[HN Gopher] Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted reli...
___________________________________________________________________
Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption
from AI
Author : danso
Score : 470 points
Date : 2026-10-28 13:41 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (religionnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (religionnews.com)
| ranger_danger wrote:
| > "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.
| joshstrange wrote:
| 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?
| ranger_danger wrote:
| 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?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| > "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.
| rhodey wrote:
| > 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.
| eesmith wrote:
| 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.
| drdaeman wrote:
| > 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.
| eesmith wrote:
| Right, but we're talking EEOC law.
|
| The Civil Rights Act which created the EEOC does not
| require or permit an employer to break the law to
| accommodate a request, even if it is reasonable and with no
| burden.
|
| Instead, the law must be challenged directly.
| mattw2121 wrote:
| This is great for him until the goals given him are unachievable,
| in the given timelines, by human thinking and reasoning alone.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| 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.
| jkestner wrote:
| And Delaware would say, what responsibility? The state wants
| to sanction "AI-managed" corporations.
| https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-investigates-
| poten...
| busssard wrote:
| are they "enemies of the State"?
| dudefeliciano wrote:
| > moral and ethical responsibility
|
| We do not live in a system that values these
| oldmanhorton wrote:
| "Not with that attitude!"
|
| Standing by morals and ethical responsibilities is hard, it
| takes mental and physical energy and there are plenty of
| ethical fights we all have to concede every day as a
| result. But at the "society" level, I think this sort of
| rhetoric just leads us further down the hole. We can
| continue to fight the battles that we have the willpower
| and means to fight, and that's a very individual decision.
| Principled people with high tolerance for bullshit
| (seemingly like the guy in TFA) can make a lot of
| difference, IMO.
| dudefeliciano wrote:
| > Principled people with high tolerance for bullshit
| (seemingly like the guy in TFA) can make a lot of
| difference
|
| > great for him until the goals given him are
| unachievable, in the given timelines, by human thinking
| and reasoning alone.
|
| Sorry but as much as I would like to agree with what you
| are saying managers, CEOs, shareholders and everyone that
| connects that chain won't ever care about ethics or
| morals when it comes to making a buck or getting one over
| the competition. Not in the system we are in.
| JsonDemWitOster wrote:
| s/moral and ethical/professional/
|
| This just reminds me of the whole bun fiasco. If your
| manager asks you to rewrite a years-old codebase in a week
| for immediate deployment, is it not acceptable to push
| back?
|
| If you work in a regulated industry, or even just if your
| product has had a tough relationship with incidents of
| late, that makes this kind of push back even more
| defensible.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| We live in a world where most (almost all?) humans value
| them.
| dudefeliciano wrote:
| then someone needs to explain the military-industrial
| complex, sweatshops, industrial animal farming and many
| more practices which seemingly are incredibly profitable
| despite (because?) being compeltely immoral
| bemtevi wrote:
| True. We should fight for them though, and that's the
| entire point of an article like this.
| qup wrote:
| > 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.
| archagon wrote:
| You seem livid. Kind of bizarre.
|
| Where is that gas pedal taking you, by the way? I can see
| where it's taking people like Garry Tan:
| https://www.fastcompany.com/91520702/y-combinator-garry-
| tan-...
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| They're not talking to us, they're crafting a viral e/acc
| tweet. I admit I don't quite understand the point of
| doing that deep in an HN comment thread, but once you
| realize what's happening you see it a lot. Perhaps if you
| read too much viral ragebait it starts to be your default
| mode of communication.
| qup wrote:
| I was at the river with my copper bopper
| qup wrote:
| It's bizarre to read my comment as livid, that's far from
| correct.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I don't think that projecting opinions that you don't think
| are reasonable upon someone who didn't actually say those
| things, or clinging tightly to the Goomba fallacy with
| phrases like "guys like the one in the article", will get
| you very far toward understanding what he actually said.
|
| Which is self-defeating. If you don't make a good faith
| effort to understand what he said then you're leaving
| yourself in a poor position to credibly argue against it.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| There's nothing in the article to suggest that performance
| of his actual duties as an administrator have been called
| into question. The issue under contention, as the article
| frames it, is the University trying to dictate the details
| of _how_ that work gets done.
|
| There are some who would call that micro-management.
| seanclayton wrote:
| 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.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| 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.
| intrasight wrote:
| I remember a time when we had to go back in time to get a
| whale so that machines and animals could coexist.
| account42 wrote:
| And I also remember that even in that case resistance was
| in fact not futile in the end.
| abyssin wrote:
| 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".
| notabotiswear wrote:
| 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.
| vuurmot wrote:
| True, like the Iranians
| somenameforme wrote:
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| We are going to have so much high quality furniture.
| teeray wrote:
| > 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.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| > 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?
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| 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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| JsonDemWitOster wrote:
| mattw2121's hypothetical is about timelines and quality. As
| long as said Civil Engineer can deliver quality work within
| our allocated timeline, he can do long division in binary
| scribbled in sand for all I care.
| rsiotednoirstdn wrote:
| Another moron with AI Delusion Syndrome. Comparing LLMs to
| steel, numbers, and wheels is fucking hilarious.
|
| Yes, power equipment is better, but still barely the same
| thing.
|
| You're one dumb motherfucker, aren't you?
| alerighi wrote:
| 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.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| All analogies are bad you can't push reboot on a building
| (yes this analogy is also bad)
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| We shouldn't have to "push reboot" on systems we rely on.
| The fact that that's acceptable is a big part of the
| problem.
| nemo44x wrote:
| We actually do have standards for some software engineering.
| Claude isn't writing anything that is life/death critical.
|
| Static analysis for example. Although I've heard that LLMs
| can now do that if a user wanted it.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| I assume the standards you're referring to are things like
| The MISRA guidelines, or the IEC standards (specifically
| 62304). In my experience, these are applied in very "check-
| the-box" ways that often undermine their intent; Very very
| few organizations take software safety seriously.
| 0c3ca83 wrote:
| At that point, humans are pretty much unemployable anyway, so
| why worry?
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| 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.
| jpadkins wrote:
| He is an educator at a public university. I don't think they
| push people or goals very hard.
| mike_bob wrote:
| This is the opinion of someone with very low moral character.
| EarlKing wrote:
| 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.
| anon7725 wrote:
| 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.
| navhc wrote:
| He is a _human_ ist, how could relying on humans possibly go
| against his beliefs?
| EarlKing wrote:
| The word "relying" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that
| sentence. The point I'm making is that "relying" on human
| experts, as opposed to AI experts, is the same thing: you're
| giving up your autonomy for the illusion of productivity, and
| in the process courting disaster. To put it another way:
| Every single one of you who downvoted me has clearly never
| read Frank Herbert's Dune. Machine-think is not limited to
| machines.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| 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.
| staticman2 wrote:
| 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."
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| 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. :)
| mag7269 wrote:
| "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.
| duskdozer wrote:
| >human agents
|
| What? Are you trying to say "people"?
| platevoltage wrote:
| If someone told me this was a Sam Altman quote, I'd believe
| them.
| joshstrange wrote:
| 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. `
| square_usual wrote:
| 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?
| bongothrowaway wrote:
| 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.
| square_usual wrote:
| Do you think it is unethical to be a manager?
| bongothrowaway wrote:
| No, but it's not a job for me. Someone has to do it,
| though, but I'd rather it not be me.
| square_usual wrote:
| If you don't "want" to do something, that's not a
| religious or ethical exemption, that's just you not
| wanting to do something.
| bongothrowaway wrote:
| And by the same token, if my job turns around and
| requires me to do something I don't want to do, I would
| quit. Or try to get fired, if I was feeling spiteful.
|
| I'm not arguing on this guy's behalf, I only made a
| comment.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Why? Do managers have to manage a bunch of AI agents? Or are
| you equating an LLM to a living breathing human?
| square_usual wrote:
| Do you understand what the ethical objection the person who
| requested this exemption has?
| bunderbunder wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox#Continuum_fall...
|
| A continuum is not isomorphic to a single point.
| SpaceLawnmower wrote:
| 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.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > "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?
| giantg2 wrote:
| We haven't been offloading thinking. We have been
| offloading the calculation. Someone had to think to
| implement a system in the past. The system abided by those
| constraints, or could be checked against them as it was
| deterministic (vast majority). AI is non-deterministic and
| presents a shift to where people are using it like a magic
| 8-ball to think for them, even if the mechanism is
| probablistic calculation of word patterns.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| By chopping out the first sentence of the quote, you lose
| the context of exactly what kind of labor he's talking
| about. Which is useful if you want to construct a strawman
| version of his argument by suggesting he might be morally
| opposed to four function calculators, too, but not so
| useful if the goal is to engage with the (presumably
| incomplete) version of his position that the article
| presents in good faith.
|
| So let's look at that preceding sentence so that we can get
| a better sense of what kind of labor he was talking about:
|
| > The process and work involved in thinking through
| situations, through my work, through my ethics, through the
| way I handle other people, is a key component in being able
| to develop myself as a moral person.
|
| "thinking through situations", "my ethics", "the way I
| handle other people", "develop myself as a moral person".
| This doesn't read to me like he's taking a Butlerian Jihad-
| type position that humans have a moral responsibility to do
| their own arithmetic. We're clearly talking about higher-
| level, more abstract thinking and decision-making that
| might carry real moral weight.
|
| And that brings us to a difference that I think he might be
| seeing but that you seemed to be claiming does not exist
| when you said, "My main issue with these people is that
| they think AI/LLMs are different than everything that came
| before them." GPT-style decoder LLMs are the first time
| we've ever really seen people trying to rely on computers
| to make abstract and open-ended decisions such as drawing
| up business plans, drafting memoranda, or doing deep
| research-type tasks on any sort of scale.
|
| I think that you're probably aware that there is a a
| noticeable difference between how people are thinking about
| LLMs now versus how they did back when GPT 2.0 was the
| latest and greatest. The fact that we can construct a
| hypothetical continuum of possible models between GPT 2.0
| and GPT 3.5 Turbo and suggest that, in this counterfactual
| scenario, it might not be possible to draw a hard line that
| cleanly separates the tech itself into two discrete
| categories, is fundamentally missing the point. His concern
| was never stated to be about the technology itself; it was
| about how he was being asked to use it.
| Jtarii wrote:
| The difference between a calculator and an LLM is so
| obvious that its hard to believe this is a genuine
| question.
|
| Do you honestly believe that LLMs are just the next
| incremental improvement on prior technology? It is such a
| fundamentally new paradigm.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| 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.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| The difference between the Sorites paradox and the
| continuum fallacy is explained right there in the section
| on the continuum fallacy that I linked to.
|
| I realize that's embedded within a larger page on the
| Sorites paradox instead of being given its own page, but
| I'm not super interested in being that preoccupied with
| Wikipedia's editorial decisions.
| jfyi wrote:
| 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.
| 1899-12-30 wrote:
| They did ban calculators in the Butlerian Jihad.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| > 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.
| injidup wrote:
| 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.
| savwolf wrote:
| Outside of America, most people drive cars with a manual
| gearbox.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| 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).
| newsoftheday wrote:
| According to Gemini, 35% to 40% of vehicles in the world
| today are manual transmission. While not most, it's higher
| than I realized.
| contingencies wrote:
| Possibly out of date statistics including farm machinery
| and motorbikes sold to Africa. In Southeast Asia, I've
| noticed that cities are mostly now all automatic scooters
| but in country areas many people still prefer manual.
| Manual is more intuitive for tackling hard topography and
| very bad roads.
| busterarm wrote:
| 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.
| paxy wrote:
| And how is that relevant here?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Because it shows that there are a large number of people
| who do not want to offload a basic task, people for whom an
| insignificant convenience is not worth a significant outlay
| of money.
|
| I think if you mapped smart home technology to transmission
| preference, those who op for manual transmissions probably
| also opt for oldschool switches and thermostats .
| threetonesun wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| I don't think I've seen a manual gearbox in Canada in
| decades.
| diegolas wrote:
| that's me
| close04 wrote:
| 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.
| nphardon wrote:
| 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.
| red_candle_wax wrote:
| 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!
| paxy wrote:
| 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?
| danso wrote:
| How would this person who hasn't touched a computer for
| years, end up in the candidate pool for computer-using
| engineers?
| Toynbeeidea wrote:
| Because he was hired when the company still used
| typewriters.
| paxy wrote:
| Who says they haven't touched a computer for years? There's
| no requirement for your beliefs to be consistent. Otherwise
| there wouldn't be a single religious person left in the
| world. You can interview on a computer and reveal your
| religious preferences on the first day of the job.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| > There's no requirement for your beliefs to be
| consistent
|
| I would bet money a judge would argue that
| inconsistent/arbitrary beliefs are in fact not "sincerely
| held" beliefs as defined under Title VII.
|
| Also, SCOTUS made a ruling in 2023 that a business is
| allowed to take "undue hardship" into consideration for
| the company as a whole, meaning they can still fire (or
| not hire) you if your beliefs would be detrimental to the
| success of the business.
| cwnyth wrote:
| The fact that all this stuff is easily accessible online
| and yet some people think they can just out-logic the law
| is mind-boggling to me. Oh, you never studied law in your
| life but you're criticizing a 60-year old law that has
| been hashed out over and over again? Dunning-Kruger
| strikes again.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Agreed... I feel like this is many people in general
| though (and esp. online forums/social media where people
| like to act smart); always with the armchair experts
| confidently stating uneducated guesses as dogma.
|
| And the Dunning-Kruger effect also applies to "smart"
| people. You don't stop when you're estimating your
| ability correctly; as you learn more, you gain more
| awareness of your ignorance and continue being
| conservative with your self-estimates.
| danso wrote:
| Yeah but you realize that religious exemptions aren't
| just automatically rubber stamped? That employers can
| deny them on the basis of lack of sincerity? How
| realistic is it that someone can have a career with
| computers, and then on the first day of the job, prove
| that they've gone all-in on an anti-computer religion?
| bluGill wrote:
| There are a lot of weird ways interviews are done. I
| wouldn't be surprised if someone's interview process didn't
| screen for is someone even an engineer.
|
| Though nothing about the Amish prohibits being a computer
| using engineer. Their rejection of technology is a lot more
| nuanced.
| cwnyth wrote:
| 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.
| paxy wrote:
| So all a company has to do is say "AI is necessary for the
| job" and the exemption no longer applies. Then why are we
| even having this discussion?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| How would you possibly prove that AI is necessary for a
| job when someone has been doing the job successfully for
| years before AI?
|
| Sounds like a tough argument to make to me
| MentalM wrote:
| How would you possibly prove that AI is necessary for a
| job when someone has been doing the job successfully for
| years before AI?
|
| Same for computers and engineering.
| Jtarii wrote:
| Computers were introduced to the workplace over the
| course of 50 years, not 4 years.
| MentalM wrote:
| Computers were introduced overnight. One Monday the
| engineer went to work, and bang! There is a computer
| waiting for him, deal with it or go find another job.
| People at that time not joked around, were too busy
| building affordable houses, medicine, education,
| groceries and childcare. No way they would put up with
| some snowflakes who has some "beliefs" get in the way of
| creating all that societal goods.
| AustinDev wrote:
| Let's say your company makes holes. The year is 2026 so
| you use excavators because they are good at digging holes
| quickly. Would you hire a guy who refuses to use an
| excavator but will happily use a shovel?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| My argument that you seem to have completely missed: If
| the guy with the shovel is already satisfying 100% of my
| hole digging needs, why would I spend the extra money for
| an excavator?
| cwnyth wrote:
| Because if neither side budges, it goes to court to
| figure out what's reasonable, like with any other
| dispute. This is pretty basic stuff.
| goodmythical wrote:
| 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.
| paxy wrote:
| And what if someone decides to convert after starting the
| job?
| goodmythical wrote:
| They'd be found incapable of performing the tasks they
| agreed to perform in their contract.
|
| You don't get to violate a contract just because you
| changed religions.
| eesmith wrote:
| 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.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| 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).
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The AI use requirement described in the source article
| doesn't seem to have had such a specific mandate.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| 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.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| > 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.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| So are you making the case that some % of SWE should be
| licensed?
| toast0 wrote:
| If you're in texas, you need a license to engineer.
| They're reasonable though and accept the reality of
| business card engineers.
| vel0city wrote:
| Kind of true.
|
| There are certainly things where you need to have an
| officially licensed engineer actually stamp the plans.
| That doesn't mean everything about the plans was done by
| someone who holds that stamp, just that they were
| reviewed and signed off by the person holding the
| license. Lots of people may work on those plans. They're
| still doing engineering work. And that's just for the
| kinds of things which actually require a licensed
| "engineer".
|
| There's still tons of jobs which is often still called
| "engineering" which often don't involve _anyone_ who has
| a stamp. Few electrical engineers, chemical engineers,
| mechanical engineers, or lots of others actually have any
| kind of engineering license. They still get degrees in
| things like "Bachelor of Science of Electrical
| Engineering" or "Master of Science in Mechanical
| Engineering". Their job roles usually have "engineer" in
| it. And yet it seems like the job people only really
| criticize as "you're not an engineer, engineers are
| licensed" is SWE.
| toast0 wrote:
| > "you're not an engineer, engineers are licensed"
|
| I always come back with "you're not an engineer,
| engineers wear stripey hats"
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| You mean they know more about _engines_ than most people
| and often work for the most monopolistic big orgs that
| exist? Who would have guessed?
|
| I guess search engines count for something if you shovel
| in enough coal ;)
| hermitdev wrote:
| In most (all?) US states, you need a license to be a
| _Professional_ Engineer. This is a legal distinction that
| carries weight _and_ legal liability. It doesn't mean
| that you cannot "engineer" without a license. There's
| legal distinctions on what work a licensed engineer can
| and cannot do, and what work must be done by or under the
| supervision of a licensed engineer. e.g. a junior's work
| has to be signed off by a supervising PE. To become a PE,
| a licensed Engineering Intern must have first passed a
| preliminary exam issued by the state and worked under a
| PE for a minimum amount of time with satisfactory
| performance (think apprenticeship).
|
| It's the legal liability that SWEs don't want. e.g. You
| wouldn't be able to just slap "This is free software; see
| the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty;
| not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
| PURPOSE." on your software and walk away from it when
| lives are at stake. A so-called Profession Software
| Engineer would have to accept liability for their work
| product, and those of the juniors working under them.
|
| I started down the road to becoming a Professional
| Engineer while I was in college as I studied Electrical
| Engineering and was more interested in hardware/power
| engineering. I took, and passed, the Engineering Intern
| Test in my state (which is the preliminary exam you take
| before you can start your journey to become a PE). Then
| life happened and job/career opportunities took me in a
| different direction/industry, and I've been doing
| software instead. So, I never became a licensed
| Professional Engineer. I'm still a licensed engineering
| intern, though. I'm still bound by the legal and ethical
| standards that it entails and could lose my license for
| violations.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Think about it like this: What makes software any more or
| less of a profession than working at your favorite burger
| joint in terms of industry wide criteria?
| lightedman wrote:
| "What makes software any more or less of a profession
| than working at your favorite burger joint in terms of
| industry wide criteria?"
|
| Many states require you to pass a test and get a
| license/certification before working in fast food.
|
| That is not a requirement in the SWE world.
|
| The sheer lack of accreditation and standards-enforcing
| body is what makes sofware engineering a non-profession.
| kibwen wrote:
| Those percentage of SWE working on critical
| infrastructure should be licensed and legally liable,
| yes. You shouldn't need a license to build a CRUD app,
| just like nobody needs a license to build a treehouse in
| their backyard. You should need a license to work on a
| car's braking system (https://safetyresearch.net/toyota-
| unintended-acceleration-an...) or radiation therapy
| machines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25), just
| like you need a license to engineer a highway bridge.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Interesting that some of the most critical software is
| open source with code contributed by people not even paid
| to write it.
| kibwen wrote:
| People do things based on motivation. People motivated by
| pride and passion know that their work reflects upon
| them, so they have an incentive to care about quality.
| People motivated by money know that their paychecks will
| keep arriving as long as they keep meeting a minimum bar,
| so they're not incentivized to care about quality, but
| they are incentivized to care about responsiveness and
| consistency. For critical software, adding in legal
| liability for one's work creates the quality incentive
| that's lacking in most professional roles, while
| retaining the accountability that we can't expect of
| volunteers.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| I agree completely -- the lack of proper professional
| licensing around working on what has become critical
| infrastructure astounds me. But even more so is the
| pushback I feel from within the field! It isn't that the
| pushback isn't understandable; its more that its
| disappointing.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Even bus drivers are held to higher standards of
| practice than software developers.
|
| Because while there are _some_ software developers that
| _might_ be in a place to cause people physical harm, ALL
| bus drivers are ALWAYS in a position to cause great and
| immediate harm to others on the road.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Determining proximity to harm is the excuse people are
| looking for to justify allowed malicious intent.
| dcss_gardener wrote:
| 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/
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| OpenAI and Anthropic still do coding interviews, though?
| echelon wrote:
| If they do, they're behind the curve. They don't matter
| anymore.
|
| Systems design, architecture, database fundamentals, a
| bit of SRE. That matters. Not coding and syntax and toy
| problem solving with data structures and algorithms.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I think this is something where definitions and static
| roles might serve as a useful reference point. Is it
| really the case that the trillion-dollar frontier AI labs
| are behind the curve, and only some other group of people
| knows how to _really_ leverage AI? It 's not impossible -
| Nvidia employees aren't the best in the world at using
| their chips - but the hypothesis practically demands some
| analysis of who these clever curve-setters are and why
| we're hearing so much less about them than about
| Anthropic.
|
| My own experience is that coding, syntax, and some kinds
| of toy problem solving are important skills to use AI
| coding tools most effectively. I routinely get PRs these
| days whose descriptions seem plausible but are clearly
| wrong from a glance at the code, and I've had times when
| I'm unable to communicate to someone _why_ a PR is wrong
| because they 're not able to form a sufficiently detailed
| mental model of what it's doing.
| robot_jesus wrote:
| This makes sense, though. They have to be exceptionally
| confident in the performance of the product and work to
| continually improve its quality and efficiency. Many
| other companies can get by more just as consumers of it,
| but the makers of the product need some of the best
| coding skills available.
| archagon wrote:
| They keep claiming their agents are better than any
| programmer.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Sounds like the software execs who create addictive
| software but make sure their own kids don't have a phone.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Legal IQ tests and nothing else.
| eikenberry wrote:
| I just finished several months of interviewing and think
| that you must be projecting a bit. Every one of them
| included a coding interview with no AI use allowed.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| 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.
| dcss_gardener wrote:
| I'm not sure how you can know what I've experienced or
| imagined. But I appreciate your ownership of the
| communication failure here.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| This is bunk/nonsense. Despite dentists ostensible having
| ethical standards, they are literally worse than lawyers
| on being scammers, charlatans, cranks, etc
|
| Your definition would include Chiropractors as a
| profession. Such scum of the earth deserves nothing but
| contempt with extreme prejudice.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I sure as hell don't want a doctor who hasn't gone through
| any kind of certification and approval process.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| for me it would depend on a situation (I definitely would
| not want to be in a situation where this would be needed)
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| > US Army, ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession
|
| I'm not going to let the army tell me what my job is.
| a34729t wrote:
| Well yes, but dont call it a profession then.
|
| And lets be pirates and hackers instead.
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| jimbokun wrote:
| None of those certify the vast majority of those who work
| as software engineers.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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...
| keybored wrote:
| 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.
| lifeisloving wrote:
| 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...
| thatsabadlook wrote:
| Tech bros are kind of untethered from reality.
| redwood wrote:
| 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
| lifeisloving wrote:
| 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.
| angiolillo wrote:
| > 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.
| ChickeNES wrote:
| 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.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| 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.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Why in your hypothetical is it a good thing to strike down
| their rights to conform to your worldview?
| pj_mukh wrote:
| 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.
| harimau777 wrote:
| For most of the things that people really care about, I
| don't think that the bottleneck is the sort of thing that
| AI is automating.
|
| The bottleneck for housing is construction and landlords.
| The bottleneck for medicine is the number of doctors and
| the inelasticity of demand. The bottleneck for education
| is the number of teachers. Etc.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| >>"I don't think that the bottleneck is the sort of thing
| that AI is automating."
|
| This is patently false on multiple levels. One, on a
| simple level automating paperwork frees up labor for more
| useful things they can do immediately. Two, the footprint
| of what AI can do is rapidly growing. Till 2 months ago,
| no one thought LLM's could command robots, and now voila
| [1]. Of course these capabilities will plateau somewhere,
| but it's clear the productivity curve hasn't even been
| explored yet.
|
| At least in my city, housing is severely restricted by
| the cost and availability of labor. I want labor to be
| paid well, but I always want housing to be cheaper, the
| missing link is productivity.
|
| [1]:
| https://x.com/ihorbeaver/status/2104646736652447854?s=20
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| 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.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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.
| vuurmot wrote:
| poison pilling
|
| societal ostracization (e.g. boycotts)
|
| sabotaging data centers, data gathering infra (flock
| cameras), web infrastructure
|
| These are just methods within the current societal norms
| and context, if not I could think of 10 more.
|
| For example, it is not beyond the realm of imagination to
| think that large swathes of people could stop using
| technology (as in phones & computers) altogether, and
| return to a more traditional physical communal state.
|
| It is not beyond the realm of imagination that countries,
| after suffering from cyber attacks, could start decoupling
| themselves from the global internet, and wall themselves
| off (similar to China), and develop their own unique
| culture around technology.
|
| It is not beyond the realm of imagination that tags like
| Anti-AI be mandated to be attached to products similarly to
| kosher, halal, etc.
| abirch wrote:
| I'd be happy to do a 1999 Amish life style + LED TVs that don't
| spy on you.
| zer0tonin wrote:
| I will be happy to put up with CRT screens if that's what it
| takes.
| Uncle_Brumpus wrote:
| My second monitor is a 11" beige VGA LCD. I'm ready for the
| regression.
| TheJohnSmith1 wrote:
| 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.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| I want modern medicine, renewable energy, etc. the world
| keeps getting better.
| harimau777 wrote:
| I want those things to. I just can't afford them.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| Hamuko wrote:
| According to the AI boosters, my career (and pretty much
| everyone else's) is already over anyway.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| phil21 wrote:
| Very much agree with most of this.
|
| The number of people who never seem to have understood
| what software and IT is in most companies is eye opening
| to me. Your job was never really to "write code" - you
| were always automating things.
|
| That the field got somewhat stuck for a couple decades
| seems to have made many people forget this.
|
| The vast majority of programmers who started in the 80's
| and 90's are basically directly responsible for massive
| waves of job losses in certain categories. Lots of cases
| of entire departments of secretarial level paper-pushing
| work being replaced with a small team of programmers.
| Same will happen with AI tooling. The difference is
| programmers are no longer the "winning" party here.
|
| Computers and software in the end are the most
| configurable and complex automation system society has
| ever created. They are simply a continuation of
| industrial automation, and AI is a continuation upon
| that.
| basilgohar wrote:
| I think it's helpful seeing AI in this context, at least
| in as much as it pertains to enterprise and industry.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| I am an AI booster, and this is incorrect. Your career will
| change, and if you change with it, it'll thrive.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| What unique selling point do individuals operating AI
| still have if it's AI doing the heavy lifting and
| specialized work? I mean I don't believe that people in
| general will need to work less (no automation has done
| that), but I'm convinced many people will need to find
| new employment at lower wages in a society where cost of
| living only increases.
|
| I can't afford a pay cut, and AI isn't making my job
| worth more.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| " will need to find new employment at lower wages "
|
| Why at lower wages? Most automation has led to people
| transitioning to higher wages. Utility works get paid 10x
| more than lamplighters. Why would that change here? Your
| job will have a bigger impact, affect more people, and
| you'll be doing more with less.
|
| I am not saying all employers will immediately start
| paying people more, but economically it doesn't make
| sense that pay will go down.
| eloisius wrote:
| That's only one analogy. What about artisanal cobblers vs
| Southeast Asia Nike sweatshop workers?
| pj_mukh wrote:
| >>What about artisanal cobblers vs Southeast Asia Nike
| sweatshop workers?
|
| No technology involved? Other than I guess tangentially,
| containerized shipping. I don't see how that analogy
| applies here at all, every AI workflow I've seen has been
| either:
|
| a) Totally new thing that was never done before that is
| possible now and is therefore creating a new class of
| work
|
| b) Worst case scenario: a whole spate of jobs being
| consolidated under one person, but its still a human in
| the end.
|
| So everything I'm seeing is pointing to this being a
| lamplighter/utility worker situation.
| noumenon1111 wrote:
| Well, for example, a metric ass-ton of shoes and shoe
| components are made in Bosnia. But hardly anyone still
| makes the traditional opanci in the traditional way;
| there's one guy left in the whole Hercegovina that does.
| And they are required for the national costume, so they
| are still important. But the economics just don't work
| out.
| AngryData wrote:
| To me this just reads like how I imagine people and the
| Luddites thought about automated looms. At first they
| were excited, thinking about the cheap and abundant cloth
| they put in plenty of work to make automated looms work
| flawlessly, until they start getting replaced. But they
| made excuses that they always need someone who knows more
| than "put cloth on spool, press button" to run these
| factories and that skilled people will always be needed.
| But slowly and surely the factory went towards quantity
| and not quality, and since quantity was done regardless
| why pay for the skilled and knowledgeable workers? And
| soon nobody made good money making cloth except the
| factory owner, the cloth was shit, and the people who
| built it all left with nothing but memories of once being
| valuable.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| >>people who built it all left with nothing but memories
| of once being valuable.
|
| But, the story doesn't end there does it? Most loom
| workers left their jobs and became factory workers (part
| of the same technology revolution) and _critically_ :
| made MORE money. They were wealthier. And the loom
| machine operators left had a better job. There are very
| good sources for this, not just vibes [1].
|
| I don't deny that the transition process is traumatic,
| and there is much we should be doing this time around to
| assuage the process. But all the evidence points to a
| general rise in pay, material conditions and standard of
| living.
|
| [1]:
| https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300205251/libertys-
| dawn/
| jacquesm wrote:
| And where do you propose the 20-25% or so of the soon-to-
| be-jobless will go next?
| mekael wrote:
| They dont know and dont care.
|
| people who spout the trite "everything will be better at
| some nondescript future point in time" are essentially
| screaming "the ends justify the means and screw everyone
| else, i'm going to get my bag / be ok".
| stvltvs wrote:
| As anyone in the Rust Belt can tell you, the average
| worker might experience higher wages over time, but the
| average worker is a statistical fiction, not a flesh and
| blood person.
|
| Individuals and entire communities can live out the rest
| of their lives destitute and hopeless in the wake of
| changes that leave them behind. Things might be brighter
| for those who come after, but let's not pretend we're not
| doing real violence to those left behind.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| The "average worker" ends up getting more wealthy because
| younger, newer employees who grow up native to the new
| technology often capture its upsides at the expense of
| older workers who were unable to. The Rust Belt is a
| great example of this because most kids ended up
| migrating out to cities for work while their parents or
| the less successful ones ended up stuck.
|
| There's a lot of questions right now.
|
| 1. Will there be a net-new creation of jobs? Is positive-
| sum knowledge work a real thing, or have we run out of
| new jobs to create?
|
| 2. How quickly will workers transition to an AI version
| of their jobs?
|
| 3. Will AI even succeed in a broad way across knowledge
| work or will the frontier of AI remain jagged and only
| impact some jobs (coding) while leaving others alone?
|
| 4. For workers left behind in this transition, what will
| their lives be like? We know from looking at previous
| technology transitions (industrial revolution, factory
| automation, computer revolution, now maybe AI revolution)
| that many workers really do end up in bad places. It's
| perfectly reasonable to demand that in today's world in
| our advanced societies that even if those workers are
| unable to adapt that they are able to lead lives with
| dignity.
|
| There's a lot of interesting conversations and
| investigations to be had but my biggest fear is just that
| nobody is really willing to listen to the other side with
| empathy. This entire conversation thread is just people
| snipping at each other, hitting the vote buttons based on
| where they want to steer their favorite opinion. If you
| want to do social and economic science in this space but
| people are so polarized, the work will be thwarted. In
| general offline spaces are less polarized (not to be
| mistaken for pro or anti AI disruption) than online
| spaces, but my fear is that we continue to polarize,
| making understanding the fabric of our social change
| challenging and letting down everyone in the process.
| harimau777 wrote:
| From what I've been able to find, that book does not make
| the argument that the people actually displaced from
| their jobs ended up better off. It is certainly possible
| for some workers to end up better off while those who
| were displaced do not.
| lbreakjai wrote:
| I don't think the analogy holds. AI isn't automating one
| job, it's automating _knowledge work_. There's no factory
| work to flee to, literally and figuratively.
|
| Try to come up with a job that both doesn't produce
| anything physical, and can't be done by AI.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| >>" it's automating _knowledge work_. "
|
| This is vague marketing speak and simply not the reality
| on the ground. As someone implementing all new workflows,
| most of the time I'm create new product classes
| wholesale. _sometimes_ I see people upskilling tasks so
| the same human can do more.
|
| I can't think of a single knowledge job where they are
| removing humans from the loop completely.
|
| Random news headlines of struggling companies doing "AI
| layoffs" don't count. No amount of AI can save bad
| leadership.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Most automation has led to people transitioning to
| higher wages._
|
| Gonna need a citation for this.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| Easy. Name one profession within the North American
| context that makes less money ( _inflation adjusted_ )
| now than say a farmer, loom weaver or laborer of yore.
|
| A grub hub delivery man is wealthier today than a farmer
| 100 years ago and that's purely because of two reasons:
| Technology and Unions :)
| Hamuko wrote:
| This argument only works if you have a career (and
| lifespan) that spans 100+ years. I'd venture a guess that
| 0% of Grubhub delivery drivers were farmers a hundred
| years ago.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| Have you talked to a delivery driver in most large
| cities? Most of them come from countries where they
| _would_ be a farmer or day laborer.
|
| This ball is going through even your ever-moving goal
| posts. My statement never claimed people's careers would
| _stay the same_ and they 'd just make more money.
| harimau777 wrote:
| But you didn't provide any support for saying that the
| specific people who were automated away would make more
| money. That's what people are objecting to.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| I have with specific data and personal stories in other
| parts of the thread.
|
| There are some great reads on this topic[1].
|
| [1]:
| https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300205251/libertys-
| dawn/
| tavavex wrote:
| > Most automation has led to people transitioning to
| higher wages.
|
| No, what you mean to say is that automation has
| eventually (decades later) led to higher purchasing power
| in the system as a whole. The outlook for people that
| were directly automated away was pretty bleak, actually.
| The hundreds of thousands of lamplighters did not largely
| become the thousands of electricians that were needed in
| this new industry.
|
| This tracks for all industries. Automation literally
| means far fewer people will be employed to do the same
| job (otherwise what's the point of it?). That dumps these
| workers out at the low end of the general job market,
| where they have to compete with an increasing number of
| people. Because of the desperation to get any job, the
| wages fall. It's only decades later that societies
| settled into a new place and created enough brand new
| jobs to make up the shortfall, or applied regulation to
| reign in the crazy power imbalance. That's the stuff you
| miss out on if you only look at statistics that span
| centuries and treat the population as one homogeneous
| mass. The people who are directly targeted by automation
| are very likely to have their lives messed up for a very
| long time.
| District5524 wrote:
| Recent news from China about how better AI capabilities
| changed what Chinese specialists can earn with
| microdramas are not confirming this point. Some
| historical analogies to reassure people things will turn
| out nice in the end are nice but are not very convincing
| if you have so many more recent counterexamples with the
| gig economy and the huge inflation that was not a problem
| in the early 20th century.
|
| The economy now is very different, no gold or silver
| standard, less isolation and more globalised product
| chains and processes, and 7-times as many people.
|
| There is a good chance that a large enough number of
| people will suffer from this transformation, and they
| will have to fight with whatever they have, because if
| they don't, they will risk being left on the roadside and
| not getting any raise.
|
| People having some direction over how jobs are automated
| should keep that in mind, otherwise it will be too late
| to convince the masses of people fearing automation that
| it is their fault not seeing the positive angles of
| automation.
| cyclopeanutopia wrote:
| And you are basing this on what, exactly?
|
| AI boosting seems to be very close to pulling shit out of
| ass.
| brudgers wrote:
| Sometimes career tracks cease to exist...typists,
| secretaries, and in real time right now translators.
| officeplant wrote:
| My change will be killing the computer. I will then
| thrive.
| harimau777 wrote:
| I don't care if my career thrives. I care if I thrive.
|
| Currently, I don't see any reason at all to suspect that
| AI will make my life better or even just not make it
| worse.
| jwitchel wrote:
| 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.
| b112 wrote:
| Some in that era could not type, at all.
| brudgers wrote:
| Yes, and because typists and secretaries were
| predominately women, it was not as uncommon as one might
| imagine for male executives to eschew personal computers
| based on their perception of gender roles.
|
| I like to call it "keyboard cooties."
| kube-system wrote:
| These things have a self-reinforcing feedback loop --
| consider also for example, men learning to use "power
| tools" but not a sewing machine.
| senderista wrote:
| There's a great anecdote about that in the book _Dealers
| of Lightning_, where the Xerox execs were indifferent to
| a demo of the Star personal computer but their wives were
| ecstatic about it.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I don't know why you're being downvoted, this is
| absolutely true.
|
| I had a boss early in my career (around 1990) who
| considered typing effeminate and was mildly horrified at
| what the world was coming to with all us guys who were
| cheerfully using a keyboard. He had a secretary who did
| all his typing. This was ~5 years before email became
| common, but I'm sure he would have had all his emails
| printed so he could read them properly.
| gattr wrote:
| And I've read somewhere that quite a fraction of young
| people nowadays can't type (effectively) on a physical
| keyboard - no wonder, their main interaction with
| computing being via phones and tablets. Could be that
| typing won't be useful/practiced anymore (like already
| cursive writing in some parts of the world).
| awad wrote:
| There is a generation of people that are unique insofar
| as having grown up with handwriting on pen and paper
| (with cursive!) in school while also having
| typing/computing classes and access to the internet at a
| young age. Of course, people could type before computers,
| though it was a specialist skill more often than not, and
| kids certainly have every opportunity to pick up both
| handwriting and touch typing today, but the balance of it
| all isn't quite the same is it?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Also a way for dyslexics to hide their issue.
| bpshaver wrote:
| Isn't this still what Donald Trump does?
| kube-system wrote:
| Yes, he doesn't really know how to use a computer. He was
| born in the 1940s, computer skills are not super common
| for people from that generation. He was already in his
| mid-50s when computers started to become common in the
| workplace.
| saimiam wrote:
| I'm in my mid forties. If VR/ar devices like the Apple
| Vision Pro were to go mainstream, I can't imagine myself
| learning how to use it effectively as a daily driver
| device to get work done. Heck, even the Internet, I'm
| pretty sure my relationship with it is more of wary
| scepticism than most people in their thirties.
|
| I can see why someone who never used email until their
| fifties would never get fully comfortable with it.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Isn't this the original point? The workplace is getting
| AI-ified, so there are lots of people who are
| unwilling/unable/uncomfortable changing the way they work
| to deal with it.
| acheong08 wrote:
| I have a friend who uses ChatGPT, but writes all the
| messages on paper, takes a picture, and sends it in. Then
| prints out all the responses to annotate and respond to.
| scruple wrote:
| It hasn't exactly worked out well for email, either...
| i_love_retros wrote:
| Why?
| scruple wrote:
| Out of roughly 400 billion emails sent daily worldwide,
| estimates pin actual human written messages at around
| 10%. In personal inboxes, human correspondence is
| essentially extinct. Checking my own personal email inbox
| right now, the entire first page is 2FA, Amazon, some
| shit from my climbing gym, my car, my employer health
| insurance, my bank... My spam filters are aggressive and
| there are literally thousands of unread emails in there
| waiting for me to click select all -> delete. Even at
| work the overwhelming majority is automated Jira noise,
| CI/CD noise, calendar shit, compliance blasts... I have
| received maybe 2 or 3 actual human typed messages in the
| last 2-3 weeks.
|
| It's a fucking log dump for machines.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| 40 billion/day is extinct ?
| scruple wrote:
| For personal correspondence? Yes. Most of what email was
| used for, for actual humans in their personal lives, has
| transitioned to SMS and other apps like WhatsApp,
| WeeChat, Signal, Discord, and that happened a decade ago.
|
| You see that 90% of the daily volume is sludge and think
| this is a healthy communication network for humans?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Totally agree. About half the time, or more, that I send
| an actual email I get no reply because it got lost in the
| deluge of crap and I end up calling or texting the
| recipient so they know to search their inbox for my
| message.
| fsckboy wrote:
| i have 4 email accounts, and I check them maybe once a
| week. nobody sends me emails any more, everybody uses
| "messaging"
|
| (actually, i forgot i have 2 or 3 others, I check them
| even less, perhaps a few times a year, really only when i
| need to reset a password associated with them)
| carlosjobim wrote:
| There's no better written communication tool than email.
| It's one of the most successful inventions of the 20th
| century.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| 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!
| GaryBluto wrote:
| 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.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| Email stopped me having to walk to the post box or spend
| a lunch hour in the post office. Before WhatsApp etc it
| let me communicate instantly with relatives in other
| countries for free. Email made my website accounts harder
| to crack. So many things.
|
| What the fuck have LLMs done yet? Nothing! We would be no
| worse off without them so far and no one has anything to
| show to prove otherwise, except some vibe coded websites
| that all look the same (edgy dark theme and hacker vibes)
| i_love_retros wrote:
| Come on Gary, prove me wrong smartass
| mohamedkoubaa wrote:
| Refusing to use technology isn't the Amish way, they
| communally decide how and when to use technology.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| hospitals still use faxes not email due to the latter's
| inherent insecurity
| harvey9 wrote:
| Are you sure? I work across a few hospitals in the UK and
| can't recall seeing a fax in the last decade.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| in the US, yes. I experience it personally. Can't speak
| for other countries.
| Telaneo wrote:
| As if phone lines are not inherently insecure. The only
| reason they use fax is because it's been grandfathered in.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| About 20 years ago I had a phone number that was one digit
| off from a local attorney who took medical malpractice
| cases. And despite not using it myself, that phone line had
| built-in fax detection and so it would accept any incoming
| fax and then email the results to me. I lost count of the
| number of times I got sent a good chunk of someone's
| private medical records. In many cases repeatedly from the
| same source, despite me calling them and politely
| explaining that they had just sent someone's medical
| records to a random stranger.
|
| So ... perhaps more secure than email, but not necessarily
| as much as you'd think. Though maybe it isn't as common now
| to have phone lines with fax receiving included. I worked
| for a CLEC at the time and got my phone & internet through
| them too, so maybe I was just getting the special deluxe
| plan. Had my very own public class C, too, but that's a
| different problem.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> 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
| conartist6 wrote:
| 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.
| zer0tonin wrote:
| 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?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > 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.
| harpersealtako wrote:
| 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?"
| conartist6 wrote:
| You're saying there's nothing left to invent. I think
| that explains a lot of the complacency around considering
| AI to be the last ever frontier for progress. I obviously
| don't agree. I've gone looking into "why don't we have
| better version control" and the answer is definitely not
| that we already have all we could want.
| floren wrote:
| > 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.
| derwiki wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And this is progress, how?
|
| All it will lead to is yet more people that are out of a
| job. Right now at least a driving license (more so if it
| is a commercial license) is a source of income to many.
| ChickeNES wrote:
| Good! All jobs should be made obsolete
| muvlon wrote:
| And then what? Once the economy no longer depends on
| human input (labor), why do we expect it to keep
| producing outputs that humans need (food, shelter,
| medical care)?
| derwiki wrote:
| Roughly 36k people died on US roads last year. Waymo's
| own numbers over 271M driverless miles show about 95%
| fewer serious injury crashes than the human benchmark in
| the cities it runs in. Discount that however much you
| want for methodology, it's still progress.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And you really believe that when Waymo is the only way to
| drive around that those figures will hold?
| prirun wrote:
| I'd love to have speech-to-text on my iPhone that actually
| worked without needing to proofread and edit.
| jimbokun wrote:
| But the AI still progressing at a rapid rate is also
| software.
| conartist6 wrote:
| 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?
| undersuit wrote:
| If your database gets bigger does the software get better
| too?
| SapporoChris wrote:
| 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.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| > 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.
| SquirrelOnFire wrote:
| It's not really a question of living, it's a question of
| prosperity (through a strictly capitalist lens).
| shermantanktop wrote:
| 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.
| paxy wrote:
| 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.
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| 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.
| b112 wrote:
| The closest biological fear, might be Planet of the Apes.
| waffletower wrote:
| Mike Judge has shown that this fear is even closer to
| home than that.
| soco wrote:
| 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.
| csnover wrote:
| 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...
| detourdog wrote:
| 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.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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.
| dataflow wrote:
| > 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.
| prirun wrote:
| > 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.
| PebblesRox wrote:
| You might only be hearing about it now but the warnings
| have been coming (including by those who are now leading
| the top labs) for a long time, since before any of those
| "incentives" were in place.
| autoexec wrote:
| Some of those people in the early days were just letting
| their imagination run away with them, like that google
| engineer who thought a chatbot was self-aware, being
| enslaved, and was in need of rescue. Much of the time
| they weren't talking about "AI" as it exists, but what AI
| might maybe one day become. Other times it was purely
| marketing to make headlines and put the idea in people's
| (investors) heads that the chatbots were vastly more
| powerful than they are.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > 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.)
| _fat_santa wrote:
| 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.
| archagon wrote:
| AI is not an abstraction, so any programmer who thinks
| they're "moving up the stack" is fundamentally mistaken.
| b112 wrote:
| I think you mean "shouldn't be", because I see many using
| as if it is.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| AI is an abstraction in the same way throwing a task to a
| junior engineer is
| SR2Z wrote:
| 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.
| archagon wrote:
| Oh, well, I guess the managers at my last job were
| secretly "programmers" who were simply farther up the
| stack -- all the way up to the CEO, evidently the
| greatest programmer of them all.
| soco wrote:
| 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...
| calgoo wrote:
| I love giving it different supplier docs and having it read
| them all allowing me to get pros vs cons and act like
| search.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| 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.
| pitched wrote:
| The centaur / reverse-centaur is another interesting way to
| describe this split.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| "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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| The major difference is that people routinely ship
| shoddy, broken products in the world of software with few
| consequences, beyond needing to patch it later. Try the
| same thing with a court filing and you're out on your
| ass.
| echelon wrote:
| We're still early in AI.
|
| All of this will sort itself out and eventually bio,
| legal, software will all just work.
|
| Don't hold onto any single assumption about the world.
| Things are going to be weird.
| dTal wrote:
| Well hang on, "just work" implies an objective standard
| of correct vs incorrect. No such standard exists. I'm
| sure that there will be legal AIs that reliably do...
| something... but the whole point of the legal system is
| to allow space for humans to argue their case. If an AI
| "does legal" deterministically, without human
| intervention, how can it be said to be "working" if its
| very use defeats the purpose of the system it has learned
| to navigate so expertly?
| EA-3167 wrote:
| That's utopian thinking unburdened by reality or the need
| to explain how this will work. I have no interest in
| that.
|
| We aren't talking about the new version of SV
| spiritualism here, we're talking about systems people
| actually care about.
| infamouscow wrote:
| This was true before AI too.
|
| In practice, lawyers generally don't ever disbarred
| except if they lie to clients or steal from them.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| Yes exactly. It isn't a surprise that the industry with
| no professional standards worth discussing is also the
| one having the biggest field day with ML. My point is
| that in many other professional arenas acting like a
| software "engineer" is called malpractice.
| slg wrote:
| >This is not that much different in programming, it just
| takes longer to find out.
|
| The primary difference is that it's much easier for the
| AI to figure out itself if it's wrong on the programming
| side. Knowledge workers don't have automated testing for
| example.
|
| The end result is the knowledge worker needs to be more
| heavily involved in the process and be more mindful of
| mistakes which makes it a worse experience for the user
| and generally less productive than it is for programmers.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's true. And: as long as you don't hit production
| mistakes are cheap and quick to fix. Not so in many other
| fields.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| It is more that knowledge workers are less sophisticated
| at using AI. It is not that hard to check whether sources
| are real, using AI or other tools, for example. Something
| like functional testing will come to non programming
| tasks.
| deeponey wrote:
| It's not hard, but having to check work so carefully, at
| some point you're better off just doing it yourself.
| Retric wrote:
| Consistently catching errors is vastly harder when you're
| not the one doing the legwork. Send the wrong file, do a
| bad copy and paste, or skip one verification step, etc is
| all it takes for most people to majorly mess up.
|
| For most professionals it's just safer to avoid having
| output in your workflow. Keep using AI, but stop copying
| and pasting AI output.
| eluru wrote:
| i wonder why dont we have a better pipeline for research.
| for example ask opus to do some research, then have some
| hook configured with Haiku, JEV, anything that makes more
| sense really, only job is ti check the sources are real.
| you can keep adding into this, of course it can get too
| big, of course it will still fail, but it will still be
| much better than the current state of things. It seems to
| be a low hanging fruit with a huge value that no one has
| taken.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| "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.
| Exoristos wrote:
| I don't personally know of any software engineers using AI as
| "fleets of agents" in a "factory." Sounds like a nightmare.
| hparadiz wrote:
| Every PR now has auto reviews. That's like at least 3-5+
| agents depending on the repo.
| mywittyname wrote:
| 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.
| tehjoker wrote:
| They are doing that because they are running into
| hardware limits with single agents. If one agent made
| correct decisions and explored spaces efficiently, they
| would not need hundreds of thousands of agents. It's is
| the luxury of great wealth that they can produce a large
| number of possibly defective samples and then select the
| ones that are not defective.
| Wheen wrote:
| > When you hear about the work Anthropic researchers are
| doing, they seem to be using hundreds or thousands of
| agents to solve problems.
|
| There's a reason they're Anthropic researchers. The value
| proposition tanks when you actually have to foot the bill
| for the tokens you use.
|
| Subagent flows can improve overall performance, but it
| generally also comes with disproportionately high token
| use. That gets worse with parallel subagents that are
| often doing the same things at the same time and cannot
| share a cache.
| mywittyname wrote:
| So the point I was trying to make is that I'm maybe in
| the 25th percentile of developers and am using multiple
| agents for a task, and Anthropic researchers are at the
| 99th percentile and are using thousands of agents per
| task.
|
| So the median developer is probably using 5-20 agents at
| a time for a task. I'm not sure if that crosses the
| threshold of being a "fleet of agents".
| Wheen wrote:
| I'm curious to see your source for these numbers. Your
| flow sounds closer to a 99th percentile one than a 25th.
| I find it hard to believe that a median developer is
| using 5-20 agents at a time.
| NichoPaolucci wrote:
| Yeah... N=2-3 here but my team prefers having 1 main
| agent and maybe a couple more finely tuned ones for
| review / analysis / security... I generally have 2-3
| chats going on different tasks but more than that and I
| lose the plot.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| the way I read this passage - author claims to be not a
| particularly skilled or fast-paced practitioner, and yet
| it is true that author is using agents like this. Next,
| very advanced researchers -- in the heart of the AI
| Frontier industry -- are using many more agents with much
| larger actions.
|
| The "median developer" refers to the particularly skilled
| or fast-paced, not that there are continuous numbers of
| every practitioner using N-agents
| Exoristos wrote:
| > And I'm probably on the more amateurish end of AI
| development. As I learned these techniques from YouTube.
|
| I think that sums up the "fleets of agents" approach
| fairly well.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| chicagobuss wrote:
| you... don't read hackernews much I take it? This is like
| 10% of all submissions lately, lol.
| Exoristos wrote:
| In fact I do live outside HN.
| freejazz wrote:
| 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
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Current AI models are incapable of doing software
| development either, but that isn't stopping some people.
| slopnt wrote:
| what do you mean by this?
| exe34 wrote:
| 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.
| MisterTea wrote:
| 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.
| idontknowmann wrote:
| 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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.
| knollimar wrote:
| I'm starting to have them gather info to feed into
| automated tooling for drafting tasks. It's just there's no
| good harness for my field (and only recently have models
| been able to read symbolic things well enough)
| waffletower wrote:
| 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.
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| 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.
| senorcrab wrote:
| 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.
| esikich wrote:
| 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.
| TheJohnSmith1 wrote:
| 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?
| esikich wrote:
| We all seemed fine with machines replacing telephone
| operators and spreadsheets replacing computers (the
| people).
| TheJohnSmith1 wrote:
| I'm fine with machines replacing labor... If we
| completely and totally remove capitalism from the
| equation.
|
| I'm clearly not being pro 9-5 here. But in a 9-5 world,
| we need jobs in order to eat.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| LLMs do not make people more productive. They only give the
| illusion of productivity.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > saves my brainpower for situations that truly need it.
|
| Like posting on hacker news?
| cdrnsf wrote:
| 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.
| platevoltage wrote:
| 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.
| lrvick wrote:
| 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.
| zkmon wrote:
| 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.
| lins1909 wrote:
| Is this satirical?
| tintor wrote:
| Calling people who don't want to use AI, Amish-like, is a huge
| stretch.
| ezst wrote:
| 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"?
| krs_ wrote:
| Generative AI?
| ezst wrote:
| Same stuff, is a Markov chain too much (Gen) AI already?
| kkukshtel wrote:
| 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.
| SaintForthigan wrote:
| I suspect most of it comes down to the tacit promise of what
| happens once everything works as intended, as a matter aside
| from any technical imperfections. The marketing material and
| the target financial valuations aren't predicated on the
| notion that _you_ get to be incredibly productive, fulfilled,
| and get to spend all day making cool things and solving
| interesting problems. The sales pitch is that you can be made
| to work incredibly hard as the ever-growing machine drags the
| relative value of your having a brain to zero, and that, at
| such a moment as it reaches its perfection, everyone below
| the VP level can be safely shoved into a blender and all
| intelligence, expertise, and execution can be rented out from
| OpenAI without any operational hiccups.
|
| If the _point_ is that we all get shoved in a blender, and
| the people building the blender are actively salivating over
| what they 'll be able to pawn the resultant slurry off for
| ----does being told that the economic efficiency of the
| blender is inevitable or that you may get shoved into a
| Vitamix instead of a Kenmore----does any of that move the
| needle on your projected life satisfaction post-blender?
| creata wrote:
| > has started to just feel more akin to a religious stance
| than something based on any specific fact
|
| It can be an ethical stance based on facts, rather than
| religious-like. AI has no shortage of ethical issues that
| could stop someone from using it.
|
| Comparing these people to religious or MAGA types - who
| believe in things that are false or at least unprovable - is
| farcical.
| caycep wrote:
| Apparently they develop mentat capabilities to serve their
| feudal planetary lord
| demo4567 wrote:
| 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.
| _blk wrote:
| I strongly disagree that an AI-free world view should be
| granted religious exemptions from an employer - don't like the
| way it's done, go look somewhere else. Isn't that comparable to
| refusing to use a phone or computer?
|
| Don't get me wrong, just like the Amish, I believe it's a valid
| or even honorable choice for him to make. I also highly respect
| the Amish though because they're a minority that refuses to be
| victimized by their choices and that's the stance I'd like to
| see here.
|
| > he does not have to use AI to complete his work. I wonder if
| that'll just result in him offloading work to people that act
| as AI proxies for him and then, wouldn't the human have less
| value than the AI since he just delegates?
|
| Interesting times ahead indeed.
| f6v wrote:
| The problem is that you can get any kind of exemption based on
| religious beliefs.
| intrasight wrote:
| Which is better than getting no exceptions - if only the two
| extremes are available.
| paxy wrote:
| 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.
| rafram wrote:
| That's not true at all. Many of the most famous religious
| accommodations in the US are things that mainstream
| Christians find illogical/absurd:
|
| - Sikhs keeping long hair/beard in the military or police
|
| - Quakers being exempt from the draft
|
| - Quakers, again, refusing to drive with NH plates that say
| "live free or die," because they don't believe that
|
| - Muslims needing breaks to pray 5x/day
|
| - Jews requiring food that follows extremely complex kosher
| preparation rules
|
| - Native Americans using peyote, a hallucinogen
|
| - Jehovah's Witnesses and others refusing to swear oaths,
| even in court
|
| Of course many of these had to be fought for in court, but
| courts are very amenable to the earnestly held beliefs of
| minority religious groups in the US. We don't have a state
| religion.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Sikhs (Khalsa) are also technically obliged to carry a
| knife around at all times.
| Polizeiposaune wrote:
| There are, however, constraints on these accomodations
| driven by job and safety requirements -- see for instance
| https://www.osha.gov/laws-
| regs/standardinterpretations/2011-...:
|
| "... there are circumstances where a tight-fitting
| respirator must be worn, such as when a worker is exposed
| to an atmosphere that is immediately dangerous to life or
| health (IDLH), defined as "...an atmosphere that poses an
| immediate threat to life, would cause irreversible
| adverse health effects, or would impair an individual's
| ability to escape from a dangerous atmosphere." 29 CFR
| 1910.134(b). In these situations, a tight-fitting
| pressure demand respirator is required. Wearing a
| respirator that is less protective could pose a grave
| danger not only to the worker who is wearing it, but also
| to other workers who might be called on to rescue him
| from the IDLH atmosphere. Preventing these unnecessary
| risks is a compelling governmental interest that
| justifies OSHA's decision not to provide a religious
| exemption from the respirator standard, especially as
| there is no less restrictive way to provide this
| protection."
| m0llusk wrote:
| Which is funny because people who actually work with this
| tech know well that facial hair is no obstacle to
| rigorously functional respirator use. This is more of a
| cultural tradition such as how genital mutilation of
| infant boys is necessary for health when it really took
| off as a way of adding value to birth support service
| invoices.
| rafram wrote:
| Wow, talk about a change of subject.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Can you provide an example? The undue burden, safety
| issues, etc tend to strike down most requests that are
| unusual.
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Yes, in most cases a religious exemption requires approval
| after a formal review regardless of the reason or its merits.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Please provide some evidence for your claim. There are
| plenty of cases out there to show the opposite of what you
| claim.
|
| https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2026/01/21/ninth-
| c...
| austin-cheney wrote:
| You could answer that yourself. To qualify this first ask
| what are the criteria for a person to establish a valid
| religious exemption request and then what are the
| criteria for a regulating body or employer to deny the
| exemption according to that criteria.
|
| Here is a brief example from the American Bar
| Association:
| https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/resources/human-
| righ...
|
| Also, some institutions have much wider latitude to deny
| a variety of religious exemption requests than other due
| to environmental hazards and safety concerns.
| giantg2 wrote:
| This is the opposite of what your prior comment said.
| Your prior comment says that exemption requests require
| approval regardless of the merits.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| 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.
| snowpid wrote:
| 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.
| TFNA wrote:
| Your last paragraph is out of order and sounds like the
| kind of dig that made Usenet and so many early-millennium
| web forums so tiresome. Catholics amount to a minority of
| people making up postliberal trends, and many of those who
| are Catholics spend a lot of their time arguing not quite
| from "Jesus who was invented 1950 years ago" but from
| Aristotelian concepts that became a popular intellectual
| framework within Western Christianity. I say all this as
| someone who is neither Catholic, nor would call himself
| postliberal.
| snowpid wrote:
| "[...] so tiresome. " I only wrote very basic Atheist
| concepts. If that is tiresome to you, I dont know, what
| else.
|
| " Catholics amount to a minority of people making up
| postliberal trends, " I cited a bigger group of people
| who have a problem with the liberal Popper. You can call
| Marxist classical postliberalism.
|
| " e Catholics spend a lot of their time arguing not quite
| from "Jesus who was invented 1950 years ago" but from
| Aristotelian concepts " I doubt it. Most catholics I've
| met dont do it. Sorry. And I doubt that most Catholics do
| any deep philosophical statement at all. You can ask them
| how I could disapprove their belief. You wouldnt get an
| answer, sometimes a very angry reaction.
| TFNA wrote:
| No, your post wasn't "basic atheism" (a basic atheist
| probably wouldn't write anything there at all) but New
| Atheism, which was such a web community-spoiling scene
| and thankfully peaked and declined nearly two decades ago
| though you apparently didn't go the memo.
|
| Most Catholics you have met are immaterial, because the
| OP distinctly mentioned postliberalism. If you want to
| bring up Catholics here, then the Catholics who would
| bother to identify with postliberalism, which is after
| all a stance of political philosophy, are largely those
| Catholics of a philosophical bent, and that is why one
| hears a lot of Aristotle in defense of their political
| and social models. I have my own disagreements with
| Catholics because I am not sympathetic to many claims of
| Aristotelianism, but on HN facts matter.
| snowpid wrote:
| " our post wasn't "basic atheism" (a basic atheist
| probably wouldn't write anything there at all) but New
| Atheism, which was such a web community-spoiling scene
| and thankfully peaked and declined nearly two decades ago
| though you apparently didn't go the memo. " You mean
| people like Kazimierz Lyszczynski (https://en.wikipedia.o
| rg/wiki/Kazimierz_%C5%81yszczy%C5%84sk... ) or the
| growing atheism in the Arab world (
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy3JuwGJWBE ) ? I didnt
| get the memo? In my country Catholism is losing
| constantly people and English use net was not a thing
| back then.
|
| " Most Catholics you have met are immaterial " Most
| Catholics just suck what they learned during child hood.
| They are postliberal as they wish a Catholic society
| which is hence not liberal. Arguing with Aristoteles is
| just plain sane washing as the bible is intellectuelly
| very thin.
| samatman wrote:
| Just chiming in: I upvoted both the post you replied to
| and the post it was replying to. All of yours got the
| thumbs down. No one appointed you the order police and
| this entire train was net-negative.
| drfloyd51 wrote:
| How is this a problem? And what would you propose to do about
| the negative symptoms of the "problem".
| f6v wrote:
| > 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?
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| > 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| That might not be reasonable to you, but that's completely
| different from the reasonable standard under the law.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I'm glad you've never written any bugs into your software.
| If only we could all be that perfect.
|
| However the standard for performance is relative to
| reasonable expectations for someone in that role. Typically
| relative to peers within the company. If one person is
| unable to do their job to within a reasonable level
| relative their peers even with reasonable accommodations,
| accommodations do not require the company to continue
| employing them anyway.
| f6v wrote:
| 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.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Some might say this is a feature not a bug of religious freedom
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| jjsullivan5196 wrote:
| > 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.
| simianwords wrote:
| 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.
| ybrendany wrote:
| "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
| pwillia7 wrote:
| RIP Berry
| schmudde wrote:
| 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.
| skinfaxi wrote:
| The irony.
| ChickeNES wrote:
| "Old man yells at cloud"
| nphardon wrote:
| 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.
| rhedak wrote:
| It is an interesting approach, but I would say his productivity
| is what matters.
| hall0ween wrote:
| I see you value productivity. Productivity to what purpose?
| hereme888 wrote:
| 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.
| archagon wrote:
| 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.
| paxy wrote:
| 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.
| archagon wrote:
| That is not for you to decide!
| probably_wrong wrote:
| 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.
| zamadatix wrote:
| How would you see these types of limits applying to AI in a
| way that doesn't already apply to a normal tool?
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I don't think the problem is whether these limits apply
| to normal tools or not, the same way it doesn't really
| matter that speed limits technically apply to horses too
| [1].
|
| I imagine a solution would be a knowledge worker's bill
| of rights that declares the amount of output that one can
| reasonably expect from a human. You could add some
| measurements like "a knowledge worker cannot be expected
| to understand and take responsibility for more than X
| printed pages of work per day", with the expectations
| that if your employees are overworked then the
| accountability falls on you.
|
| [1] DUIs too:
| https://www.loweringthebar.net/2026/04/still-illegal-to-
| driv...
| zamadatix wrote:
| Hmm, I suppose I see it the opposite - it's important
| these limits don't apply to one specific instance, just
| as the citation points out problematic things still apply
| if it's a horse rather than a car. That doesn't seem an
| accident/mistake, but a key part of making the limitation
| meaningful and well formed.
| handoflixue wrote:
| Should we also have a transportation worker's bill of
| rights, that sets the reasonable output that one can
| expect from a human? Would it be reasonable to set that
| rate based on what a human can deliver on foot,
| unassisted by any vehicle?
|
| The whole point of a tool is that it increases the amount
| of output we can expect from workers. Otherwise we'd
| still all be doing agriculture, because the farmer's bill
| of rights sets the maximum output of a farm and there's
| not enough surplus for non-farmers.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| We do have a transportation worker's bill of rights. The
| vehicles may not tire but the drivers do, and therefore
| all truck drivers are entitled to mandatory rests. And
| self-driving cars (current ones, at least) have a similar
| issue: because the driver must be prepared to take the
| wheel at all times there's a whole bunch of "increased
| output" that they're not allowed to take advantage of,
| with a risk of serious jail time if they do.
|
| IMO the key is risk: right now no one is taking
| responsibility of the AI errors (IMO by design), but the
| second we codify who's legally responsible for them we'll
| see calls for slowing down coming from those groups.
| nater5000 wrote:
| >We have to solidify laws protecting anti-AI-ers if that's
| their choice.
|
| Protect them from what, exactly?
| hereme888 wrote:
| 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.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| But the Amish _are_ heavily excluded from society. Amish
| that refuse to use computers can 't work most jobs. Amish
| that won't use credit cards can't buy things at cashless
| stores/restaurants. Amish that don't use electricity
| basically can't live in major cities.
|
| There are no legal carveouts for that.
| anikan_vader wrote:
| Some places (including some places in the US) ban
| cashless stores. It seems reasonable to me to try to
| legally protect people who struggle to adapt to new
| technologies.
| hereme888 wrote:
| Not about struggling to adapt, but a willful choice for
| personal reasons.
| muvlon wrote:
| But the Amish _are_ nonetheless protected. Not by the law
| but by having a community of people around them willing
| to live with those same restrictions and provide for each
| other. I think that 's much more likely to happen than
| legal protection also in the AI case.
| bemtevi wrote:
| The Amish are even protected by law in some ways. They
| don't have to pay social security for one, which is more
| compatible with their lifestyle (they take care of their
| own).
| screamingninja wrote:
| > roads (not highways)
|
| Why not highways? That's an arbitrary line to draw.
| mrehler wrote:
| In much of the US, some types of highways do have a
| minimum speed. It varies by state (and can even vary
| within a state). I believe most places have a minimum on
| Interstates of 40 MPH.
| nater5000 wrote:
| >Exclusion from society
|
| We exclude plenty of people from society, at least in the
| abstract. Someone who simply acts weird can be excluded
| from society. There are certainly no law which forces
| people to include them?
|
| >the object of anger at "those darn Luddites"
|
| Again, I'm not sure what kinds of laws could reasonably
| prevent this. Seems like we're all basically free to
| criticize one another for personal beliefs. If that wasn't
| the case, then 99% of social media would be in constant
| breach of the law lol
|
| >You can't tell an Amish he can't use physical coins
|
| Well, for one, laws protecting the acceptance of US
| currency aren't specific to Amish people based on their
| beliefs. It's more about protecting the value of US
| currency. And two, private companies _are_ allowed to not
| accept physical currency. Plenty of companies only accept
| credit card, etc. That 's legal. And Amish people wouldn't
| be able to purchase goods and services from such places.
|
| Of course, the Amish typically don't care about that,
| because they're not typically in the market for the kinds
| of goods and services offered by such businesses. In
| contrast, someone who is happy to consume modern technology
| _accept_ AI for arbitrary reasons seems like someone who is
| making interacting with society unnecessarily complicated
| and difficult.
|
| >Or that his buggy is too slow for the roads (not
| highways), etc.
|
| Well, as you've alluded to, if we deem that their beliefs
| would end up causing a significant enough issue to society,
| then their beliefs don't get to override the rules of
| society. Amish people are free to use buggies where
| appropriate because it's not a problem. They are not
| allowed to use buggies on highways because it would be a
| safety issue.
|
| Regardless, they're not protected because of their beliefs.
| They're just operating within the rules of society. You
| don't have to be Amish to legally ride a buggy on the side
| of a road. These aren't special protections carved out for
| Amish people. Which, again, is the point of this
| discussion:
|
| You stated "We have to solidify laws protecting anti-AI-ers
| if that's their choice," and I'm asking, "Protect them from
| what, exactly?"
|
| "Exclusion from society" or being "the object of anger at
| "those darn Luddites"" are not things which laws can
| generally help with. Anti-AI people are free to not use AI,
| be vocal about their opposition to AI, and even (try to)
| exclude those who use AI from society or make them the
| object of anger with regards to AI usage. All of that is
| fair. It works both ways. None of it is dictated by law.
| kuboble wrote:
| The same way as we protect those anti-internet or anti-
| electricity ?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| The Amish have a bunch of protections and exemptions... So
| yes?
| ChickeNES wrote:
| They shouldn't
| hereme888 wrote:
| Precisely the ideology and attitude we need protection
| from
| platevoltage wrote:
| Why should they? What's a good reason why laws shouldn't
| apply to everyone?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| America land of the free*
|
| As long as you enjoy your freedom the exact same way as
| everyone else
| lbreakjai wrote:
| Freedom never meant that the society much be changed to
| accommodate you. You're free from persecution (Conditions
| apply), you're free to behave the way you want, to
| associate with who you want. Likewise, Society is free to
| not associate with you and move in a different direction.
| lelandfe wrote:
| 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.
| bemtevi wrote:
| We do protect them in some ways. People who don't want to use
| the internet should still have phone numbers to call, and
| they should still be able to go into a bank and store their
| money or cash their paycheques.
| NickNaraghi wrote:
| Market efficiency solves this. But whether that's healthy for
| society or not is an open question.
| eluru wrote:
| I dont want someone elses choices making my papperwork even
| slower and im sure most would agree, AI wont take charge of
| this but society? certainly will
| moi2388 wrote:
| Whilst I'm in favour of the result, how is it possible for a
| humanist viewpoint to be classified as a religious belief?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| ChickeNES wrote:
| Also, if humanism is being classified this way, why not
| transhumanism?
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| Precursor to the machine crusade?
| tantalor wrote:
| Butlerian Jihad when??
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| 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.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I imagine it was a blanket request for all university
| employees.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| 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
| Leherenn wrote:
| Huh, all the time?
|
| We were asked to migrate from Zoom to Teams recently. We
| have to use git and GitHub. Recently, there's a mandate to
| migrate from Jenkins to GitHub Actions. We have to use
| Windows or Mac, no Linux. We have to have the corporate VPN
| and antivirus running. And so on, and so on.
| pona-a wrote:
| Perhaps that's why office jobs seem less productive than
| ever, since the invention of the computer... The usual
| meritocracy of the workers choosing their own tools is
| upset by top-down planning by insufficiently experienced
| people, having to bear no consequences for their choices.
|
| git was picked meritocratically, Teams was not...
| lbrito wrote:
| This is great
| csours wrote:
| 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.
| hugosama wrote:
| 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.
| ChickeNES wrote:
| Not if one is a transhumanist, it feels liberating
| rep_lodsb wrote:
| 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?
| ChickeNES wrote:
| I don't see how one can live in a world where machines are
| solving and making headway on Millennium Prize problems and
| say the above with a straight face.
| ragazzina wrote:
| Where do you expect to see the consequences of machines
| solving Millennium Prize problems in your life and in
| society at large?
| nater5000 wrote:
| >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.
| ChickeNES wrote:
| Also begs the question, if humanism counts, why not
| transhumanism?
| catoc wrote:
| Great site
| rglover wrote:
| 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.
| drakonka wrote:
| 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.
| rglover wrote:
| 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.
| drakonka wrote:
| I think I understand what you mean, but to me the exemption
| doesn't seem performative. It seems like the equivalent of
| him talking to his employer and having them agree to not
| force him to use tech he is concerned about, he just used a
| particular legal avenue to justify it as part of that
| discussion. It may be performative in the sense that it
| also got attention (e.g., in the form of this article), but
| in this case even that part of it seems like it could be a
| useful precedent for others who may be considering a
| similar route.
|
| Then again, maybe even seeing it as _slightly_
| performative, potentially, is overly pessimistic. It may
| seem performative simply because it's novel, but if he
| legitimately considers this part of his religious beliefs
| and his employer (seemingly) agrees, what is performative
| about exercising his rights like many other people of other
| religions do?
| bevr1337 wrote:
| Possibly not. I would get fired if I said "yeah, I'm not
| using [AI]."
| rglover wrote:
| Right, but does a business/company owe you the right to
| never require usage of AI to do your job (and by
| extension, owe you that job under those terms)?
| bevr1337 wrote:
| I did not take that position. You asked if US citizens
| could refuse AI without religious exemption, possibly
| suggesting the dramatics are unnecessary, and I answered
| that I could not.
| rglover wrote:
| Ah, disregard then.
| platevoltage wrote:
| Because it turns this situation from "okay well, you're
| fired", to "okay, we don't want any trouble".
| drdaeman wrote:
| 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.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| 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?
| wildzzz wrote:
| 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.
| phainopepla2 wrote:
| > 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.
| jzemeocala wrote:
| for a crazier example.....hooters hire it's waitress as
| "entertainers/actresses" now to avoid alot of their rules
| that would be sexual discrimination anywhere else you serve
| shitty food.
| wildzzz wrote:
| It's race in all but name. They actually get around it by
| specifying everything about a person other than race, like
| skin color, accent or language skills.
|
| If they need a Viet person for a role in a Vietnam War
| movie, they'll cast for "native or fluent Vietnamese
| speakers". Of course it's entirely plausible that a black
| guy is a fluent Vietnamese speaker but auditions are very
| subjective so good luck proving that the black guy played
| the role of NVA Soldier #1 better than the actual
| Vietnamese guy.
| cvoss wrote:
| 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.
| v0x wrote:
| 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.
| Humorist2290 wrote:
| > A humanist may have strong, sincerely held beliefs, but he
| is not under any authority that compels those beliefs, so
| they aren't "religious".
|
| The article actually links to a federal court case which
| ruled, indeed, that humanism is a religion [0].
|
| It is my understanding that to suggest that strong, sincerely
| held beliefs are not in themselves authoritative is a
| rejection of humanism.
|
| 0: https://www.edweek.org/education/federal-court-finds-
| secular...
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| This whole argument rubs me the wrong way. It requires the
| state to determine what a real religion is and isn't. And it
| removes equal protection, different people have the law
| applied to them in different ways depending on their
| religion.
|
| Both of these seen to go against the first amendment:
| Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
| religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
| romanows wrote:
| Seems the religious people have a strong, sincerely held
| belief that they should follow a particular religious
| authority, and that seems to come outside of the religious
| authority itself. I guess I don't really buy this line of
| justification any more than just saying "because religion".
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| 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.
| smag wrote:
| 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.
| officeplant wrote:
| > 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.
| Razengan wrote:
| Clay Tablets: It gave rise to spam and many types of fraud:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ea-nasir
| drdaeman wrote:
| I don't think the quality of that copper had anything to do
| with the tablets. Tablets only hold a record that an issue
| happened, and are otherwise uninvolved. It would be
| different if Ea-Nasir advertised his copper with clay
| tablets, but that's not the story we know.
| Razengan wrote:
| Maybe Nanni was the real scammer all along, blackmailing
| an honest merchant with slander
| kulahan wrote:
| This would be a hilarious finding. It's so believable and
| human, too
| Razengan wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it9BfpGbrKo
|
| I swear there'll be a movie about this some day
| DangitBobby wrote:
| The only spam that still manages to consistently burden me is
| delivered to my real mailbox by USPS!
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Well, all of the big jumps of technology that revolve around
| communication at least. While im sure some pedant could find
| an nth degree link, I dont think the cotton gin or steam
| engine led to increased spam in any direct way.
| sobellian wrote:
| 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!
| Arodex wrote:
| 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).
| adjejmxbdjdn wrote:
| 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.
| brabel wrote:
| 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??
| pona-a wrote:
| Religion is metaphysical, ethics are not. Simulation theory
| might pass as a religion, opposition to animal testing
| doesn't. Of course the latter does involve a moral axiom but
| one a lot more simple than religion's vast bundled sets of
| axioms in scripture...
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| 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.
| vuurmot wrote:
| I think this is a wrong appraisal of the story.
|
| This is the first time someone did this, and therefore other
| people could start to ask for similar accommodations. The idea
| is important
| GreenLightGo wrote:
| It's actually strange that he rejects AI, considering how much
| this tool speeds things up and helps with so many tasks.
| Lerc wrote:
| 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?
| Lerc wrote:
| While I don't want to complain about the downvotes, it does
| present me with some confusion. What part of my post is being
| disagreed with here?
|
| Do people disagree that beliefs should be accommodated? Do they
| disagree that they should be treated equally? I didn't say
| where to draw the line, I just observed that one existed.
| platevoltage wrote:
| 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.
| tehjoker wrote:
| 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.
| 0x4e wrote:
| 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.
| globalnode wrote:
| US courts stated that humanism is a form of religion... i bet
| that gets overturned pretty fast if this takes off.
| throwfaraway135 wrote:
| > 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.
| hoppp wrote:
| Its gonna turn into an anti-vaxxer thing when they realize
| vaccines could be created with generative AI. It will be in the
| pipeline
| andai wrote:
| Why do I need to appeal to third party groupthink? "A bunch of
| people over there agree with me" has always been an infallible
| argument, hasn't it?
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