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).
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.
> 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.
Software is an employment rather than a profession. That distinction is important. Here is a definition of profession:
Traditional professions share essential characteristics. They provide a vital service to society, requiring expertise and skill developed through years of training, education, and experience. Professions establish standards of practice and certify that their members are qualified to serve the needs of society.
--US Army, ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession
Software does not have explicit standards of practice or a required body of certifications for its practitioners. Software, as an employment, is whatever an employer wants or is willing to accept at any given moment.
What do you find important about this distinction? To me it's a description of the normative relationship between practitioners and broader society but I don't really see the significance you do.
Hillel Wayne wrote a really excellent well researched article about software engineering compared to other forms of engineering a few years ago. It necessarily goes into a lot of this stuff but what emerges is that these definitions are regulatory and historical debris.
You don't need medical board or a bar to certify or constrain professional behavior and those organizations may not constrain as much as you assume anyway. The reasons we do have those institutions is as much a matter of historical accident as any modern need for it, and the reasons we don't have it for other high impact fields is pretty much an accident too.
And in a lot of the world software engineering does have professional certification and standards of practice. They still ship adware and racist loan denial algorithms too.
Be careful with military definitions. One near-universal aspect of a "profession" is that it be self-regulating. Lawyers have Bar Associations that dictate who can or cannot practice. Doctors have Medical Associations. So too accountants and engineers. These entities are granted monopolies but remain independent from government and set their own standards.
But by that definition, soldiering can never be a "profession" as a soldier is always regulated by the government they serve, and there is no professional association regulating mercenaries. But I would be very hesitant to suggest that the US Marines are not professional soldiers. They are. The definitions are messy.
> These entities are independent from government and set their own standards.
As they should. Industries should be self regulating. While these industries form their own standards of practice they do so with the blessing of government, typically under state government supervision/authorization in the US, and are held to account by government. A lawyer or doctor who violates their standards of practice could very likely be guilty of criminal law and find themselves in prison depending upon the violation even when no other criminal actions occurred.
Even bus drivers are held to higher standards of practice than software developers.
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.
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.
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 like 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 the argument should lie.
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.
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.
"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.
Technologists as a professional group are beyond weird. You usually expect rational critique (either positive or negative) from professionals, but the good technologists are supposed to just uncritically accept whatever supposed technological progress as an unalloyed good. Employer or Silicon Valley says it’s good, therefore think it is good. No, that’s a bit on the nose: Silicon Valley says it is good which means that it would be “good for my career”, therefore it is good. But are there any ill effects for society? Those are Luddite questions.[1]
But in this case Amish is not really an insult of course. I guess they are a hard-working people. Self-sufficient. And allow their young to take a sabbatical from the primitive life to see if it’s really something that they want to dedicate their life to.
On the other hand, of course there won’t be some Amish split. You can’t just pick and choose modernity. You can’t form a subculture of No AI. That’s why people are critical of AI; we live in a society.
[1] Being ahistorical and using Luddite as an insult also helps.
I'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.
I'm not him, but I would guess that he would respond by saying that we have a moral and ethical responsibility to remain in control of what we're putting into the world. If there's a conflict between the given timelines and how quickly a human can understand the problem and the implications of the decision being made, then the thing that needs to budge is the timeline.
He probably has a lot to say on the topic, but it’s not up to him. The accommodations only extend to reasonable affordances, but do not entirely exempt the person from requirements to perform to the level of expectation for the job.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While I agree with you at some level, I can't help thinking of the Amish. They impose plenty of restrictions on themselves and still manage to flourish. There must be a way that is different than simply accepting "progress".
This is even more true when "progress" means fertility rates collapse. A culture that is not self sustaining will die, and far more quickly than most realize. It doesn't matter how awesome that culture is for a brief moment in time, it will cease to exist.
Amish have an overall fertility rate around 6, which is why there are now almost half a million Amish in America alone. They had less than half that in 2000. In a few decades, they'll number in the millions. If people don't start having babies then groups like the Amish will take over the world, very much turning "the meek shall inherit the Earth" into a completely fulfilled prophecy. In some ways it's perhaps even a self fulfilling if it turns out that 'non-meek' behaviors result in unsustainable societies.
The Amish are an exception, one of the rare ones (along with the handful of protected, isolated tribes). The rule is that a technologically inferior group will get rolled over by a technologically superior one for the benefit of the latter.
> Until the goals given him are unachievable, in the given timelines, by human thinking and reasoning alone.
Would that not be tantamount to constructive dismissal? Consider: you may have your prayer times during the day, but they will be counted against you in performance evaluations.
> but they will be counted against you in performance evaluations.
That was my initial thought: he may get his exemption from use, but TFA doesn’t indicate that he will be evaluated differently during performance review.
To go one step further, would such allowances have to be accompanied by different performance standards, like oral exams for students with dyslexia also have increased time limits?
Or would the allowances be granted for the duration of employment, the latter being shortened due to performance problems?
Exactly. The person or people above him who wanted AI to be used against his will will ultimately achieve their goals---no matter what his beliefs are. At the end of the day, his views of humanism are futile against the force of those in favor of AI acceptance.
Are you implying that there's a meaningful population of people that are against reasonable accommodation for individuals' religious beliefs? There's a very big difference between prescribed religion in the workspace and an individual's beliefs requiring a slight adjustment by the employer to respect.
Depends what you mean by a meaningful population. There are definitely people who think religious accommodations are wrong in principle. There are definitely people who are hostile to religion in general. How many? I have no idea.
Yes I am implying exactly that. This is a very frequent topic of debate.
- People refusing vaccination requirements in schools, offices, the military.
- Pharmacists refusing to fill certain prescriptions (like birth control).
- Restaurant owners refusing to serve gay people.
- Kids (well, their parents) refusing to study certain topics in school.
Are you implying that there isn't a "meaningful population" that is against some of these?
There are thousands of religions each with their own set of beliefs. Many of them directly conflict with each other, and with societal laws. You can make up a "religious exemption" for literally anything, and they are selectively allowed based on how the majority religion tolerates the thing.
There is a really interesting point that I think you're getting at, but choosing well known and already politically charged examples undermines the discussion by bringing cognitive dissonance in at the ground floor.
What about an example where religious belief fundamentally excludes someone from doing the actual job? Suppose a Muslim wants a job as a bartender, but refuses to actually serve people drinks because they consider it a violation on the rule against alcohol. Should the bar grant them a religious exemption and just accept that they won't be serving alcoholic beverages when that person's the bartender on duty?
Or what if two different religious beliefs come into direct conflict? Suppose a Jehovah's Witness whose manager is also a JW decides to leave the religion. Jehovah's Witnesses consider shunning apostates to be a religious commandment, so their manager might feel obligated to fire them. Is that OK?
Depending on how we resolve those conflicts, perhaps people can at least agree that there should be limits to religious exemptions, even if they don't agree on the specifics. But perhaps that's at least a starting point for a conversation. And perhaps from there we can extend out to Durham's position.
-doctors refusing to abide by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health Standard of Care's Standards of Care for Hormone Replacement Therapy and Gender Confirming Surgeries
TIL that WPATH was founded in 1979 in Illinois to "promote evidence-based care, education, research, advocacy, public policy, and respect in transgender health"
It just shows how progressive and, sorry to bring this up, socialist the US has been historically. Truly a beacon of hope in a world mired in prejudice and dogma.
There are also people who believe you shouldn't be allowed to wear a head scarf or turban. Or be allowed to pray five times a day.
Of note, every single one of your examples impacts multiple people in significant ways. None of them are people just wanting to practice their faith in isolation. I think the cases you describe aren't really analogous.
Not the guy you replied to, but I assume they are saying the examples are typical of the current right wing. Though antivaxxers are also represented a bit on the left. Just not as prominently today.
Lots of strawmanning going on with comments about where the line gets drawn and talking about driving stick, heating his home, etc.
If you read the article, you will see that the concern is with his direct actions concerning ethics and moral, especially with interactions with others (as an admin).
There is plenty to unpack with this as it is a new concept. I'm hoping we can have a real discussion about this. For example, will this religious exemption become moot if productivity is sufficiently higher with AI giving employers an easy out? If that does happen, do we think we'll see adverse effects such as baked in biases in a hidden process?
One thing I am concerned with with AI is that everything will follow Google and Meta when it comes to things like appeals and fair treatment. There area ton of stories about people getting banned/deleted with no recourse and no insight into why. I can see this same sort of totalitarian activity spreading to other aspects of life, like finance, medical billing, etc.
> For example, will this religious exemption become moot if productivity is sufficiently higher with AI giving employers an easy out?
For this person’s job at an academic institution, I doubt it. This specific case feels very symbolic from start to finish: His management probably mandated AI use because they felt the need to do something about AI, and he used this as a perfect opportunity to stage a protest against AI. Knowing what I know about academic institutions, I suspect AI would have very little impact on productivity.
Many jobs might be the same: AI’s productivity impact can be large on a small set of tasks, but if those tasks were only 10% of someone’s hours at work then a couple people refusing AI will not make a difference to the whole department.
Workloads also flow to people who are good at that work, so the work that benefits from AI would be distributed to the AI users and more of the non-AI work would go to the few people who don’t use AI. It can be self-balancing when the number of refusals is small.
There are jobs where it’s not going to work out, though. If most of someone’s job is accelerated a lot by AI and they refuse to use that accelerator, it’s going to be really hard to avoid failing behind.
Companies do not have to retain employees who need accommodations that are not reasonably compatible with the work. AI is a hot topic and everyone has strong feelings about it, so it can help to think back to other technology leaps and consider what it would be like if your coworkers refused to use them.
What if you had a coworker who refused to use email and would only communicate on the phone? It could technically be done, but they would fall so far behind and produce enough hardship for their coworkers that it wouldn’t be a reasonable request for most office jobs. The laws do not force companies to accommodate requests that are unreasonable for the work.
I can already think of jobs where refusing to use any AI tools would put someone at so much of a disadvantage that it couldn’t be justified. That set of jobs is small today, but it’s growing.
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.
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.
Also, some institutions have much wider latitude to deny a variety of religious exemption requests than other due to environmental hazards and safety concerns.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
- 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.
This is just a consequence of the philosophically liberal metaphysics, anthropology, and resulting moral views and political orders they produce. Once you accept those premises, they act as a corrosive agent that can be deployed to dissolve all sorts of truths opposed to someone's conception of "autonomy" and "freedom" and you really have no defense as long as your thinking is subject to them. It's why the Right has consistently lost all sorts of cultural battles. They, too, are liberals - because we're all liberals, culturally - and as long as they remain so, their "reactionary" behavior will largely remain rooted in mere sentimental attachment to an imagined past rather than something intellectually substantive. Hence, why what falls under the label of "postliberalism" has a much stronger shot. It is an intellectual rejection of liberalism with intellectual substance that often draws on robust metaphysical and anthropological "alternatives" to liberalism, as it were.
Sorry you can define criteria how to find a better understanding of the world. E.g. Popper did it (as he asked the innocent question if one is aloud to disprove your theory)
It pisses lots of people including Marxist, Nazis, Gender Study Theorists, Catholics, as all of them believe stuff which they dont like to disapprove.
Your statement smells like Catholic rhetoric so I am happy to announce the truth is there is no god. Jesus was not his son and he was certainly not reborn. Just some folks who invented this story 1950 years ago.
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.
"[...] 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.
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.
" 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 Łyszczyński (https://en.wikipedia.org/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.
> “The process and work involved in thinking through situations, through my work, through my ethics, through the way I handle other people, is a key component in being able to develop myself as a moral person,” he told RNS in a video interview. “And offloading that labor, regardless of whether it’s taxing or not, is undercutting my ability to be a moral actor.”
Very true, 100% agree. I'm not saying we should get rid of AI, but we need to be aware of the dangers of relying on it too much.
Yes, because those things don't affect his work as a university researcher, which is where he is protesting the forced use of AI and asking for an exemption to that rule.
Either way, I don't think people should be playing zero-sum altruism olympic games. Different people are always concerned about different things, and the "line in the sand" will always be different depending on who you ask.
I could ask how you (or anyone) dare to use technology at all when it supports forced child labor from mining the raw materials to make computer chips and batteries, but what good would that do?
Wait till the "where's the line" boosters learn groups like the Amish who have mostly drawn a line. They'll be clamoring for legal loopholes to steal the land from those luddites so that they can buid the future on it!
So what do you do if your company hires an engineer and on the first day they say "I am Amish and cannot touch a computer"? Give them a religions exemption? What then? Are you obligated to pay their salary for the rest of their life?
> Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires employers to make reasonable accommodations for an applicant or employee whose sincerely held religious belief, practice, or observance conflicts with a work requirement, *unless providing the accommodation would create an undue hardship for the employer.*
If using a computer is necessary for the job, then the religious exemption would create undue hardship. Presumably for this Kentucky guy's job he can get his work done without AI and the university isn't suffering for it.
You filter out any such applicant with digital applications for digital postings requiring proficiency with digital tools.
Any such potential candidate passing these is then given an interview in which technical questions relevant to the question are asked.
I'm really not sure how you imagine a luddite makes it all the way to their first day to drop some weird "oh, I can't actually do this job btw" bomb.
Even supposing they do, they have a job description requiring that they perform certain tasks that are within the realm of reasonable expectations as set by the government.
Someone in a wheelchair isn't going to get hired for any "must be able to regularly lift and move weights over 50 pounds" job just because of equal employment opportunity as they can't perform the legally allowed requirements.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> “It has to be a deeply held ethical commitment that’s analogous to a religious commitment,” he said. “That’s a fact question that presumably the employer will investigate.”
I’m curious if the opposite would work:
“As a transhumanist my religion compels me to share everything with my machines, otherwise they can’t ensure my mind uploading is up to date “
I see no reason transhumanism is any less of a religion than humanism.
> I see no reason transhumanism is any less of a religion than humanism.
TBH I agree. Religious exemptions at large only exist for the big name religions but the arguments pushed often make claims about it being a moral/ethical precedent and its just not true. I think its a matter of PR and politics if you're able to get an exemption kind of same game as a lot of things.
We see this with people who believe it is a religious requirement to share their faith at work, even when their co-workers say they don't want to hear it.
We see this with people who say their religious belief says they don't take orders from a women, even if that woman is their boss.
If your transhumanist religion compels you to share PII with your machines in a way which breaks the law, then there's likely an undue burden.
If it means you need access to a power plug during lunch so your devices can scan your brain for 10 minutes - almost certainly not an undue burden.
Modernity has always been about abstraction and specialisation. If he's so humanist, he must also want to make his own food and his own car because after all, you are offloading your thinking to the underlying companies.
Where's the irony? Everything the article reports about Durman's opinions would seem to suggest that millions of humans mutually supporting each other is exactly the kind of thing that he wants to see happening.
“Expertise of millions of human agents” …in what? Understanding the universe that’s around us? In the cosmic sense, we humans have not done anything at all, aside from trying to understand it and “chimping out” from time to time.
It’s just that our human-centric bias is showing. We are not the main characters of this universe. Not by a long shot. Heck, in the planetary sense, we feel like earth belongs to us, but chances are we will not be in the top 1,000,0000th of its inhabitants as species by the amount of time spent living on it when life inevitably ceases to exist on it at some point in the future.
Every A.I. related post here has someone saying "I for one see no difference between a human being and an A.I." but this may be the first time I've seen this cliche extended to "How bizarre to meet a human being that thinks humans are not identical to A.I."
That doesn’t seem ironic at all. Irony is merely the condition where appearance and reality differ. In this case, if he values his own thinking he presumably values the thinking of other persons.
Where is the line? "AI" is completely arbitrary, might as well say a calculator is immoral because it offloads thinking. That my main issue with these people is that they think AI/LLMs are different than everything that came before them, yes they are more capable but all of computing has involved "offloading" effort/thought to computers. `
> "And offloading that labor, regardless of whether it's taxing or not, is undercutting my ability to be a moral actor."
The objection in the article is specifically about offloading thinking to technology, which is something we've been doing for decades, or depending on your definition, since we first started using tools.
If offloading cognitive labor is the core problem, then what makes AI fundamentally different from the countless other technological advances that have allowed us to offload cognitive labor?
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.
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.
Exactly. Recent LLMs are in a different category and it's disingenuous to pretend they're not. Wherever you decide to draw the line, GPT-3 and more advanced chatbots are clearly on the far side of it.
Sorites doesn't actually refute the OP. The paradox is rooted in a failure to distinguish between aggregates and integral wholes. A heap is not really a natural kind or an integral whole. It is just a convenient label to describe a vague range of collections for practical purposes, but it is not what you a "thing" in its own right. There is no intrinsic tendency of a heap to be a heap, whereas in integral wholes there are. You cannot draw a line between a heap and a non-heap, because there is no such thing as a heap in any objective sense. There is no essential difference, only an accidental one.
Computers and computer programs are much more like heaps than integral wholes. There is no essential difference between what we conventionally call "AI" and any other computer program. The manner in which we have cordoned off "AI" from "non-AI" has more to do with human purposes and perspectives rather than any objective facts on the ground.
The 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.
The average person was able to look at the devices up until now and see a tool. Now they see something they don't understand, but sure does seem smarter than they are, and has the aesthetics of being a person on the other side of the computer.
Do you think this guy has the technical depth to make these connections? He's working off what he can see, and he will likely grow old and die still lacking that understanding. So will a vast majority of users of these services.
What you are seeing is people realigning with a baseline of their reality. They have to trust what they are being told on this by someone, and they need to figure out who and how amid malicious actors that are trying to bend their beliefs.
Yeah, and is this person going to turn down becoming a manager, ever, because they'll have to delegate the actual solution to someone else? Or are they going to micromanage them due to their ethical commitments?
I mean... this is exactly why I've avoided becoming a manager in the past. I will accept being responsible for my own work, but I don't want to be accountable for someone else's work.
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.
Not true. Even for a lower middle income country like mine, cars with manual gearboxes had become very rare (with the exception of cabs where they remain the norm).
Outside of the United States? Even then, I don't think this has been a true statement for at least a decade, if not more with the rise of EVs in places other than the USA.
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 .
This is only still true because in the parts of the world with the most population, cost is the #1 deciding factor in vehicle purchasing. Manuals are cheaper. Globally the industry is trending against manuals over time.
Also in large parts of Europe if you pass your driving test in an automatic car you _can't_ drive a manual, so it becomes the default out of convenience.
This kind of automation takes the execution away from you, not the decision, and even that execution only concerns you. You wanted to shift into a higher gear, the car's computer does it for you. The result is what you wanted. A fully autonomous car that decides everything for you would be a better example.
If you let an AI grade an exam then a big part of what comes next is a decision that you didn't take or validate. You didn't remove yourself just from the execution, you removed yourself from the responsibility and cognitive effort to take the decision, and from the accountability for that decision.
If you can simplify and call every button press "just the computer doing things", the someone can exaggerate and say a fully autonomous drone hunting humans is the same, business as usual, computers doing things.
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).
I've been reading articles suggesting that AI use alters ways of thinking. Humans certainly adapt to the tools they use. If this is true, and what a huge caveat that is, then the divergence in ways humans think: AI using and non-AI using will be interesting to watch. Although it will probably be decades before any significant conclusions are reached.
I find your Amish example is striking and accurate.
I'd be happy to do a 1999 Amish life style + LED TVs that don't spy on you.
> 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.
Software is an employment rather than a profession. That distinction is important. Here is a definition of profession:
Traditional professions share essential characteristics. They provide a vital service to society, requiring expertise and skill developed through years of training, education, and experience. Professions establish standards of practice and certify that their members are qualified to serve the needs of society.
--US Army, ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession
Software does not have explicit standards of practice or a required body of certifications for its practitioners. Software, as an employment, is whatever an employer wants or is willing to accept at any given moment.
What do you find important about this distinction? To me it's a description of the normative relationship between practitioners and broader society but I don't really see the significance you do.
Hillel Wayne wrote a really excellent well researched article about software engineering compared to other forms of engineering a few years ago. It necessarily goes into a lot of this stuff but what emerges is that these definitions are regulatory and historical debris.
You don't need medical board or a bar to certify or constrain professional behavior and those organizations may not constrain as much as you assume anyway. The reasons we do have those institutions is as much a matter of historical accident as any modern need for it, and the reasons we don't have it for other high impact fields is pretty much an accident too.
And in a lot of the world software engineering does have professional certification and standards of practice. They still ship adware and racist loan denial algorithms too.
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/
> US Army, ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession
I'm not going to let the army tell me what my job is.
Be careful with military definitions. One near-universal aspect of a "profession" is that it be self-regulating. Lawyers have Bar Associations that dictate who can or cannot practice. Doctors have Medical Associations. So too accountants and engineers. These entities are granted monopolies but remain independent from government and set their own standards.
But by that definition, soldiering can never be a "profession" as a soldier is always regulated by the government they serve, and there is no professional association regulating mercenaries. But I would be very hesitant to suggest that the US Marines are not professional soldiers. They are. The definitions are messy.
> These entities are independent from government and set their own standards.
As they should. Industries should be self regulating. While these industries form their own standards of practice they do so with the blessing of government, typically under state government supervision/authorization in the US, and are held to account by government. A lawyer or doctor who violates their standards of practice could very likely be guilty of criminal law and find themselves in prison depending upon the violation even when no other criminal actions occurred.
Even bus drivers are held to higher standards of practice than software developers.
So are you making the case that some % of SWE should be licensed?
If you're in texas, you need a license to engineer. They're reasonable though and accept the reality of business card engineers.
I think there’s a wide space between refusing any AI use, and refusing AI use requirements imposed by an employer. For example, one might find AI valuable for search, research, and getting a second opinion, but refuse it for primary generation of content.
The AI use requirement described in the source article doesn't seem to have had such a specific mandate.
Yes, though from legal standpoint, this particular case isn't that interesting because its a religious exemption for religious work, where considering the moral and ethical boundaries is the main job?
But if someone was say, working on housing approvals and refused to use AI because of religious exemptions to do their jobs faster, I would hope any court would strike it down.
Why in your hypothetical is it a good thing to strike down their rights to conform to your worldview?
My right to housing supersedes their right to work a certain (slower) way? "You can just wait longer" is an unacceptable answer.
It's easy to find egregious corner cases of philosophical workflows where an LLM was inappropriately used to replace thinking, where the whole goal was thinking (which is the case here).
But we know most token use is like 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 the argument should lie.
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.
>> 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
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.
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...
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
Tech bros are kind of untethered from reality.
Technologists as a professional group are beyond weird. You usually expect rational critique (either positive or negative) from professionals, but the good technologists are supposed to just uncritically accept whatever supposed technological progress as an unalloyed good. Employer or Silicon Valley says it’s good, therefore think it is good. No, that’s a bit on the nose: Silicon Valley says it is good which means that it would be “good for my career”, therefore it is good. But are there any ill effects for society? Those are Luddite questions.[1]
But in this case Amish is not really an insult of course. I guess they are a hard-working people. Self-sufficient. And allow their young to take a sabbatical from the primitive life to see if it’s really something that they want to dedicate their life to.
On the other hand, of course there won’t be some Amish split. You can’t just pick and choose modernity. You can’t form a subculture of No AI. That’s why people are critical of AI; we live in a society.
[1] Being ahistorical and using Luddite as an insult also helps.
I've had the concern for years that AI users (or AI itself) will eventually consider non-AI users a pain, because humans will become inefficient in lots of workloads and management, sometimes causing things to come down to a screeching halt, relatively speaking.
We have to solidify laws protecting anti-AI-ers if that's their choice.
This is great for him until the goals given him are unachievable, in the given timelines, by human thinking and reasoning alone.
I'm not him, but I would guess that he would respond by saying that we have a moral and ethical responsibility to remain in control of what we're putting into the world. If there's a conflict between the given timelines and how quickly a human can understand the problem and the implications of the decision being made, then the thing that needs to budge is the timeline.
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.
> 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.
And Delaware would say, what responsibility? The state wants to sanction “AI-managed” corporations. https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-investigates-poten...
are they "enemies of the State"?
> moral and ethical responsibility
We do not live in a system that values these
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While I agree with you at some level, I can't help thinking of the Amish. They impose plenty of restrictions on themselves and still manage to flourish. There must be a way that is different than simply accepting "progress".
This is even more true when "progress" means fertility rates collapse. A culture that is not self sustaining will die, and far more quickly than most realize. It doesn't matter how awesome that culture is for a brief moment in time, it will cease to exist.
Amish have an overall fertility rate around 6, which is why there are now almost half a million Amish in America alone. They had less than half that in 2000. In a few decades, they'll number in the millions. If people don't start having babies then groups like the Amish will take over the world, very much turning "the meek shall inherit the Earth" into a completely fulfilled prophecy. In some ways it's perhaps even a self fulfilling if it turns out that 'non-meek' behaviors result in unsustainable societies.
The Amish are an exception, one of the rare ones (along with the handful of protected, isolated tribes). The rule is that a technologically inferior group will get rolled over by a technologically superior one for the benefit of the latter.
> Until the goals given him are unachievable, in the given timelines, by human thinking and reasoning alone.
Would that not be tantamount to constructive dismissal? Consider: you may have your prayer times during the day, but they will be counted against you in performance evaluations.
> but they will be counted against you in performance evaluations.
That was my initial thought: he may get his exemption from use, but TFA doesn’t indicate that he will be evaluated differently during performance review.
To go one step further, would such allowances have to be accompanied by different performance standards, like oral exams for students with dyslexia also have increased time limits?
Or would the allowances be granted for the duration of employment, the latter being shortened due to performance problems?
At that point, humans are pretty much unemployable anyway, so why worry?
Exactly. The person or people above him who wanted AI to be used against his will will ultimately achieve their goals---no matter what his beliefs are. At the end of the day, his views of humanism are futile against the force of those in favor of AI acceptance.
I can remember a time when the Borg's famous catchphrase was understood to be the kind of thing that only the bad guys would say.
I remember a time when we had to go back in time to get a whale so that machines and animals could coexist.
Let's see how all the "religion doesn't belong in the workplace" people will react now that the religion happens to align with their own beliefs.
Are you implying that there's a meaningful population of people that are against reasonable accommodation for individuals' religious beliefs? There's a very big difference between prescribed religion in the workspace and an individual's beliefs requiring a slight adjustment by the employer to respect.
Depends what you mean by a meaningful population. There are definitely people who think religious accommodations are wrong in principle. There are definitely people who are hostile to religion in general. How many? I have no idea.
Yes I am implying exactly that. This is a very frequent topic of debate.
- People refusing vaccination requirements in schools, offices, the military.
- Pharmacists refusing to fill certain prescriptions (like birth control).
- Restaurant owners refusing to serve gay people.
- Kids (well, their parents) refusing to study certain topics in school.
Are you implying that there isn't a "meaningful population" that is against some of these?
There are thousands of religions each with their own set of beliefs. Many of them directly conflict with each other, and with societal laws. You can make up a "religious exemption" for literally anything, and they are selectively allowed based on how the majority religion tolerates the thing.
There is a really interesting point that I think you're getting at, but choosing well known and already politically charged examples undermines the discussion by bringing cognitive dissonance in at the ground floor.
What about an example where religious belief fundamentally excludes someone from doing the actual job? Suppose a Muslim wants a job as a bartender, but refuses to actually serve people drinks because they consider it a violation on the rule against alcohol. Should the bar grant them a religious exemption and just accept that they won't be serving alcoholic beverages when that person's the bartender on duty?
Or what if two different religious beliefs come into direct conflict? Suppose a Jehovah's Witness whose manager is also a JW decides to leave the religion. Jehovah's Witnesses consider shunning apostates to be a religious commandment, so their manager might feel obligated to fire them. Is that OK?
Depending on how we resolve those conflicts, perhaps people can at least agree that there should be limits to religious exemptions, even if they don't agree on the specifics. But perhaps that's at least a starting point for a conversation. And perhaps from there we can extend out to Durham's position.
-doctors refusing to abide by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health Standard of Care's Standards of Care for Hormone Replacement Therapy and Gender Confirming Surgeries
-employers refusing to employ queer people
-landlords refusing queer tenants
TIL that WPATH was founded in 1979 in Illinois to "promote evidence-based care, education, research, advocacy, public policy, and respect in transgender health"
It just shows how progressive and, sorry to bring this up, socialist the US has been historically. Truly a beacon of hope in a world mired in prejudice and dogma.
What happened there?
There are also people who believe you shouldn't be allowed to wear a head scarf or turban. Or be allowed to pray five times a day.
Of note, every single one of your examples impacts multiple people in significant ways. None of them are people just wanting to practice their faith in isolation. I think the cases you describe aren't really analogous.
In all of your examples, the “religious accommodation” harms a third party.
The birth control one might be a stretch.
A pregnancy you dont want could very well end in harm
For your examples, you've chosen only one side.
What does that mean?
Not the guy you replied to, but I assume they are saying the examples are typical of the current right wing. Though antivaxxers are also represented a bit on the left. Just not as prominently today.
s/religion/philosophy/?
Lots of strawmanning going on with comments about where the line gets drawn and talking about driving stick, heating his home, etc.
If you read the article, you will see that the concern is with his direct actions concerning ethics and moral, especially with interactions with others (as an admin).
There is plenty to unpack with this as it is a new concept. I'm hoping we can have a real discussion about this. For example, will this religious exemption become moot if productivity is sufficiently higher with AI giving employers an easy out? If that does happen, do we think we'll see adverse effects such as baked in biases in a hidden process?
One thing I am concerned with with AI is that everything will follow Google and Meta when it comes to things like appeals and fair treatment. There area ton of stories about people getting banned/deleted with no recourse and no insight into why. I can see this same sort of totalitarian activity spreading to other aspects of life, like finance, medical billing, etc.
> For example, will this religious exemption become moot if productivity is sufficiently higher with AI giving employers an easy out?
For this person’s job at an academic institution, I doubt it. This specific case feels very symbolic from start to finish: His management probably mandated AI use because they felt the need to do something about AI, and he used this as a perfect opportunity to stage a protest against AI. Knowing what I know about academic institutions, I suspect AI would have very little impact on productivity.
Many jobs might be the same: AI’s productivity impact can be large on a small set of tasks, but if those tasks were only 10% of someone’s hours at work then a couple people refusing AI will not make a difference to the whole department.
Workloads also flow to people who are good at that work, so the work that benefits from AI would be distributed to the AI users and more of the non-AI work would go to the few people who don’t use AI. It can be self-balancing when the number of refusals is small.
There are jobs where it’s not going to work out, though. If most of someone’s job is accelerated a lot by AI and they refuse to use that accelerator, it’s going to be really hard to avoid failing behind.
Companies do not have to retain employees who need accommodations that are not reasonably compatible with the work. AI is a hot topic and everyone has strong feelings about it, so it can help to think back to other technology leaps and consider what it would be like if your coworkers refused to use them.
What if you had a coworker who refused to use email and would only communicate on the phone? It could technically be done, but they would fall so far behind and produce enough hardship for their coworkers that it wouldn’t be a reasonable request for most office jobs. The laws do not force companies to accommodate requests that are unreasonable for the work.
I can already think of jobs where refusing to use any AI tools would put someone at so much of a disadvantage that it couldn’t be justified. That set of jobs is small today, but it’s growing.
“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
In the Berry style, I can say that I don't need to use AI because my wife can do all the statistical inference I need.
The irony.
RIP Berry
It is an interesting approach, but I would say his productivity is what matters.
The problem is that you can get any kind of exemption based on religious beliefs.
This is not true. The accommodation is only possible if it doesn't present undue hardship, safety concerns, etc. Plenty of accommodations can be denied on those grounds.
Yes, in most cases a religious exemption requires approval after a formal review regardless of the reason or its merits.
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...
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.
This is the opposite of what your prior comment said. Your prior comment says that exemption requests require approval regardless of the merits.
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.
> 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.
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.
That might not be reasonable to you, but that's completely different from the reasonable standard under the law.
Which is better than getting no exceptions - if only the two extremes are available.
I disagree. At the moment religious exemptions are almost always granted only to the majority religions, or at least views that the majority religions find acceptable. If you started applying the law fairly the whole thing would immediately fall apart.
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.
Sikhs (Khalsa) are also technically obliged to carry a knife around at all times.
Can you provide an example? The undue burden, safety issues, etc tend to strike down most requests that are unusual.
How is this a problem? And what would you propose to do about the negative symptoms of the “problem”.
Some might say this is a feature not a bug of religious freedom
This is just a consequence of the philosophically liberal metaphysics, anthropology, and resulting moral views and political orders they produce. Once you accept those premises, they act as a corrosive agent that can be deployed to dissolve all sorts of truths opposed to someone's conception of "autonomy" and "freedom" and you really have no defense as long as your thinking is subject to them. It's why the Right has consistently lost all sorts of cultural battles. They, too, are liberals - because we're all liberals, culturally - and as long as they remain so, their "reactionary" behavior will largely remain rooted in mere sentimental attachment to an imagined past rather than something intellectually substantive. Hence, why what falls under the label of "postliberalism" has a much stronger shot. It is an intellectual rejection of liberalism with intellectual substance that often draws on robust metaphysical and anthropological "alternatives" to liberalism, as it were.
Sorry you can define criteria how to find a better understanding of the world. E.g. Popper did it (as he asked the innocent question if one is aloud to disprove your theory)
It pisses lots of people including Marxist, Nazis, Gender Study Theorists, Catholics, as all of them believe stuff which they dont like to disapprove.
Your statement smells like Catholic rhetoric so I am happy to announce the truth is there is no god. Jesus was not his son and he was certainly not reborn. Just some folks who invented this story 1950 years ago.
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.
"[...] 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.
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.
" 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 Łyszczyński (https://en.wikipedia.org/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.
> “The process and work involved in thinking through situations, through my work, through my ethics, through the way I handle other people, is a key component in being able to develop myself as a moral person,” he told RNS in a video interview. “And offloading that labor, regardless of whether it’s taxing or not, is undercutting my ability to be a moral actor.”
Very true, 100% agree. I'm not saying we should get rid of AI, but we need to be aware of the dangers of relying on it too much.
The car he drives to work, the house he heats, the electricity he consumes daily, all that labor is fine to offload, but AI is the line in the sand?
Yes, because those things don't affect his work as a university researcher, which is where he is protesting the forced use of AI and asking for an exemption to that rule.
Either way, I don't think people should be playing zero-sum altruism olympic games. Different people are always concerned about different things, and the "line in the sand" will always be different depending on who you ask.
I could ask how you (or anyone) dare to use technology at all when it supports forced child labor from mining the raw materials to make computer chips and batteries, but what good would that do?
Wait till the "where's the line" boosters learn groups like the Amish who have mostly drawn a line. They'll be clamoring for legal loopholes to steal the land from those luddites so that they can buid the future on it!
So what do you do if your company hires an engineer and on the first day they say "I am Amish and cannot touch a computer"? Give them a religions exemption? What then? Are you obligated to pay their salary for the rest of their life?
You're missing a major component of the law:
> Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires employers to make reasonable accommodations for an applicant or employee whose sincerely held religious belief, practice, or observance conflicts with a work requirement, *unless providing the accommodation would create an undue hardship for the employer.*
If using a computer is necessary for the job, then the religious exemption would create undue hardship. Presumably for this Kentucky guy's job he can get his work done without AI and the university isn't suffering for it.
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.
And what if someone decides to convert after starting the job?
How would this person who hasn’t touched a computer for years, end up in the candidate pool for computer-using engineers?
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
Because he was hired when the company still used typewriters.
Read up on EEOC regulation and you'll see your example won't fly. Exceptions must be reasonable and not cause undue hardship on the employer.
"An accommodation may cause undue hardship if it is costly, compromises workplace safety, decreases workplace efficiency, infringes on the rights of other employees, or requires other employees to unwillingly do more than their share of potentially hazardous or burdensome work." - https://www.eeoc.gov/religious-discrimination
Otherwise we would all be joining a religion which require 360 days of religious festivities each year.
Whilst I’m in favour of the result, how is it possible for a humanist viewpoint to be classified as a religious belief?
> “It has to be a deeply held ethical commitment that’s analogous to a religious commitment,” he said. “That’s a fact question that presumably the employer will investigate.”
I’m curious if the opposite would work:
“As a transhumanist my religion compels me to share everything with my machines, otherwise they can’t ensure my mind uploading is up to date “
I see no reason transhumanism is any less of a religion than humanism.
> I see no reason transhumanism is any less of a religion than humanism.
TBH I agree. Religious exemptions at large only exist for the big name religions but the arguments pushed often make claims about it being a moral/ethical precedent and its just not true. I think its a matter of PR and politics if you're able to get an exemption kind of same game as a lot of things.
There's also the bit about undue burden.
We see this with people who believe it is a religious requirement to share their faith at work, even when their co-workers say they don't want to hear it.
We see this with people who say their religious belief says they don't take orders from a women, even if that woman is their boss.
If your transhumanist religion compels you to share PII with your machines in a way which breaks the law, then there's likely an undue burden.
If it means you need access to a power plug during lunch so your devices can scan your brain for 10 minutes - almost certainly not an undue burden.
Modernity has always been about abstraction and specialisation. If he's so humanist, he must also want to make his own food and his own car because after all, you are offloading your thinking to the underlying companies.
The ironic part is that this same guy undoubtedly relies on the expertise of millions of human agents and sees absolutely nothing wrong with that.
He is a humanist, how could relying on humans possibly go against his beliefs?
Where's the irony? Everything the article reports about Durman's opinions would seem to suggest that millions of humans mutually supporting each other is exactly the kind of thing that he wants to see happening.
“Expertise of millions of human agents” …in what? Understanding the universe that’s around us? In the cosmic sense, we humans have not done anything at all, aside from trying to understand it and “chimping out” from time to time.
It’s just that our human-centric bias is showing. We are not the main characters of this universe. Not by a long shot. Heck, in the planetary sense, we feel like earth belongs to us, but chances are we will not be in the top 1,000,0000th of its inhabitants as species by the amount of time spent living on it when life inevitably ceases to exist on it at some point in the future.
We monkeys are sure dumb and self-centered.
Every A.I. related post here has someone saying "I for one see no difference between a human being and an A.I." but this may be the first time I've seen this cliche extended to "How bizarre to meet a human being that thinks humans are not identical to A.I."
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.
Where is the line? "AI" is completely arbitrary, might as well say a calculator is immoral because it offloads thinking. That my main issue with these people is that they think AI/LLMs are different than everything that came before them, yes they are more capable but all of computing has involved "offloading" effort/thought to computers. `
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox#Continuum_fall...
A continuum is not isomorphic to a single point.
> "And offloading that labor, regardless of whether it's taxing or not, is undercutting my ability to be a moral actor."
The objection in the article is specifically about offloading thinking to technology, which is something we've been doing for decades, or depending on your definition, since we first started using tools.
If offloading cognitive labor is the core problem, then what makes AI fundamentally different from the countless other technological advances that have allowed us to offload cognitive labor?
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.
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.
Exactly. Recent LLMs are in a different category and it's disingenuous to pretend they're not. Wherever you decide to draw the line, GPT-3 and more advanced chatbots are clearly on the far side of it.
Sorites doesn't actually refute the OP. The paradox is rooted in a failure to distinguish between aggregates and integral wholes. A heap is not really a natural kind or an integral whole. It is just a convenient label to describe a vague range of collections for practical purposes, but it is not what you a "thing" in its own right. There is no intrinsic tendency of a heap to be a heap, whereas in integral wholes there are. You cannot draw a line between a heap and a non-heap, because there is no such thing as a heap in any objective sense. There is no essential difference, only an accidental one.
Computers and computer programs are much more like heaps than integral wholes. There is no essential difference between what we conventionally call "AI" and any other computer program. The manner in which we have cordoned off "AI" from "non-AI" has more to do with human purposes and perspectives rather than any objective facts on the ground.
The 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.
The average person was able to look at the devices up until now and see a tool. Now they see something they don't understand, but sure does seem smarter than they are, and has the aesthetics of being a person on the other side of the computer.
Do you think this guy has the technical depth to make these connections? He's working off what he can see, and he will likely grow old and die still lacking that understanding. So will a vast majority of users of these services.
What you are seeing is people realigning with a baseline of their reality. They have to trust what they are being told on this by someone, and they need to figure out who and how amid malicious actors that are trying to bend their beliefs.
They did ban calculators in the Butlerian Jihad.
Yeah, and is this person going to turn down becoming a manager, ever, because they'll have to delegate the actual solution to someone else? Or are they going to micromanage them due to their ethical commitments?
I mean... this is exactly why I've avoided becoming a manager in the past. I will accept being responsible for my own work, but I don't want to be accountable for someone else's work.
Do you think it is unethical to be a manager?
No, but it's not a job for me. Someone has to do it, though, but I'd rather it not be me.
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.
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.
Why? Do managers have to manage a bunch of AI agents? Or are you equating an LLM to a living breathing human?
Do you understand what the ethical objection the person who requested this exemption has?
I'm sure he drives stick as well because offloading cognitive function to an ECU changing gears for him would also be against his religious beliefs.
Outside of America, most people drive cars with a manual gearbox.
Not true. Even for a lower middle income country like mine, cars with manual gearboxes had become very rare (with the exception of cabs where they remain the norm).
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.
And how is that relevant here?
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 .
This is only still true because in the parts of the world with the most population, cost is the #1 deciding factor in vehicle purchasing. Manuals are cheaper. Globally the industry is trending against manuals over time.
Also in large parts of Europe if you pass your driving test in an automatic car you _can't_ drive a manual, so it becomes the default out of convenience.
This kind of automation takes the execution away from you, not the decision, and even that execution only concerns you. You wanted to shift into a higher gear, the car's computer does it for you. The result is what you wanted. A fully autonomous car that decides everything for you would be a better example.
If you let an AI grade an exam then a big part of what comes next is a decision that you didn't take or validate. You didn't remove yourself just from the execution, you removed yourself from the responsibility and cognitive effort to take the decision, and from the accountability for that decision.
If you can simplify and call every button press "just the computer doing things", the someone can exaggerate and say a fully autonomous drone hunting humans is the same, business as usual, computers doing things.
that's me