Comment by ahmedfromtunis
10 hours ago
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.
This is not that much different in programming, it just takes longer to find out.
Using AI is like using adaptive cruise control: you're still in charge of where the vehicle will ultimately end up and if you decide to go take a nap you will wake up in the hospital or end up in the morgue.
It's true though that the 'time between interventions' is lengthening steadily.
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"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."
If lawyers and article writers are in the knowledge realm. Then your thesis has plenty of counter-examples of people who just use AI to create stuff and don't correct it.
I don't personally know of any software engineers using AI as "fleets of agents" in a "factory." Sounds like a nightmare.
I usually have a high-level agent drafting plans, then spawning sub-agents to build parts of the plan, other sub-agents to check the work of those agents. Then the PRs have different code review agents looking at the code, on top of the agents for people on my team also reviewing my code.
And I'm probably on the more amateurish end of AI development. As I learned these techniques from YouTube.
When you hear about the work Anthropic researchers are doing, they seem to be using hundreds or thousands of agents to solve problems.
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you... don't read hackernews much I take it? This is like 10% of all submissions lately, lol.
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Yeah, I very much dispute the characterization GP made as to how software devs are working. I know some are. But I do not believe it's the majority of people in the field, not by a long shot.
Every PR now has auto reviews. That's like at least 3-5+ agents depending on the repo.
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.
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.
Was going to say, to the extent I rely on Claude, I'm closer to the old school than the new hotness. I don't run fleets of agents per se, I just use Claude Code with a good bit of back-and-forth and review. So not quite web browser level usage, but I don't have a big swarm of agents working full time. I guess CC can spin up multiple agents, but I don't know if that counts.
Fortunately I'm in a shop that isn't being judged by feature output quantity, but is absolutely judged on whether or not our internal or external customers go out of service. We don't have pressure to pump output.
AI is not an abstraction, so any programmer who thinks they’re “moving up the stack” is fundamentally mistaken.
Language is a tool for abstraction, and AI is just an imperfect tool for working with language.
In the sense that "down the stack" is well-captured by existing language, AI is absolutely moving programmers up the stack. I can describe my goals using high-level abstractions, and the low-level implementation is somewhat constrained by that.
How well constrained it is depends on how well I described the problem and the quality of the model - much like how good human-written code is depends on how clearly the authors were thinking when they designed the structure.
AI is an abstraction in the same way throwing a task to a junior engineer is
I think you mean "shouldn't be", because I see many using as if it is.
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
Current AI models are incapable of doing software development either, but that isn't stopping some people.
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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...
I love giving it different supplier docs and having it read them all allowing me to get pros vs cons and act like search.
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.
Some in that era could not type, at all.
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Isn't this still what Donald Trump does?
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It hasn't exactly worked out well for email, either...
There's no better written communication tool than email. It's one of the most successful inventions of the 20th century.
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Why?
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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.
I am an AI booster, and this is incorrect. Your career will change, and if you change with it, it'll thrive.
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The job is to automate the enterprise, keep things safe and reliable, and make money for the company.
It was never about software. That was just the means.
Even in the software era, fads developed and tech stacks changed frequently. Now it's just moving a hundred times faster.
You need smart systems thinkers to do this. That's the role. Be smart in managing processes and complexity.
I'm not going to give coding interviews anymore, but I am going to give architecture, systems design, and SRE interviews. People still need to know how not to fuck up a database and how to design scalable and resilient systems.
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hospitals still use faxes not email due to the latter's inherent insecurity
As if phone lines are not inherently insecure. The only reason they use fax is because it's been grandfathered in.
Are you sure? I work across a few hospitals in the UK and can't recall seeing a fax in the last decade.
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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!
I’d love to read the paper on how email was objectively “proven to make the world better” and how LLMs fail this same test.
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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/
If you have ever worked in almost any other industry your first question quickly answers itself. If you have never worked in an industry principally governed by ethical standards it would be challenging for me to describe it to you. I cannot give you what your perspective has never before imagined.
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I sure as hell don’t want a doctor who hasn’t gone through any kind of certification and approval process.
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Coding interviews don't matter anymore.
Every part of your existing job is transforming before your eyes.
If you cling to definitions and static roles, you're going to have a bad time.
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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.
Well yes, but dont call it a profession then.
And lets be pirates and hackers instead.
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.
> These entities are independent from government and set their own standards.
As they should. Industries should be self regulating. While these industries form their own standards of practice they do so with the blessing of government, typically under state government supervision/authorization in the US, and are held to account by government. A lawyer or doctor who violates their standards of practice could very likely be guilty of criminal law and find themselves in prison depending upon the violation even when no other criminal actions occurred.
Even bus drivers are held to higher standards of practice than software developers.
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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.
Do those organizations determine your acceptable level of practice? I would argue they do not and are thus not relevant to this conversation.
What was your last employer that asked for your license number of member ID from any of those organizations? I am guessing it has never happened.
Normally when people try this argument they are hoping a for a dog whistle to shift ground because they don't want to be regulated.
None of those certify the vast majority of those who work as software engineers.
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 have the feeling this expectation loss is what triggered the current riots in Western Europe. I'm not talking about the platforms and actors which might be fanning and fueling them, but the trigger which I have seen at work at my kids or nephews - they don't see much hope they can rely on some income, on getting their own house, on feeding their own children. Of course they are young and easier influenced, and I might be biased myself, but I really believe they have less chances than what I had at their age. I won't tell them that though.
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The closest biological fear, might be Planet of the Apes.
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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...
From conversations with my young kids the problem they have is with the billionaires. They are fine with the technology they just don’t trust the billionaires and who can blame them.
I don't think the underlying numbers support the thesis. My understanding (from e.g. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/how-opinions...) is that the age skew is not that high and largely driven by how much more likely young people are to be familiar with the technology at all.
> 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 don't think the creators of any of those technologies were warning society that their own creations might wipe out humanity.
They are only doing this now IMO so that they can be the ones writing the regulations to keep us all "safe", just like we need identity verification to "save the children". They want to keep competition at bay so they can have a $2T IPO, and unregulated, "unsafe", Chinese, open-weight, and local AI threatens that IPO.
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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.
Not to sound insane (because those who know, know), but CRT's actually resolve very well and are league better than most non OLED displays for non-text based media consumption.
I run a wide-screen 1080i Sony Display as my main TV. Power consumption sucks, though.
My second monitor is a 11" beige VGA LCD. I'm ready for the regression.
I want modern medicine, renewable energy, etc. the world keeps getting better.
I want those things to. I just can't afford them.
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.
Most 9-5 workers (statistically) do not get to enjoy extra hours clawed back from labor. It's hard enough filling an 8 hour office day as it is.
And now you want to automate what little most workers do?
LLMs do not make people more productive. They only give the illusion of productivity.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Same stuff, is a Markov chain too much (Gen) AI already?
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.
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.
Apparently they develop mentat capabilities to serve their feudal planetary lord
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?
> Why can't we finally have a good container orchestrator that's not kubernetes for example?
Easy, we can't because the LLMs know a lot about kubernetes but wouldn't know anything about a new orchestrator, so they'll always suggest k8s, and the button-pushers will just say "yes, do it, no mistakes". Maybe if Anthropic decides they need to create a new orchestrator, they would bias Claude heavily enough for it to actually get used, but that's about the only way I see.
Perhaps because the tools that we have already are already good enough.
"Why don't we have any new programming languages" or "Why don't we have any new web frameworks" or "Why don't we have any new operating systems" or "Why don't we have any new container orchestrators" might be the same kinds of questions as "why is the design for washing machines still basically the same as it was 50 years ago?" or "why are we still using English, where are all the new conlangs to replace it?" "why are we still using email/SMTP instead of inventing a better system" "why haven't we invented a new calendar?"
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It might not count as innovation in the last four years because the groundwork was laid decades ago, but in the last four years Waymo evolved to the point where it can drive on the highways.
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I'd love to have speech-to-text on my iPhone that actually worked without needing to proofread and edit.
> Why can't we finally have a good container orchestrator that's not kubernetes for example?
What's the market demand? I'm confident there are plenty of alternatives being churned out today but nobody's looking or asking for any. If only because they settled on k8s, they have it on their CV, they have certifications, and switching is a huge investment and risk.
Right now to me it feels like the innovation is in using LLMs to (finally?) clean up existing code, find vulnerabilities, do maintenance, optimize, and if necessary rewrite.
But the AI still progressing at a rapid rate is also software.
If your database gets bigger does the software get better too?
It is progressing, yes, but it subsumed the productivity of humans.
Where before humans learned and built better tools, now you keep paying forever to get re-trained models. What makes it a regressive feedback loop is that the people who used to learn and push the frontier are now using AI to repackage others' work as their own. Eventually what will be left to train on but copies of copies of copies?
> 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
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.
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
Love Pychon, his recent book published last year is really good, and a light read in comparison to his other novels. "Shadow Ticket" highly reccomend.
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?
My right to housing supersedes their right to work a certain (slower) way? "You can just wait longer" is an unacceptable answer.
It's easy to find egregious corner cases of philosophical workflows where an LLM was inappropriately used to replace thinking, where the whole goal was thinking (which is the case here).
But we know most token use is software development + back office paperwork. A big chunk of it is productivity improvements for things we all need (housing, medical paperwork, insurance etc.), so to me, that's where my argument lies.
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