood design and purpose but that show some surprising behavior, they've watched youtube videos that show how everything ties together computationally and mathematically, from neural nets to RL, etc. and dont see them as capital A, Ai. It's another tool in the toolbox, and thinking about them in the way you describe, as something closer to capital Ai would cause severe cognitive dissonance, akin to the idea that a hammer could hop out of the toolbox and start building a house. Even though what you've done is just take one small step of critical thinking, it would be a leap to the other camp members, who are themselves, quite technical thinkers.
that's me
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HN posters: try not to deploy a slur challenge: impossible
It’s actually strange that he rejects AI, considering how much this tool speeds things up and helps with so many tasks.