The revenge effects of technologies are well known: email was great! It was faster and much cheaper than mailing letters. But it gave rise to spam and many types of fraud. The mobile phone is awesome. A powerful computer in your pocket. But now people, including teenagers, spend 12-16 hours each day staring into their mobile phones, doomscrolling towards Babylon. In 2006 people memorized dozens of phone numbers. Today? Maybe you remember 1-2 numbers.
What will be the revenge effects of LLMs and diffusion models? I sense that the revenge effects from these technologies will be much more substantial.
This is very interesting. As someone who thinks AI is an amazing tool, I am very well interested in seeing how will people refusing to use AI fare both in professional settings and day-to-day life.
A new Amish-like lifestyle may be developing before our eyes in real-time and that's very interesting to follow and observe (from a distance).
One thing I've seen with AI is AI as used by software developers is quickly diverging from AI that's used by knowledge workers.
Knowledge workers use it primarily to "augment" their work, answer questions with AI, get it to create documents, etc. But it's usually 1 individual to 1-2 conversation threads.
Meanwhile in software development were running fleets of agents. At work we have it setup where firing off one agent request will eventually lead to like 10-20 AI calls at different parts of the process.
I make this distinctions because it changes how each group thinks about AI. For software devs it just feels like "moving up the stack". Yeah you're not writing code anymore but there is still plenty of work to do and problems to solve within your "software factory". Contrast that with knowledge workers that feel like the AI is making all of their decisions for them.
I almost think of this as a factory worker versus an artisan. The software devs are "factory workers" where we used to be on the floor but now we're managing the machines that took over the work. There are still tons of interesting problems at that stage and you still feel like you have worth. Contrast that with a knowledge worker that's more of an artisan in this analogy. For them they aren't running a factory but instead watching a robot do the work they used to do while they sit idle and watch it.
"Contrast that with a knowledge worker that's more of an artisan in this analogy. For them they aren't running a factory but instead watching a robot do the work they used to do while they sit idle and watch it".
I think your general thesis about how AI is used of agents vs. the general chat interface is true, but not the rest.
Your knowledge worker example is where people fail when using AI, and it is usually very obvious.
Knowledge workers who know what they're doing recognized very quickly that AI often goes down very bad rabbit holes, often cites incorrect sources, makes up sources, or will use a random Facebook source or Reddit post as an authority on some topic. In legal circles you have to fight it to understand what venue(s) apply and to get it to stick to the right ones, in medical research it will sometimes pull in crackpot papers from left field and intermix them with well defined research.
People in the knowledge realm caught on very quickly that you have to use AI iteratively and constantly back check what you get and correct it. Let it run on its own and it will give you a legal theory based on some weird case in Kentucky that has no bearing to your issue with a court in Vermont.
This is not that much different in programming, it just takes longer to find out.
Using AI is like using adaptive cruise control: you're still in charge of where the vehicle will ultimately end up and if you decide to go take a nap you will wake up in the hospital or end up in the morgue.
It's true though that the 'time between interventions' is lengthening steadily.
>This is not that much different in programming, it just takes longer to find out.
The primary difference is that it's much easier for the AI to figure out itself if it's wrong on the programming side. Knowledge workers don't have automated testing for example.
The end result is the knowledge worker needs to be more heavily involved in the process and be more mindful of mistakes which makes it a worse experience for the user and generally less productive than it is for programmers.
The major difference is that people routinely ship shoddy, broken products in the world of software with few consequences, beyond needing to patch it later. Try the same thing with a court filing and you’re out on your ass.
I think you are onto something. I think most agents I have up is two and even that I am not super comfortable not carefully managing. Otoh, buddy has agents galore running his network and everything giving him updates in near real time. I just.. don't have that much .. I want to say faith, but that suggests unshakeable religious belief.. confidence. I don't have that kind of confidence. There is too much stuff connected now ( taxes, projects, work, fun ). I am slowly starting to separate everything even that takes some careful planning.
Language is a tool for abstraction, and AI is just an imperfect tool for working with language.
In the sense that "down the stack" is well-captured by existing language, AI is absolutely moving programmers up the stack. I can describe my goals using high-level abstractions, and the low-level implementation is somewhat constrained by that.
How well constrained it is depends on how well I described the problem and the quality of the model - much like how good human-written code is depends on how clearly the authors were thinking when they designed the structure.
That's because current AI models are incapable of doing knowledge workers' jobs. At least for me as an attorney, Harvey is only actually useful when it comes to helping me sort through large amounts of data. Even then, I can't trust its judgment (it has shown to be very poor) so it's only so useful
I use the AI in the "knowledge worker" way you described. However I still feel it's augmenting my work, because I don't ask or expect it to make decisions for me. I use it to gather sources, to criticize my ideas, to generate summaries targeted to people expectations, and so on. Yes of course it's gonna influence my work with their own biases, but I don't think it is that important - my own biases are otherwise still there...
> A new Amish-like lifestyle may be developing before our eyes in real-time and that's very interesting to follow and observe (from a distance).
I’m just old enough to remember some older adults in my life who refused to use email. They would only talk to coworkers in person or on the phone.
It did not work out very well, unless they could afford to retire at that point. When your career evolves, the only way to keep participating is to evolve with it.
I knew a guy early in my career who has a secretary (for starters!) who printed out his email and put them on his desk every morning with the rest of the mail. He would then dictate his response to her and she would type it in. It was pure ego. Nothing else.
And I've read somewhere that quite a fraction of young people nowadays can't type (effectively) on a physical keyboard - no wonder, their main interaction with computing being via phones and tablets. Could be that typing won't be useful/practiced anymore (like already cursive writing in some parts of the world).
Yes, and because typists and secretaries were predominately women, it was not as uncommon as one might imagine for male executives to eschew personal computers based on their perception of gender roles.
Yes, he doesn't really know how to use a computer. He was born in the 1940s, computer skills are not super common for people from that generation. He was already in his mid-50s when computers started to become common in the workplace.
What unique selling point do individuals operating AI still have if it's AI doing the heavy lifting and specialized work? I mean I don't believe that people in general will need to work less (no automation has done that), but I'm convinced many people will need to find new employment at lower wages in a society where cost of living only increases.
I can't afford a pay cut, and AI isn't making my job worth more.
" will need to find new employment at lower wages "
Why at lower wages? Most automation has led to people transitioning to higher wages. Utility works get paid 10x more than lamplighters. Why would that change here? Your job will have a bigger impact, affect more people, and you'll be doing more with less.
I am not saying all employers will immediately start paying people more, but economically it doesn't make sense that pay will go down.
Recent news from China about how better AI capabilities changed what Chinese specialists can earn with microdramas are not confirming this point. Some historical analogies to reassure people things will turn out nice in the end are nice but are not very convincing if you have so many more recent counterexamples with the gig economy and the huge inflation that was not a problem in the early 20th century.
The economy now is very different, no gold or silver standard, less isolation and more globalised product chains and processes, and 7-times as many people.
There is a good chance that a large enough number of people will suffer from this transformation, and they will have to fight with whatever they have, because if they don't, they will risk being left on the roadside and not getting any raise.
People having some direction over how jobs are automated should keep that in mind, otherwise it will be too late to convince the masses of people fearing automation that it is their fault not seeing the positive angles of automation.
To me this just reads like how I imagine people and the Luddites thought about automated looms. At first they were excited, thinking about the cheap and abundant cloth they put in plenty of work to make automated looms work flawlessly, until they start getting replaced. But they made excuses that they always need someone who knows more than "put cloth on spool, press button" to run these factories and that skilled people will always be needed. But slowly and surely the factory went towards quantity and not quality, and since quantity was done regardless why pay for the skilled and knowledgeable workers? And soon nobody made good money making cloth except the factory owner, the cloth was shit, and the people who built it all left with nothing but memories of once being valuable.
>>people who built it all left with nothing but memories of once being valuable.
But, the story doesn't end there does it? Most loom workers left their jobs and became factory workers (part of the same technology revolution) and critically: made MORE money. They were wealthier. And the loom machine operators left had a better job. There are very good sources for this, not just vibes [1].
I don't deny that the transition process is traumatic, and there is much we should be doing this time around to assuage the process. But all the evidence points to a general rise in pay, material conditions and standard of living.
> Most automation has led to people transitioning to higher wages.
No, what you mean to say is that automation has eventually (decades later) led to higher purchasing power in the system as a whole. The outlook for people that were directly automated away was pretty bleak, actually. The hundreds of thousands of lamplighters did not largely become the thousands of electricians that were needed in this new industry.
This tracks for all industries. Automation literally means far fewer people will be employed to do the same job (otherwise what's the point of it?). That dumps these workers out at the low end of the general job market, where they have to compete with an increasing number of people. Because of the desperation to get any job, the wages fall. It's only decades later that societies settled into a new place and created enough brand new jobs to make up the shortfall, or applied regulation to reign in the crazy power imbalance. That's the stuff you miss out on if you only look at statistics that span centuries and treat the population as one homogeneous mass. The people who are directly targeted by automation are very likely to have their lives messed up for a very long time.
Well, for example, a metric ass-ton of shoes and shoe components are made in Bosnia. But hardly anyone still makes the traditional opanci in the traditional way; there's one guy left in the whole Hercegovina that does. And they are required for the national costume, so they are still important. But the economics just don't work out.
>>What about artisanal cobblers vs Southeast Asia Nike sweatshop workers?
No technology involved? Other than I guess tangentially, containerized shipping. I don't see how that analogy applies here at all, every AI workflow I've seen has been either:
a) Totally new thing that was never done before that is possible now and is therefore creating a new class of work
b) Worst case scenario: a whole spate of jobs being consolidated under one person, but its still a human in the end.
So everything I'm seeing is pointing to this being a lamplighter/utility worker situation.
Easy. Name one profession within the North American context that makes less money (inflation adjusted) now than say a farmer, loom weaver or laborer of yore.
A grub hub delivery man is wealthier today than a farmer 100 years ago and that's purely because of two reasons: Technology and Unions :)
This argument only works if you have a career (and lifespan) that spans 100+ years. I'd venture a guess that 0% of Grubhub delivery drivers were farmers a hundred years ago.
Have you talked to a delivery driver in most large cities? Most of them come from countries where they would be a farmer or day laborer.
This ball is going through even your ever-moving goal posts. My statement never claimed people's careers would stay the same and they'd just make more money.
The job is to automate the enterprise, keep things safe and reliable, and make money for the company.
It was never about software. That was just the means.
Even in the software era, fads developed and tech stacks changed frequently. Now it's just moving a hundred times faster.
You need smart systems thinkers to do this. That's the role. Be smart in managing processes and complexity.
I'm not going to give coding interviews anymore, but I am going to give architecture, systems design, and SRE interviews. People still need to know how not to fuck up a database and how to design scalable and resilient systems.
The number of people who never seem to have understood what software and IT is in most companies is eye opening to me. Your job was never really to "write code" - you were always automating things.
That the field got somewhat stuck for a couple decades seems to have made many people forget this.
The vast majority of programmers who started in the 80's and 90's are basically directly responsible for massive waves of job losses in certain categories. Lots of cases of entire departments of secretarial level paper-pushing work being replaced with a small team of programmers. Same will happen with AI tooling. The difference is programmers are no longer the "winning" party here.
Computers and software in the end are the most configurable and complex automation system society has ever created. They are simply a continuation of industrial automation, and AI is a continuation upon that.
I don't like that comparison. Email was an improvement to snail mail, and the people who you claim refused to use it just didn't understand it and didn't want to understand it.
Lots of people, myself included, understand llms and can and do use them at work because we have to, but we might choose to not use them outside of work because they rot our brains, are unethical, funnel even more money into the hands of a few billionaires (selling a service trained on stolen property) and haven't actually been proven to make the world better. Unlike email!
AI is new but this phenomenon isn't. Every new wave of tech has sizable opposition.
People refused phone calls, refused to watch TV, refused to buy computers, refused to move their workflows to software, refused emails or browing the web, refused online shopping, refused smartphones, refused social media.
And there's nothing wrong with any of this. Ultimately everyone decides which stage of technology they are comfortable with. Everything until then is comfortable and convenient, and everything newer is corrupting society and rotting our brains.
I came of age with the personal PC revolution and developed my career during the internet revolution, and was well into my career when the mobile computing smartphone revolution occurred. I did not see or feel even a fraction of the amount of social dread with those technologies that I see with AI, and I think that's justified given the circumstances.
Saying that this revolution is another one of those is true in a general sense, but misleading in the specific sense. Just as saying that adding 1c heat to some body of water is "more of the same" can be true in a general sense, but misleading when the water's basis temperature is 99.5c.
That is to say, periodic or gradual change induces large changes at inflection points.
It feels similar to the progression from post-WW2 technological utopianism that arose with the adoption and deployment of massive advancements in materials and mechanical, and electrical technology, to the cold-war dread of nuclear and ballistic technology.
I think the 90s saw the end of the cold war which lifted a bunch of that dread. The optimism of those days has been worn down over time.
What I remember back then is at least the pretense being sold that the technology would improve people's lives by giving them more leisure and enjoyment. That the productivity gains would be reflected in some improvement in quality of life. I think the main difference now is that this expectation has been lost by most people.
I have the feeling this expectation loss is what triggered the current riots in Western Europe. I'm not talking about the platforms and actors which might be fanning and fueling them, but the trigger which I have seen at work at my kids or nephews - they don't see much hope they can rely on some income, on getting their own house, on feeding their own children. Of course they are young and easier influenced, and I might be biased myself, but I really believe they have less chances than what I had at their age. I won't tell them that though.
I’m unaware of other technological revolutions where the largest group of opposition was among young people[0]. Was there a great youth revolt against the telephone, the television, and the computer? I don’t recall anything of the sort.
From conversations with my young kids the problem they have is with the billionaires. They are fine with the technology they just don’t trust the billionaires and who can blame them.
I don't think the underlying numbers support the thesis. My understanding (from e.g. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/how-opinions...) is that the age skew is not that high and largely driven by how much more likely young people are to be familiar with the technology at all.
> People refused phone calls, refused to watch TV, refused to buy computers, refused to move their workflows to software, refused emails or browing the web, refused online shopping, refused smartphones, refused social media.
You really think this is an apt comparison? I don't think the creators of any of those technologies were warning society that their own creations might wipe out humanity.
> I don't think the creators of any of those technologies were warning society that their own creations might wipe out humanity.
They are only doing this now IMO so that they can be the ones writing the regulations to keep us all "safe", just like we need identity verification to "save the children". They want to keep competition at bay so they can have a $2T IPO, and unregulated, "unsafe", Chinese, open-weight, and local AI threatens that IPO.
I think there’s a wide space between refusing any AI use, and refusing AI use requirements imposed by an employer. For example, one might find AI valuable for search, research, and getting a second opinion, but refuse it for primary generation of content.
Software is an employment rather than a profession. That distinction is important. Here is a definition of profession:
Traditional professions share essential characteristics. They provide a vital service to society, requiring expertise and skill developed through years of training, education, and experience. Professions establish standards of practice and certify that their members are qualified to serve the needs of society.
--US Army, ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession
Software does not have explicit standards of practice or a required body of certifications for its practitioners. Software, as an employment, is whatever an employer wants or is willing to accept at any given moment.
What do you find important about this distinction? To me it's a description of the normative relationship between practitioners and broader society but I don't really see the significance you do.
Hillel Wayne wrote a really excellent well researched article about software engineering compared to other forms of engineering a few years ago. It necessarily goes into a lot of this stuff but what emerges is that these definitions are regulatory and historical debris.
You don't need medical board or a bar to certify or constrain professional behavior and those organizations may not constrain as much as you assume anyway. The reasons we do have those institutions is as much a matter of historical accident as any modern need for it, and the reasons we don't have it for other high impact fields is pretty much an accident too.
And in a lot of the world software engineering does have professional certification and standards of practice. They still ship adware and racist loan denial algorithms too.
If you have ever worked in almost any other industry your first question quickly answers itself. If you have never worked in an industry principally governed by ethical standards it would be challenging for me to describe it to you. I cannot give you what your perspective has never before imagined.
I just finished several months of interviewing and think that you must be projecting a bit. Every one of them included a coding interview with no AI use allowed.
This makes sense, though. They have to be exceptionally confident in the performance of the product and work to continually improve its quality and efficiency. Many other companies can get by more just as consumers of it, but the makers of the product need some of the best coding skills available.
If they do, they're behind the curve. They don't matter anymore.
Systems design, architecture, database fundamentals, a bit of SRE. That matters. Not coding and syntax and toy problem solving with data structures and algorithms.
I think this is something where definitions and static roles might serve as a useful reference point. Is it really the case that the trillion-dollar frontier AI labs are behind the curve, and only some other group of people knows how to really leverage AI? It's not impossible - Nvidia employees aren't the best in the world at using their chips - but the hypothesis practically demands some analysis of who these clever curve-setters are and why we're hearing so much less about them than about Anthropic.
My own experience is that coding, syntax, and some kinds of toy problem solving are important skills to use AI coding tools most effectively. I routinely get PRs these days whose descriptions seem plausible but are clearly wrong from a glance at the code, and I've had times when I'm unable to communicate to someone why a PR is wrong because they're not able to form a sufficiently detailed mental model of what it's doing.
The IEEE has made some efforts to turn software engineering from an occupation into a profession — on par with civil engineering, architecture, law, medicine, military science, etc. A true profession requires a recognized body of knowledge, formal qualification criteria, and a code of ethics. So far most working software developers haven't shown much interest in this, nor is there much demand from employers or government authorities. I don't think we need to professionalize software engineering in the general case but it is an option for those who want it.
Be careful with military definitions. One near-universal aspect of a "profession" is that it be self-regulating. Lawyers have Bar Associations that dictate who can or cannot practice. Doctors have Medical Associations. So too accountants and engineers. These entities are granted monopolies but remain independent from government and set their own standards.
But by that definition, soldiering can never be a "profession" as a soldier is always regulated by the government they serve, and there is no professional association regulating mercenaries. But I would be very hesitant to suggest that the US Marines are not professional soldiers. They are. The definitions are messy.
> 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.
>> Even bus drivers are held to higher standards of practice than software developers.
Because while there are some software developers that might be in a place to cause people physical harm, ALL bus drivers are ALWAYS in a position to cause great and immediate harm to others on the road.
There are certainly things where you need to have an officially licensed engineer actually stamp the plans. That doesn't mean everything about the plans was done by someone who holds that stamp, just that they were reviewed and signed off by the person holding the license. Lots of people may work on those plans. They're still doing engineering work. And that's just for the kinds of things which actually require a licensed "engineer".
There's still tons of jobs which is often still called "engineering" which often don't involve anyone who has a stamp. Few electrical engineers, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, or lots of others actually have any kind of engineering license. They still get degrees in things like "Bachelor of Science of Electrical Engineering" or "Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering". Their job roles usually have "engineer" in it. And yet it seems like the job people only really criticize as "you're not an engineer, engineers are licensed" is SWE.
Think about it like this: What makes software any more or less of a profession than working at your favorite burger joint in terms of industry wide criteria?
Those percentage of SWE working on critical infrastructure should be licensed and legally liable, yes. You shouldn't need a license to build a CRUD app, just like nobody needs a license to build a treehouse in their backyard. You should need a license to work on a car's braking system (https://safetyresearch.net/toyota-unintended-acceleration-an...) or radiation therapy machines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25), just like you need a license to engineer a highway bridge.
People do things based on motivation. People motivated by pride and passion know that their work reflects upon them, so they have an incentive to care about quality. People motivated by money know that their paychecks will keep arriving as long as they keep meeting a minimum bar, so they're not incentivized to care about quality, but they are incentivized to care about responsiveness and consistency. For critical software, adding in legal liability for one's work creates the quality incentive that's lacking in most professional roles, while retaining the accountability that we can't expect of volunteers.
I agree completely — the lack of proper professional licensing around working on what has become critical infrastructure astounds me. But even more so is the pushback I feel from within the field! It isn’t that the pushback isn’t understandable; its more that its disappointing.
It's not an either or, really. I can concede it has utility authoring code while being repulsed by its use in creative works. I might operate Claude Code while actively avoiding any significant use of it in movies, books and music.
Lol, what a slave mindset. Just because a technology exists, and most of the human cattle use it, does not mean that it's necessary for someone to use it.
Sure, be less productive, see how that works out for you. Your attitude in 2026 is crazy to me. Maybe you're just using chat, I don't know, but it saves me hours daily and saves my brainpower for situations that truly need it. Work smarter, not harder.
My new analogy for AI is that it produces an elaborate lunch buffet containing so many floral arrangements that considerable effort must be expended to find the food being served.
I'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.
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 software development + back office paperwork. A big chunk of it is productivity improvements for things we all need (housing, medical paperwork, insurance etc.), so to me, that's where my argument lies.
They've stopped technological progress. I tell you since AI started taking over, my experience is that nearly all forward progress (in software at least) has come to a halt. We've been standing in place, maybe sliding backwards a bit.
Here's the thing about AI: intelligence isn't a new thing, and it isn't a tool. The Amish can tell you that having a brain doesn't meant that you don't need a plow. In some ways they're much smarter than the AI crowd, all of who loudly keep insisting that brains will make plows and tractors and combine harvesters obsolete. You're so convinced that intelligence is the ultimate replacement for tools that you've stopped climbing the tech tree of tools...
It's like the tech industry itself no longer believes in technology.
I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing that. It feels that aside from the regular new LLM releases, there has been no serious innovation for the past four years.
I'm not even talking about holographic game consoles or FTL travel. Why can't we finally have a good container orchestrator that's not kubernetes for example?
> Why can't we finally have a good container orchestrator that's not kubernetes for example?
Easy, we can't because the LLMs know a lot about kubernetes but wouldn't know anything about a new orchestrator, so they'll always suggest k8s, and the button-pushers will just say "yes, do it, no mistakes". Maybe if Anthropic decides they need to create a new orchestrator, they would bias Claude heavily enough for it to actually get used, but that's about the only way I see.
Perhaps because the tools that we have already are already good enough.
"Why don't we have any new programming languages" or "Why don't we have any new web frameworks" or "Why don't we have any new operating systems" or "Why don't we have any new container orchestrators" might be the same kinds of questions as "why is the design for washing machines still basically the same as it was 50 years ago?" or "why are we still using English, where are all the new conlangs to replace it?" "why are we still using email/SMTP instead of inventing a better system" "why haven't we invented a new calendar?"
You're saying there's nothing left to invent. I think that explains a lot of the complacency around considering AI to be the last ever frontier for progress. I obviously don't agree. I've gone looking into "why don't we have better version control" and the answer is definitely not that we already have all we could want.
It might not count as innovation in the last four years because the groundwork was laid decades ago, but in the last four years Waymo evolved to the point where it can drive on the highways.
All it will lead to is yet more people that are out of a job. Right now at least a driving license (more so if it is a commercial license) is a source of income to many.
> Why can't we finally have a good container orchestrator that's not kubernetes for example?
What's the market demand? I'm confident there are plenty of alternatives being churned out today but nobody's looking or asking for any. If only because they settled on k8s, they have it on their CV, they have certifications, and switching is a huge investment and risk.
Right now to me it feels like the innovation is in using LLMs to (finally?) clean up existing code, find vulnerabilities, do maintenance, optimize, and if necessary rewrite.
It is progressing, yes, but it subsumed the productivity of humans.
Where before humans learned and built better tools, now you keep paying forever to get re-trained models. What makes it a regressive feedback loop is that the people who used to learn and push the frontier are now using AI to repackage others' work as their own. Eventually what will be left to train on but copies of copies of copies?
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.
I find this man's ostrich response to be quite different from my world view, but agree that it is fascinating to confront. Given that so many of us consume the world via tiny handheld screens and vote the way they do, I think it is definitely worth considering an artificial intelligence hedge. AI Maternalism would be a wildly unpopular counter proposition at the moment, but you have to admit humans aren't succeeding at governance right now either. Some of the parody AI movements are pretty amazing to behold: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DI2fSgssIW2/. I know, I know, but I had points to spare.
Technologists as a professional group are beyond weird. You usually expect rational critique (either positive or negative) from professionals, but the good technologists are supposed to just uncritically accept whatever supposed technological progress as an unalloyed good. Employer or Silicon Valley says it’s good, therefore think it is good. No, that’s a bit on the nose: Silicon Valley says it is good which means that it would be “good for my career”, therefore it is good. But are there any ill effects for society? Those are Luddite questions.[1]
But in this case Amish is not really an insult of course. I guess they are a hard-working people. Self-sufficient. And allow their young to take a sabbatical from the primitive life to see if it’s really something that they want to dedicate their life to.
On the other hand, of course there won’t be some Amish split. You can’t just pick and choose modernity. You can’t form a subculture of No AI. That’s why people are critical of AI; we live in a society.
[1] Being ahistorical and using Luddite as an insult also helps.
> Comparing people to Amish that dont want to use LLMs is wild.
What makes the comparison wild? The Amish are thoughtful and deliberate about what technologies they reject, adopt, and accept with constraints. Many of the people I know who have concerns about relying on LLMs are similarly thoughtful and deliberate.
"If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long."
I just looked it up and Thomas Pynchon remains alive.... how wonderful.
I'm not sure if terrorism is the right word (how can you do bad things to software?), but I am sure that sabotage on datacenters will become a thing. But that's not a direct response to AI, but one to building more datacenters, using power (and potable water, but I'm not convinced that's as big of a thing as people make it out to be compared to other industries / wastes), and corporate greed which does not improve the lives of the common people.
I read it as: faring well in a work/industry/employment situation where expectations for velocity and quality pivot on the fact that 99% of your peers use AI, and 90% of those use it to do poor quality work quickly.
Now your boss is surprised your email took more than 10s to produce, and wonders why you are concerned about what it contains. None of your teammates are.
It's interesting to think about this expanded view of religion and how it interacts with nondiscrimination laws. The guy's beliefs (at least in the quotes in the article) seem like a good combination of well reasoned and sensible and core faith-like beliefs, so I'm glad they're protected. At the same time, I can imagine plenty of beliefs that would make me not want to hire someone. I know this one didn't go to court, but I wonder what tests courts use to draw the lines. What deeply held beliefs am I allowed to say make someone an idiot or jerk I don't want to hire, and what deeply held beliefs am I allowed to hold and want the state to protect?
I've had the concern for years that AI users (or AI itself) will eventually consider non-AI users a pain, because humans will become inefficient in lots of workloads and management, sometimes causing things to come down to a screeching halt, relatively speaking.
We have to solidify laws protecting anti-AI-ers if that's their choice.
This happens today with all technology. AI is no different. If your coworker refuses to use a computer or the internet there are no laws protecting them. Nor should there be.
There's a limit, though. Not only are there mandatory breaks for truck drivers, but also a maximum number of working hours my boss is allowed to demand from me. And even within those limits my boss is not allowed to dispense cocaine during tight deadlines.
We do have limits for how much work a human is allowed to do and, based on the experience of Amazon workers, they are due for some tightening already. I'm not seeing a clear case for AI but I wouldn't discount it entirely either.
Exclusion from society, and the object of anger at "those darn Luddites".
You can't tell an Amish he can't use physical coins. Or that his buggy is too slow for the roads (not highways), etc.
Some of these issues came up with the Australian prisoner who was denied vegemite, and while Australia is different, there are similar questions involved because secular western societies are all moving in the same direction.
The fundamental issue is that historically only religious belief, that actually subscribed to a religion with a god, was considered sincere. But since then it’s become clear that many non religious people hold equally sincere ethical beliefs. The current standard being converged upon by courts, as mentioned in the article is:
> “It has to be a deeply held ethical commitment that’s analogous to a religious commitment,”
Because no one wants to go and change all the laws to replace religious belief with the above, wherever a court sees religious belief they can essentially sub in the above language.
But this has led to awful articles where media will often, after a ruling in favor of a secular belief which the courts will rule as a religious belief as a shorthand, announce that the secular belief itself is considered a religion.
This misunderstanding reached its apotheosis, perhaps, in the Alabama case mentioned in the article, where a federal judge fell for the semantic mislabeling and declared humanism to be a religion, which it isn’t.
However, that legal standard gives humanists a whole lot of newfound rights, so I don’t see anyone pushing back against it.
What are trying to say exactly? That only beliefs in a god or gods are really religion? But that any strongly held set of principles is given the same benefits by law as a real religion? What’s the point? If it is treated like a religion by people and by law, who cares if it involves believing in a god, or many, or none??
Apple ought to be made to ask their users to confirm (opt-in) whether they want their AI/Siri/Intelligence/<or whatever they decide at any given time> and everyone else should be provided with a slimmer OS and slimner OTA updates.
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.
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.
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.
There's nothing in the article to suggest that performance of his actual duties as an administrator have been called into question. The issue under contention, as the article frames it, is the University trying to dictate the details of how that work gets done.
There are some who would call that micro-management.
I don't think that projecting opinions that you don't think are reasonable upon someone who didn't actually say those things, or clinging tightly to the Goomba fallacy with phrases like "guys like the one in the article", will get you very far toward understanding what he actually said.
Which is self-defeating. If you don't make a good faith effort to understand what he said then you're leaving yourself in a poor position to credibly argue against it.
They're not talking to us, they're crafting a viral e/acc tweet. I admit I don't quite understand the point of doing that deep in an HN comment thread, but once you realize what's happening you see it a lot. Perhaps if you read too much viral ragebait it starts to be your default mode of communication.
So those goals and timelines should be reconsidered; If a civil engineering firm slapped up a bridge as quickly and cheaply as possible with no concern for quality, they would cease to exist. We have no standards for software quality, and therefore anything that accelerated the perceived output is enthusiastically adopted without consideration for any future consequences.
Weinberg’s Law --
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
Exactly. I would also argue that WE DON'T NEED more software, WE DON'T NEED more features, what US, humanity, needs is MORE RELIABLE software, with less bugs, that is stable.
Big tech want to tell us that AI is great because it can write code faster than what a human can, the problem is that code is shit, is full of bugs, and is not maintainable.
Reason why my company decided to stop using AI for code that gets delivered to customers, the customer find bugs, he is not happy, you have to use time to fix bugs (for free, because it's under warranty), so we waste time, and produce code that is not easy to evolve. And even if AI is faster to write code, developers are less motivated to work, so they will just waste time on the internet while being focused on the task, and thus again, there is really no save of money.
To me all of this doesn't make sense, we want to use AI to make the work instead of US, but even if we achieve in that the result of it gives benefits only to an handful of people that are already too much rich, while the world gets polluted with all the CO2 that is produced by AI tokens, people looses jobs and gets poorer. This idea to me needs to be opposed.
Imagine a civil engineer that refuses to use a computer of any kind for his work. How much do you trust scribbled long division?
Edit: what about a civil engineer that refuses to use steel. Or Arabic numerals. Or a construction worker that refuses to use power equipment. A delivery man who swears off wheels.
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 one if it turns out that 'non-meek' behaviors result in unsustainable societies.
The Amish are an exception, one of the rare ones (along with the handful of protected, isolated tribes). The rule is that a technologically inferior group will get rolled over by a technologically superior one for the benefit of the latter.
> Until the goals given him are unachievable, in the given timelines, by human thinking and reasoning alone.
Would that not be tantamount to constructive dismissal? Consider: you may have your prayer times during the day, but they will be counted against you in performance evaluations.
> but they will be counted against you in performance evaluations.
That was my initial thought: he may get his exemption from use, but TFA doesn’t indicate that he will be evaluated differently during performance review.
To go one step further, would such allowances have to be accompanied by different performance standards, like oral exams for students with dyslexia also have increased time limits?
Or would the allowances be granted for the duration of employment, the latter being shortened due to performance problems?
Exactly. The person or people above him who wanted AI to be used against his will will ultimately achieve their goals---no matter what his beliefs are. At the end of the day, his views of humanism are futile against the force of those in favor of AI acceptance.
Lots of strawmanning going on with comments about where the line gets drawn and talking about driving stick, heating his home, etc.
If you read the article, you will see that the concern is with his direct actions concerning ethics and moral, especially with interactions with others (as an admin).
There is plenty to unpack with this as it is a new concept. I'm hoping we can have a real discussion about this. For example, will this religious exemption become moot if productivity is sufficiently higher with AI giving employers an easy out? If that does happen, do we think we'll see adverse effects such as baked in biases in a hidden process?
One thing I am concerned with with AI is that everything will follow Google and Meta when it comes to things like appeals and fair treatment. There area ton of stories about people getting banned/deleted with no recourse and no insight into why. I can see this same sort of totalitarian activity spreading to other aspects of life, like finance, medical billing, etc.
> For example, will this religious exemption become moot if productivity is sufficiently higher with AI giving employers an easy out?
For this person’s job at an academic institution, I doubt it. This specific case feels very symbolic from start to finish: His management probably mandated AI use because they felt the need to do something about AI, and he used this as a perfect opportunity to stage a protest against AI. Knowing what I know about academic institutions, I suspect AI would have very little impact on productivity.
Many jobs might be the same: AI’s productivity impact can be large on a small set of tasks, but if those tasks were only 10% of someone’s hours at work then a couple people refusing AI will not make a difference to the whole department.
Workloads also flow to people who are good at that work, so the work that benefits from AI would be distributed to the AI users and more of the non-AI work would go to the few people who don’t use AI. It can be self-balancing when the number of refusals is small.
There are jobs where it’s not going to work out, though. If most of someone’s job is accelerated a lot by AI and they refuse to use that accelerator, it’s going to be really hard to avoid failing behind.
Companies do not have to retain employees who need accommodations that are not reasonably compatible with the work. AI is a hot topic and everyone has strong feelings about it, so it can help to think back to other technology leaps and consider what it would be like if your coworkers refused to use them.
What if you had a coworker who refused to use email and would only communicate on the phone? It could technically be done, but they would fall so far behind and produce enough hardship for their coworkers that it wouldn’t be a reasonable request for most office jobs. The laws do not force companies to accommodate requests that are unreasonable for the work.
I can already think of jobs where refusing to use any AI tools would put someone at so much of a disadvantage that it couldn’t be justified. That set of jobs is small today, but it’s growing.
> His management probably mandated AI use because they felt the need to do something about AI, and he used this as a perfect opportunity to _stage a protest against AI._
I think you're missing the point. This isn't a protest, this is someone exercising their constitutional rights. It's a matter of people being able to freely choose how they may live within the state and society's constraints. Our bosses shouldn't be able to so easily tell us to violate our own morals for the company's bottom line.
Where is the limit of human thinking? This late 2025 - till now models give to some real philosophical questions that are not thought experiments anymore, imagining the matrix or the 1984 depiction was a cool thing to imagine, but feeling your humanity taken away from you in the present is heartbreaking.
> “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?
Can we please just look at LLMs like what they are and not some fantastical threat?
The fearmongering has cooked a lot of people's understanding of this stuff (and I wouldn't place the blame on them given the news they're likely consuming about AI).
"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes" is apt here. We don't need to return to mud huts and smoke signals because we can approximate intelligence.
I didn't get the impression that the man here was looking at LLMs as some fantastical threat. It seems like his concern was about offloading his thinking and decision making to AI, which seems pretty non-fantastical.
Can't that be done without a performative "religious exemption"? You don't need that to say "yeah, I'm not using this stuff." I imagine in practice all this will accomplish is pissing people off who are already stressed about AI.
I think I understand what you mean, but to me the exemption doesn't seem performative. It seems like the equivalent of him talking to his employer and having them agree to not force him to use tech he is concerned about, he just used a particular legal avenue to justify it as part of that discussion. It may be performative in the sense that it also got attention (e.g., in the form of this article), but in this case even that part of it seems like it could be a useful precedent for others who may be considering a similar route.
Then again, maybe even seeing it as _slightly_ performative, potentially, is overly pessimistic. It may seem performative simply because it's novel, but if he legitimately considers this part of his religious beliefs and his employer (seemingly) agrees, what is performative about exercising his rights like many other people of other religions do?
Was he being forced or compelled to offload his thinking to a machine?
I probably don’t share his sentiments, but that’s no different from being compelled to think in certain mandated ways (offloading being just a particular case of it), which is certainly a bad idea. If that was the case, I find it weird that he used a religious exemption mechanism, but glad he can act and think freely, the way he desires.
However, he may not have a choice of tool use or peers, and be compelled to send work to, or process results done by a non-human system, if that’s a part of his organization system (external to him with regards to duties and responsibilities). To grant him an exemption would be to discriminate upon others, no different how he can’t refuse to work with, say, a Satanist. Or a cyborg transhumanist. If that’s the case and he just refuses to feed his thinking (his part of the job) to an AI (not his part of the job), then that’s him being a zealot pushing his religious views on others. In such a case, I can quite clearly see why he went for a religious exemption, huh.
His own part of the job, his responsibilities - yes, of course he can’t be compelled on how he does it. Anything outside of that - nope, his religious beliefs end there, not his thinking - not for him to say how to do it, or refuse to interact.
I remember when in Iain M. Banks Culture Novels (I think it was _Consider Phlebas_), the heroine and its drone talk about the "Humanist" movement of a planet they visit incognito as a extremist anti-machine movement... (It is just in passing, the situation in the Culture novels is quite different from the Dune universe).
Why not? Religious freedoms are about deeply held beliefs. It's not like a judge will evaluate the bible or quran to check if something is or isn't a religious freedom based on what someone's deity of choice supposedly stated.
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.
>Federal courts have ruled that humanism qualifies as a religion. As a result, she said, humanists have the same rights as other faith groups under federal law.
Hmmm, sounds a bit ripe for exploitation, no?
>In his interview with RNS, Durman said that being a humanist means being present and paying attention to others. Using AI conflicts with that.
Does this mean I can submit complaints against the companies I work for when I'm being told to respond via email or Slack? This seems pretty far removed from my humanist perspective up being present and paying attention to others, especially when you consider the various automations and abstractions which go into that kind of communication.
Like, I know it's obtuse, but I really don't see a logical issue with someone being a humanist and sincerely believing that communicating in anyway which isn't face-to-face goes against their beliefs. And that's just one example.
>“Substituting automated machine processing for human presence, authentic listening, and personal responsibility in my work directly conflicts with my obligation to uphold human dignity and flourishing as primary,” he wrote in a letter to the University of Kentucky’s Office of Equal Opportunity.
I'm sure this guy is being sincere and somewhat reasonable with his logic, but I know people who would feel justified in pushing this way past AI if they felt it was likely to get them anywhere. Like, how can you not use the same exact reasoning to push against using other forms of modern technology?
>The letter cited Durman’s personal beliefs as well as the 2003 version of the Humanist Manifesto, which details humanist principles and beliefs. Those beliefs include the importance of freedom of conscience and human flourishing.
Hell, at what point is being forced to work in order to survive in completely opposition to this belief system? When can I start saying that my employer's expectation that I'm in the office every day is in opposition to "human flourishing"?
>Durman told RNS his work involves helping researchers at the university with grant applications and that he can do the work without the help of AI. And not using AI won’t affect his co-workers, he said.
We'll see about that. Maybe, right now, this is the case. But even moderate expectation for AI usage in the future makes this suspect. When everyone is getting 90% of their work done completely autonomously through their agents, but they're still waiting on you to respond to an email from a day ago, then will this still be the case?
>For Durman, the accommodation process was much simpler. Durman sent the letter, and then he and Huiskens met with officials at the university. “It was a very collegial meeting, and they found that there was no undue burden to David’s department,” Huiskens said. “They granted the accommodation promptly.”
Well I'm unironically happy that they were able to work this out easily. But I really doubt this will be smooth sailing indefinitely, especially as other roles which are more affected by AI end up being "targeted" in the same ways.
As a software engineer, I dread the thought of working with co-workers who just refuse to use AI based on arbitrary principals. It's one thing for them to reason that they work better without AI; it's another thing to just say that you don't agree with using the technology and everyone needs to accommodate you.
Well I'm sure I haven't said anything that everyone else hasn't immediately thought/posted, but I'm genuinely curious about these things. It seems rather important that everyone is on the same page with regards to what their rights are with respect to choosing to not use a technology like this.
> “It has to be a deeply held ethical commitment that’s analogous to a religious commitment,” he said. “That’s a fact question that presumably the employer will investigate.”
I’m curious if the opposite would work:
“As a transhumanist my religion compels me to share everything with my machines, otherwise they can’t ensure my mind uploading is up to date “
I see no reason transhumanism is any less of a religion than humanism.
> I see no reason transhumanism is any less of a religion than humanism.
TBH I agree. Religious exemptions at large only exist for the big name religions but the arguments pushed often make claims about it being a moral/ethical precedent and its just not true. I think its a matter of PR and politics if you're able to get an exemption kind of same game as a lot of things.
We see this with people who believe it is a religious requirement to share their faith at work, even when their co-workers say they don't want to hear it.
We see this with people who say their religious belief says they don't take orders from a women, even if that woman is their boss.
If your transhumanist religion compels you to share PII with your machines in a way which breaks the law, then there's likely an undue burden.
If it means you need access to a power plug during lunch so your devices can scan your brain for 10 minutes - almost certainly not an undue burden.
> If your transhumanist religion compels you to share PII with your machines in a way which breaks the law, then there's likely an undue burden.
Some modern recording laws are not made with a machine component in mind, even if that machine is a local first-party system and does not actually store anything long-term or propagate information any further. A cyborg-identifying person with a wearable speech processor may rightfully argue such laws are unfairly preventing their functioning, as they’re lacking an important distinction.
It is very weird that University of Kentucky is asking research administrators to incorporate AI in its workflow. It’s one thing for a Silicon Valley startup to ask SWE to use AI to maximize speed of development, its another thing entirely for a University insulated from competition, with a small admin staff, asking them to use AI for what exactly?
How much additional productivity do they think admin staff can crank out, and does that even matter. Does a 100X more productive research administrator mean the University will not be “left behind”, in this new world. I think we are officially reaching mass hysteria phases of the AI revolution.
Even if this was true, it is very weird. When was the last time, institutions and bosses ask their employees to use a specific tool? It’s more often that employees fall in love with a tool and ask institutions to pay for it, here’s it’s the exact opposite
We were asked to migrate from Zoom to Teams recently. We have to use git and GitHub. Recently, there's a mandate to migrate from Jenkins to GitHub Actions. We have to use Windows or Mac, no Linux. We have to have the corporate VPN and antivirus running. And so on, and so on.
Modernity has always been about abstraction and specialisation. If he's so humanist, he must also want to make his own food and his own car because after all, you are offloading your thinking to the underlying companies.
Where's the irony? Everything the article reports about Durman's opinions would seem to suggest that millions of humans mutually supporting each other is exactly the kind of thing that he wants to see happening.
“Expertise of millions of human agents” …in what? Understanding the universe that’s around us? In the cosmic sense, we humans have not done anything at all, aside from trying to understand it and “chimping out” from time to time.
It’s just that our human-centric bias is showing. We are not the main characters of this universe. Not by a long shot. Heck, in the planetary sense, we feel like earth belongs to us, but chances are we will not be in the top 1,000,0000th of its inhabitants as species by the amount of time spent living on it when life inevitably ceases to exist on it at some point in the future.
Every A.I. related post here has someone saying "I for one see no difference between a human being and an A.I." but this may be the first time I've seen this cliche extended to "How bizarre to meet a human being that thinks humans are not identical to A.I."
That doesn’t seem ironic at all. Irony is merely the condition where appearance and reality differ. In this case, if he values his own thinking he presumably values the thinking of other persons.
You actually cannot. There are standards to meet to qualify as a true religious exemption. There have been many court cases where people tried to claim religious beliefs when convenient for them, which were denied because they couldn’t meet the threshold for being a real religious belief.
There are also limitations on what accommodations can be requested. If you took a job mowing lawns and then had a religious belief against harming living plants, you wouldn’t collect paychecks while you watched your coworkers mow lawns. They would have to find other work for you if they could, like raking leaves or lawnmower maintenance. If they didn’t have that work, then you wouldn’t have a job.
The raking leaves example was to make a point. For a programming job you could be exempted from using AI tools to do the work, but you would still have to do the work at a reasonable standard.
> 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.
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.
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.
"... there are circumstances where a tight-fitting respirator must be worn, such as when a worker is exposed to an atmosphere that is immediately dangerous to life or health (IDLH), defined as "...an atmosphere that poses an immediate threat to life, would cause irreversible adverse health effects, or would impair an individual's ability to escape from a dangerous atmosphere." 29 CFR 1910.134(b). In these situations, a tight-fitting pressure demand respirator is required. Wearing a respirator that is less protective could pose a grave danger not only to the worker who is wearing it, but also to other workers who might be called on to rescue him from the IDLH atmosphere. Preventing these unnecessary risks is a compelling governmental interest that justifies OSHA's decision not to provide a religious exemption from the respirator standard, especially as there is no less restrictive way to provide this protection."
Which is funny because people who actually work with this tech know well that facial hair is no obstacle to rigorously functional respirator use. This is more of a cultural tradition such as how genital mutilation of infant boys is necessary for health when it really took off as a way of adding value to birth support service invoices.
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.
Just chiming in: I upvoted both the post you replied to and the post it was replying to. All of yours got the thumbs down. No one appointed you the order police and this entire train was net-negative.
"[...] 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.
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.
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.
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 kind of automation takes the execution away from you, not the decision, and even that execution only concerns you. You wanted to shift into a higher gear, the car's computer does it for you. The result is what you wanted. A fully autonomous car that decides everything for you would be a better example.
If you let an AI grade an exam then a big part of what comes next is a decision that you didn't take or validate. You didn't remove yourself just from the execution, you removed yourself from the responsibility and cognitive effort to take the decision, and from the accountability for that decision.
If you can simplify and call every button press "just the computer doing things", then someone else can exaggerate and say a fully autonomous drone hunting humans is the same, business as usual, computers doing things.
AI that pretends to be a human mind, or takes the place of a human mind is an abomination. [what does that mean? that's the whole ballgame. defining what this means]
AI as a tool can do impressive things.
AI usage metrics by employers is ... an interesting test case.
The revenge effects of technologies are well known: email was great! It was faster and much cheaper than mailing letters. But it gave rise to spam and many types of fraud. The mobile phone is awesome. A powerful computer in your pocket. But now people, including teenagers, spend 12-16 hours each day staring into their mobile phones, doomscrolling towards Babylon. In 2006 people memorized dozens of phone numbers. Today? Maybe you remember 1-2 numbers.
What will be the revenge effects of LLMs and diffusion models? I sense that the revenge effects from these technologies will be much more substantial.
This is very interesting. As someone who thinks AI is an amazing tool, I am very well interested in seeing how will people refusing to use AI fare both in professional settings and day-to-day life.
A new Amish-like lifestyle may be developing before our eyes in real-time and that's very interesting to follow and observe (from a distance).
One thing I've seen with AI is AI as used by software developers is quickly diverging from AI that's used by knowledge workers.
Knowledge workers use it primarily to "augment" their work, answer questions with AI, get it to create documents, etc. But it's usually 1 individual to 1-2 conversation threads.
Meanwhile in software development were running fleets of agents. At work we have it setup where firing off one agent request will eventually lead to like 10-20 AI calls at different parts of the process.
I make this distinctions because it changes how each group thinks about AI. For software devs it just feels like "moving up the stack". Yeah you're not writing code anymore but there is still plenty of work to do and problems to solve within your "software factory". Contrast that with knowledge workers that feel like the AI is making all of their decisions for them.
I almost think of this as a factory worker versus an artisan. The software devs are "factory workers" where we used to be on the floor but now we're managing the machines that took over the work. There are still tons of interesting problems at that stage and you still feel like you have worth. Contrast that with a knowledge worker that's more of an artisan in this analogy. For them they aren't running a factory but instead watching a robot do the work they used to do while they sit idle and watch it.
"Contrast that with a knowledge worker that's more of an artisan in this analogy. For them they aren't running a factory but instead watching a robot do the work they used to do while they sit idle and watch it".
I think your general thesis about how AI is used of agents vs. the general chat interface is true, but not the rest.
Your knowledge worker example is where people fail when using AI, and it is usually very obvious.
Knowledge workers who know what they're doing recognized very quickly that AI often goes down very bad rabbit holes, often cites incorrect sources, makes up sources, or will use a random Facebook source or Reddit post as an authority on some topic. In legal circles you have to fight it to understand what venue(s) apply and to get it to stick to the right ones, in medical research it will sometimes pull in crackpot papers from left field and intermix them with well defined research.
People in the knowledge realm caught on very quickly that you have to use AI iteratively and constantly back check what you get and correct it. Let it run on its own and it will give you a legal theory based on some weird case in Kentucky that has no bearing to your issue with a court in Vermont.
This is not that much different in programming, it just takes longer to find out.
Using AI is like using adaptive cruise control: you're still in charge of where the vehicle will ultimately end up and if you decide to go take a nap you will wake up in the hospital or end up in the morgue.
It's true though that the 'time between interventions' is lengthening steadily.
>This is not that much different in programming, it just takes longer to find out.
The primary difference is that it's much easier for the AI to figure out itself if it's wrong on the programming side. Knowledge workers don't have automated testing for example.
The end result is the knowledge worker needs to be more heavily involved in the process and be more mindful of mistakes which makes it a worse experience for the user and generally less productive than it is for programmers.
That's true. And: as long as you don't hit production mistakes are cheap and quick to fix. Not so in many other fields.
The major difference is that people routinely ship shoddy, broken products in the world of software with few consequences, beyond needing to patch it later. Try the same thing with a court filing and you’re out on your ass.
We're still early in AI.
All of this will sort itself out and eventually bio, legal, software will all just work.
Don't hold onto any single assumption about the world. Things are going to be weird.
I don't personally know of any software engineers using AI as "fleets of agents" in a "factory." Sounds like a nightmare.
Every PR now has auto reviews. That's like at least 3-5+ agents depending on the repo.
I think you are onto something. I think most agents I have up is two and even that I am not super comfortable not carefully managing. Otoh, buddy has agents galore running his network and everything giving him updates in near real time. I just.. don't have that much .. I want to say faith, but that suggests unshakeable religious belief.. confidence. I don't have that kind of confidence. There is too much stuff connected now ( taxes, projects, work, fun ). I am slowly starting to separate everything even that takes some careful planning.
AI is not an abstraction, so any programmer who thinks they’re “moving up the stack” is fundamentally mistaken.
Language is a tool for abstraction, and AI is just an imperfect tool for working with language.
In the sense that "down the stack" is well-captured by existing language, AI is absolutely moving programmers up the stack. I can describe my goals using high-level abstractions, and the low-level implementation is somewhat constrained by that.
How well constrained it is depends on how well I described the problem and the quality of the model - much like how good human-written code is depends on how clearly the authors were thinking when they designed the structure.
AI is an abstraction in the same way throwing a task to a junior engineer is
I think you mean "shouldn't be", because I see many using as if it is.
That's because current AI models are incapable of doing knowledge workers' jobs. At least for me as an attorney, Harvey is only actually useful when it comes to helping me sort through large amounts of data. Even then, I can't trust its judgment (it has shown to be very poor) so it's only so useful
The centaur / reverse-centaur is another interesting way to describe this split.
I use the AI in the "knowledge worker" way you described. However I still feel it's augmenting my work, because I don't ask or expect it to make decisions for me. I use it to gather sources, to criticize my ideas, to generate summaries targeted to people expectations, and so on. Yes of course it's gonna influence my work with their own biases, but I don't think it is that important - my own biases are otherwise still there...
> A new Amish-like lifestyle may be developing before our eyes in real-time and that's very interesting to follow and observe (from a distance).
I’m just old enough to remember some older adults in my life who refused to use email. They would only talk to coworkers in person or on the phone.
It did not work out very well, unless they could afford to retire at that point. When your career evolves, the only way to keep participating is to evolve with it.
I knew a guy early in my career who has a secretary (for starters!) who printed out his email and put them on his desk every morning with the rest of the mail. He would then dictate his response to her and she would type it in. It was pure ego. Nothing else.
Some in that era could not type, at all.
And I've read somewhere that quite a fraction of young people nowadays can't type (effectively) on a physical keyboard - no wonder, their main interaction with computing being via phones and tablets. Could be that typing won't be useful/practiced anymore (like already cursive writing in some parts of the world).
Yes, and because typists and secretaries were predominately women, it was not as uncommon as one might imagine for male executives to eschew personal computers based on their perception of gender roles.
I like to call it “keyboard cooties.”
These things have a self-reinforcing feedback loop -- consider also for example, men learning to use "power tools" but not a sewing machine.
Isn't this still what Donald Trump does?
Yes, he doesn't really know how to use a computer. He was born in the 1940s, computer skills are not super common for people from that generation. He was already in his mid-50s when computers started to become common in the workplace.
It hasn't exactly worked out well for email, either...
Why?
According to the AI boosters, my career (and pretty much everyone else's) is already over anyway.
I am an AI booster, and this is incorrect. Your career will change, and if you change with it, it'll thrive.
What unique selling point do individuals operating AI still have if it's AI doing the heavy lifting and specialized work? I mean I don't believe that people in general will need to work less (no automation has done that), but I'm convinced many people will need to find new employment at lower wages in a society where cost of living only increases.
I can't afford a pay cut, and AI isn't making my job worth more.
" will need to find new employment at lower wages "
Why at lower wages? Most automation has led to people transitioning to higher wages. Utility works get paid 10x more than lamplighters. Why would that change here? Your job will have a bigger impact, affect more people, and you'll be doing more with less.
I am not saying all employers will immediately start paying people more, but economically it doesn't make sense that pay will go down.
Recent news from China about how better AI capabilities changed what Chinese specialists can earn with microdramas are not confirming this point. Some historical analogies to reassure people things will turn out nice in the end are nice but are not very convincing if you have so many more recent counterexamples with the gig economy and the huge inflation that was not a problem in the early 20th century.
The economy now is very different, no gold or silver standard, less isolation and more globalised product chains and processes, and 7-times as many people.
There is a good chance that a large enough number of people will suffer from this transformation, and they will have to fight with whatever they have, because if they don't, they will risk being left on the roadside and not getting any raise.
People having some direction over how jobs are automated should keep that in mind, otherwise it will be too late to convince the masses of people fearing automation that it is their fault not seeing the positive angles of automation.
To me this just reads like how I imagine people and the Luddites thought about automated looms. At first they were excited, thinking about the cheap and abundant cloth they put in plenty of work to make automated looms work flawlessly, until they start getting replaced. But they made excuses that they always need someone who knows more than "put cloth on spool, press button" to run these factories and that skilled people will always be needed. But slowly and surely the factory went towards quantity and not quality, and since quantity was done regardless why pay for the skilled and knowledgeable workers? And soon nobody made good money making cloth except the factory owner, the cloth was shit, and the people who built it all left with nothing but memories of once being valuable.
>>people who built it all left with nothing but memories of once being valuable.
But, the story doesn't end there does it? Most loom workers left their jobs and became factory workers (part of the same technology revolution) and critically: made MORE money. They were wealthier. And the loom machine operators left had a better job. There are very good sources for this, not just vibes [1].
I don't deny that the transition process is traumatic, and there is much we should be doing this time around to assuage the process. But all the evidence points to a general rise in pay, material conditions and standard of living.
[1]: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300205251/libertys-dawn/
And where do you propose the 20-25% or so of the soon-to-be-jobless will go next?
> Most automation has led to people transitioning to higher wages.
No, what you mean to say is that automation has eventually (decades later) led to higher purchasing power in the system as a whole. The outlook for people that were directly automated away was pretty bleak, actually. The hundreds of thousands of lamplighters did not largely become the thousands of electricians that were needed in this new industry.
This tracks for all industries. Automation literally means far fewer people will be employed to do the same job (otherwise what's the point of it?). That dumps these workers out at the low end of the general job market, where they have to compete with an increasing number of people. Because of the desperation to get any job, the wages fall. It's only decades later that societies settled into a new place and created enough brand new jobs to make up the shortfall, or applied regulation to reign in the crazy power imbalance. That's the stuff you miss out on if you only look at statistics that span centuries and treat the population as one homogeneous mass. The people who are directly targeted by automation are very likely to have their lives messed up for a very long time.
That’s only one analogy. What about artisanal cobblers vs Southeast Asia Nike sweatshop workers?
Well, for example, a metric ass-ton of shoes and shoe components are made in Bosnia. But hardly anyone still makes the traditional opanci in the traditional way; there's one guy left in the whole Hercegovina that does. And they are required for the national costume, so they are still important. But the economics just don't work out.
>>What about artisanal cobblers vs Southeast Asia Nike sweatshop workers?
No technology involved? Other than I guess tangentially, containerized shipping. I don't see how that analogy applies here at all, every AI workflow I've seen has been either:
a) Totally new thing that was never done before that is possible now and is therefore creating a new class of work
b) Worst case scenario: a whole spate of jobs being consolidated under one person, but its still a human in the end.
So everything I'm seeing is pointing to this being a lamplighter/utility worker situation.
>Most automation has led to people transitioning to higher wages.
Gonna need a citation for this.
Easy. Name one profession within the North American context that makes less money (inflation adjusted) now than say a farmer, loom weaver or laborer of yore.
A grub hub delivery man is wealthier today than a farmer 100 years ago and that's purely because of two reasons: Technology and Unions :)
This argument only works if you have a career (and lifespan) that spans 100+ years. I'd venture a guess that 0% of Grubhub delivery drivers were farmers a hundred years ago.
Have you talked to a delivery driver in most large cities? Most of them come from countries where they would be a farmer or day laborer.
This ball is going through even your ever-moving goal posts. My statement never claimed people's careers would stay the same and they'd just make more money.
And you are basing this on what, exactly?
AI boosting seems to be very close to pulling shit out of ass.
Sometimes career tracks cease to exist…typists, secretaries, and in real time right now translators.
The job is to automate the enterprise, keep things safe and reliable, and make money for the company.
It was never about software. That was just the means.
Even in the software era, fads developed and tech stacks changed frequently. Now it's just moving a hundred times faster.
You need smart systems thinkers to do this. That's the role. Be smart in managing processes and complexity.
I'm not going to give coding interviews anymore, but I am going to give architecture, systems design, and SRE interviews. People still need to know how not to fuck up a database and how to design scalable and resilient systems.
Very much agree with most of this.
The number of people who never seem to have understood what software and IT is in most companies is eye opening to me. Your job was never really to "write code" - you were always automating things.
That the field got somewhat stuck for a couple decades seems to have made many people forget this.
The vast majority of programmers who started in the 80's and 90's are basically directly responsible for massive waves of job losses in certain categories. Lots of cases of entire departments of secretarial level paper-pushing work being replaced with a small team of programmers. Same will happen with AI tooling. The difference is programmers are no longer the "winning" party here.
Computers and software in the end are the most configurable and complex automation system society has ever created. They are simply a continuation of industrial automation, and AI is a continuation upon that.
I think it's helpful seeing AI in this context, at least in as much as it pertains to enterprise and industry.
I don't like that comparison. Email was an improvement to snail mail, and the people who you claim refused to use it just didn't understand it and didn't want to understand it.
Lots of people, myself included, understand llms and can and do use them at work because we have to, but we might choose to not use them outside of work because they rot our brains, are unethical, funnel even more money into the hands of a few billionaires (selling a service trained on stolen property) and haven't actually been proven to make the world better. Unlike email!
AI is new but this phenomenon isn't. Every new wave of tech has sizable opposition.
People refused phone calls, refused to watch TV, refused to buy computers, refused to move their workflows to software, refused emails or browing the web, refused online shopping, refused smartphones, refused social media.
And there's nothing wrong with any of this. Ultimately everyone decides which stage of technology they are comfortable with. Everything until then is comfortable and convenient, and everything newer is corrupting society and rotting our brains.
I came of age with the personal PC revolution and developed my career during the internet revolution, and was well into my career when the mobile computing smartphone revolution occurred. I did not see or feel even a fraction of the amount of social dread with those technologies that I see with AI, and I think that's justified given the circumstances.
Saying that this revolution is another one of those is true in a general sense, but misleading in the specific sense. Just as saying that adding 1c heat to some body of water is "more of the same" can be true in a general sense, but misleading when the water's basis temperature is 99.5c.
That is to say, periodic or gradual change induces large changes at inflection points.
It feels similar to the progression from post-WW2 technological utopianism that arose with the adoption and deployment of massive advancements in materials and mechanical, and electrical technology, to the cold-war dread of nuclear and ballistic technology.
I think the 90s saw the end of the cold war which lifted a bunch of that dread. The optimism of those days has been worn down over time.
What I remember back then is at least the pretense being sold that the technology would improve people's lives by giving them more leisure and enjoyment. That the productivity gains would be reflected in some improvement in quality of life. I think the main difference now is that this expectation has been lost by most people.
I have the feeling this expectation loss is what triggered the current riots in Western Europe. I'm not talking about the platforms and actors which might be fanning and fueling them, but the trigger which I have seen at work at my kids or nephews - they don't see much hope they can rely on some income, on getting their own house, on feeding their own children. Of course they are young and easier influenced, and I might be biased myself, but I really believe they have less chances than what I had at their age. I won't tell them that though.
The closest biological fear, might be Planet of the Apes.
Mike Judge has shown that this fear is even closer to home than that.
I’m unaware of other technological revolutions where the largest group of opposition was among young people[0]. Was there a great youth revolt against the telephone, the television, and the computer? I don’t recall anything of the sort.
[0] https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/gen-z-turning-a...
From conversations with my young kids the problem they have is with the billionaires. They are fine with the technology they just don’t trust the billionaires and who can blame them.
I don't think the underlying numbers support the thesis. My understanding (from e.g. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/how-opinions...) is that the age skew is not that high and largely driven by how much more likely young people are to be familiar with the technology at all.
> People refused phone calls, refused to watch TV, refused to buy computers, refused to move their workflows to software, refused emails or browing the web, refused online shopping, refused smartphones, refused social media.
You really think this is an apt comparison? I don't think the creators of any of those technologies were warning society that their own creations might wipe out humanity.
> I don't think the creators of any of those technologies were warning society that their own creations might wipe out humanity.
They are only doing this now IMO so that they can be the ones writing the regulations to keep us all "safe", just like we need identity verification to "save the children". They want to keep competition at bay so they can have a $2T IPO, and unregulated, "unsafe", Chinese, open-weight, and local AI threatens that IPO.
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.
I'd be happy to do a 1999 Amish life style + LED TVs that don't spy on you.
I will be happy to put up with CRT screens if that's what it takes.
My second monitor is a 11" beige VGA LCD. I'm ready for the regression.
I want modern medicine, renewable energy, etc. the world keeps getting better.
Software is an employment rather than a profession. That distinction is important. Here is a definition of profession:
Traditional professions share essential characteristics. They provide a vital service to society, requiring expertise and skill developed through years of training, education, and experience. Professions establish standards of practice and certify that their members are qualified to serve the needs of society.
--US Army, ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession
Software does not have explicit standards of practice or a required body of certifications for its practitioners. Software, as an employment, is whatever an employer wants or is willing to accept at any given moment.
What do you find important about this distinction? To me it's a description of the normative relationship between practitioners and broader society but I don't really see the significance you do.
Hillel Wayne wrote a really excellent well researched article about software engineering compared to other forms of engineering a few years ago. It necessarily goes into a lot of this stuff but what emerges is that these definitions are regulatory and historical debris.
You don't need medical board or a bar to certify or constrain professional behavior and those organizations may not constrain as much as you assume anyway. The reasons we do have those institutions is as much a matter of historical accident as any modern need for it, and the reasons we don't have it for other high impact fields is pretty much an accident too.
And in a lot of the world software engineering does have professional certification and standards of practice. They still ship adware and racist loan denial algorithms too.
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/
If you have ever worked in almost any other industry your first question quickly answers itself. If you have never worked in an industry principally governed by ethical standards it would be challenging for me to describe it to you. I cannot give you what your perspective has never before imagined.
I'm not sure how you can know what I've experienced or imagined. But I appreciate your ownership of the communication failure here.
I sure as hell don’t want a doctor who hasn’t gone through any kind of certification and approval process.
for me it would depend on a situation (I definitely would not want to be in a situation where this would be needed)
Coding interviews don't matter anymore.
Every part of your existing job is transforming before your eyes.
If you cling to definitions and static roles, you're going to have a bad time.
I just finished several months of interviewing and think that you must be projecting a bit. Every one of them included a coding interview with no AI use allowed.
OpenAI and Anthropic still do coding interviews, though?
This makes sense, though. They have to be exceptionally confident in the performance of the product and work to continually improve its quality and efficiency. Many other companies can get by more just as consumers of it, but the makers of the product need some of the best coding skills available.
They keep claiming their agents are better than any programmer.
Sounds like the software execs who create addictive software but make sure their own kids don’t have a phone.
If they do, they're behind the curve. They don't matter anymore.
Systems design, architecture, database fundamentals, a bit of SRE. That matters. Not coding and syntax and toy problem solving with data structures and algorithms.
I think this is something where definitions and static roles might serve as a useful reference point. Is it really the case that the trillion-dollar frontier AI labs are behind the curve, and only some other group of people knows how to really leverage AI? It's not impossible - Nvidia employees aren't the best in the world at using their chips - but the hypothesis practically demands some analysis of who these clever curve-setters are and why we're hearing so much less about them than about Anthropic.
My own experience is that coding, syntax, and some kinds of toy problem solving are important skills to use AI coding tools most effectively. I routinely get PRs these days whose descriptions seem plausible but are clearly wrong from a glance at the code, and I've had times when I'm unable to communicate to someone why a PR is wrong because they're not able to form a sufficiently detailed mental model of what it's doing.
The IEEE has made some efforts to turn software engineering from an occupation into a profession — on par with civil engineering, architecture, law, medicine, military science, etc. A true profession requires a recognized body of knowledge, formal qualification criteria, and a code of ethics. So far most working software developers haven't shown much interest in this, nor is there much demand from employers or government authorities. I don't think we need to professionalize software engineering in the general case but it is an option for those who want it.
https://www.computer.org/education/bodies-of-knowledge/softw...
> US Army, ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession
I'm not going to let the army tell me what my job is.
Well yes, but dont call it a profession then.
And lets be pirates and hackers instead.
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.
>> Even bus drivers are held to higher standards of practice than software developers.
Because while there are some software developers that might be in a place to cause people physical harm, ALL bus drivers are ALWAYS in a position to cause great and immediate harm to others on the road.
Determining proximity to harm is the excuse people are looking for to justify allowed malicious intent.
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.
Kind of true.
There are certainly things where you need to have an officially licensed engineer actually stamp the plans. That doesn't mean everything about the plans was done by someone who holds that stamp, just that they were reviewed and signed off by the person holding the license. Lots of people may work on those plans. They're still doing engineering work. And that's just for the kinds of things which actually require a licensed "engineer".
There's still tons of jobs which is often still called "engineering" which often don't involve anyone who has a stamp. Few electrical engineers, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, or lots of others actually have any kind of engineering license. They still get degrees in things like "Bachelor of Science of Electrical Engineering" or "Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering". Their job roles usually have "engineer" in it. And yet it seems like the job people only really criticize as "you're not an engineer, engineers are licensed" is SWE.
> "you're not an engineer, engineers are licensed"
I always come back with "you're not an engineer, engineers wear stripey hats"
Think about it like this: What makes software any more or less of a profession than working at your favorite burger joint in terms of industry wide criteria?
"What makes software any more or less of a profession than working at your favorite burger joint in terms of industry wide criteria?"
Many states require you to pass a test and get a license/certification before working in fast food.
That is not a requirement in the SWE world.
The sheer lack of accreditation and standards-enforcing body is what makes sofware engineering a non-profession.
Those percentage of SWE working on critical infrastructure should be licensed and legally liable, yes. You shouldn't need a license to build a CRUD app, just like nobody needs a license to build a treehouse in their backyard. You should need a license to work on a car's braking system (https://safetyresearch.net/toyota-unintended-acceleration-an...) or radiation therapy machines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25), just like you need a license to engineer a highway bridge.
Interesting that some of the most critical software is open source with code contributed by people not even paid to write it.
People do things based on motivation. People motivated by pride and passion know that their work reflects upon them, so they have an incentive to care about quality. People motivated by money know that their paychecks will keep arriving as long as they keep meeting a minimum bar, so they're not incentivized to care about quality, but they are incentivized to care about responsiveness and consistency. For critical software, adding in legal liability for one's work creates the quality incentive that's lacking in most professional roles, while retaining the accountability that we can't expect of volunteers.
I agree completely — the lack of proper professional licensing around working on what has become critical infrastructure astounds me. But even more so is the pushback I feel from within the field! It isn’t that the pushback isn’t understandable; its more that its disappointing.
An easier way to answer this question is: does the profession have a professional society?
Yes, several: the ACS, ACM, IEEE.
So you’re wrong.
Do those organizations determine your acceptable level of practice? I would argue they do not and are thus not relevant to this conversation.
What was your last employer that asked for your license number of member ID from any of those organizations? I am guessing it has never happened.
Normally when people try this argument they are hoping a for a dog whistle to shift ground because they don't want to be regulated.
None of those certify the vast majority of those who work as software engineers.
It's not an either or, really. I can concede it has utility authoring code while being repulsed by its use in creative works. I might operate Claude Code while actively avoiding any significant use of it in movies, books and music.
Lol, what a slave mindset. Just because a technology exists, and most of the human cattle use it, does not mean that it's necessary for someone to use it.
Sure, be less productive, see how that works out for you. Your attitude in 2026 is crazy to me. Maybe you're just using chat, I don't know, but it saves me hours daily and saves my brainpower for situations that truly need it. Work smarter, not harder.
My new analogy for AI is that it produces an elaborate lunch buffet containing so many floral arrangements that considerable effort must be expended to find the food being served.
I'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.
Yes, though from legal standpoint, this particular case isn't that interesting because its a religious exemption for religious work, where considering the moral and ethical boundaries is the main job?
But if someone was say, working on housing approvals and refused to use AI because of religious exemptions to do their jobs faster, I would hope any court would strike it down.
Why in your hypothetical is it a good thing to strike down their rights to conform to your worldview?
My right to housing supersedes their right to work a certain (slower) way? "You can just wait longer" is an unacceptable answer.
It's easy to find egregious corner cases of philosophical workflows where an LLM was inappropriately used to replace thinking, where the whole goal was thinking (which is the case here).
But we know most token use is software development + back office paperwork. A big chunk of it is productivity improvements for things we all need (housing, medical paperwork, insurance etc.), so to me, that's where my argument lies.
Aren't the AI users the Amish here?
They've stopped technological progress. I tell you since AI started taking over, my experience is that nearly all forward progress (in software at least) has come to a halt. We've been standing in place, maybe sliding backwards a bit.
Here's the thing about AI: intelligence isn't a new thing, and it isn't a tool. The Amish can tell you that having a brain doesn't meant that you don't need a plow. In some ways they're much smarter than the AI crowd, all of who loudly keep insisting that brains will make plows and tractors and combine harvesters obsolete. You're so convinced that intelligence is the ultimate replacement for tools that you've stopped climbing the tech tree of tools...
It's like the tech industry itself no longer believes in technology.
I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing that. It feels that aside from the regular new LLM releases, there has been no serious innovation for the past four years.
I'm not even talking about holographic game consoles or FTL travel. Why can't we finally have a good container orchestrator that's not kubernetes for example?
> Why can't we finally have a good container orchestrator that's not kubernetes for example?
Easy, we can't because the LLMs know a lot about kubernetes but wouldn't know anything about a new orchestrator, so they'll always suggest k8s, and the button-pushers will just say "yes, do it, no mistakes". Maybe if Anthropic decides they need to create a new orchestrator, they would bias Claude heavily enough for it to actually get used, but that's about the only way I see.
I'd love to have speech-to-text on my iPhone that actually worked without needing to proofread and edit.
Perhaps because the tools that we have already are already good enough.
"Why don't we have any new programming languages" or "Why don't we have any new web frameworks" or "Why don't we have any new operating systems" or "Why don't we have any new container orchestrators" might be the same kinds of questions as "why is the design for washing machines still basically the same as it was 50 years ago?" or "why are we still using English, where are all the new conlangs to replace it?" "why are we still using email/SMTP instead of inventing a better system" "why haven't we invented a new calendar?"
You're saying there's nothing left to invent. I think that explains a lot of the complacency around considering AI to be the last ever frontier for progress. I obviously don't agree. I've gone looking into "why don't we have better version control" and the answer is definitely not that we already have all we could want.
It might not count as innovation in the last four years because the groundwork was laid decades ago, but in the last four years Waymo evolved to the point where it can drive on the highways.
And this is progress, how?
All it will lead to is yet more people that are out of a job. Right now at least a driving license (more so if it is a commercial license) is a source of income to many.
Good! All jobs should be made obsolete
> Why can't we finally have a good container orchestrator that's not kubernetes for example?
What's the market demand? I'm confident there are plenty of alternatives being churned out today but nobody's looking or asking for any. If only because they settled on k8s, they have it on their CV, they have certifications, and switching is a huge investment and risk.
Right now to me it feels like the innovation is in using LLMs to (finally?) clean up existing code, find vulnerabilities, do maintenance, optimize, and if necessary rewrite.
But the AI still progressing at a rapid rate is also software.
It is progressing, yes, but it subsumed the productivity of humans.
Where before humans learned and built better tools, now you keep paying forever to get re-trained models. What makes it a regressive feedback loop is that the people who used to learn and push the frontier are now using AI to repackage others' work as their own. Eventually what will be left to train on but copies of copies of copies?
>> 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 find this man's ostrich response to be quite different from my world view, but agree that it is fascinating to confront. Given that so many of us consume the world via tiny handheld screens and vote the way they do, I think it is definitely worth considering an artificial intelligence hedge. AI Maternalism would be a wildly unpopular counter proposition at the moment, but you have to admit humans aren't succeeding at governance right now either. Some of the parody AI movements are pretty amazing to behold: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DI2fSgssIW2/. I know, I know, but I had points to spare.
Technologists as a professional group are beyond weird. You usually expect rational critique (either positive or negative) from professionals, but the good technologists are supposed to just uncritically accept whatever supposed technological progress as an unalloyed good. Employer or Silicon Valley says it’s good, therefore think it is good. No, that’s a bit on the nose: Silicon Valley says it is good which means that it would be “good for my career”, therefore it is good. But are there any ill effects for society? Those are Luddite questions.[1]
But in this case Amish is not really an insult of course. I guess they are a hard-working people. Self-sufficient. And allow their young to take a sabbatical from the primitive life to see if it’s really something that they want to dedicate their life to.
On the other hand, of course there won’t be some Amish split. You can’t just pick and choose modernity. You can’t form a subculture of No AI. That’s why people are critical of AI; we live in a society.
[1] Being ahistorical and using Luddite as an insult also helps.
Comparing people to Amish that dont want to use LLMs is wild.
Please read this:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r...
> Comparing people to Amish that dont want to use LLMs is wild.
What makes the comparison wild? The Amish are thoughtful and deliberate about what technologies they reject, adopt, and accept with constraints. Many of the people I know who have concerns about relying on LLMs are similarly thoughtful and deliberate.
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.
I think there’s a chance for anti ai terrorism along with Amish style anti ai behavior.
Ai is stripping people away from their identity. There’s tons and tons of hatred for it… even here on HN.
I'm not sure if terrorism is the right word (how can you do bad things to software?), but I am sure that sabotage on datacenters will become a thing. But that's not a direct response to AI, but one to building more datacenters, using power (and potable water, but I'm not convinced that's as big of a thing as people make it out to be compared to other industries / wastes), and corporate greed which does not improve the lives of the common people.
> I am very well interested in seeing how will people refusing to use AI fare
There are over 2 Billion people without Internet still and they survive.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/technological-innovation/2-5...
At my age of several decades, I lived several decades before the Internet even caught on and managed very well as did most people.
Questioning whether people might potentially not fare well by choosing to not use AI is what is truly puzzling to me about your comment.
Faring well in general, sure.
I read it as: faring well in a work/industry/employment situation where expectations for velocity and quality pivot on the fact that 99% of your peers use AI, and 90% of those use it to do poor quality work quickly.
Now your boss is surprised your email took more than 10s to produce, and wonders why you are concerned about what it contains. None of your teammates are.
It's not really a question of living, it's a question of prosperity (through a strictly capitalist lens).
It's interesting to think about this expanded view of religion and how it interacts with nondiscrimination laws. The guy's beliefs (at least in the quotes in the article) seem like a good combination of well reasoned and sensible and core faith-like beliefs, so I'm glad they're protected. At the same time, I can imagine plenty of beliefs that would make me not want to hire someone. I know this one didn't go to court, but I wonder what tests courts use to draw the lines. What deeply held beliefs am I allowed to say make someone an idiot or jerk I don't want to hire, and what deeply held beliefs am I allowed to hold and want the state to protect?
Did you just express intent to violate non-discrimination laws?
I've had the concern for years that AI users (or AI itself) will eventually consider non-AI users a pain, because humans will become inefficient in lots of workloads and management, sometimes causing things to come down to a screeching halt, relatively speaking.
We have to solidify laws protecting anti-AI-ers if that's their choice.
This happens today with all technology. AI is no different. If your coworker refuses to use a computer or the internet there are no laws protecting them. Nor should there be.
There's a limit, though. Not only are there mandatory breaks for truck drivers, but also a maximum number of working hours my boss is allowed to demand from me. And even within those limits my boss is not allowed to dispense cocaine during tight deadlines.
We do have limits for how much work a human is allowed to do and, based on the experience of Amazon workers, they are due for some tightening already. I'm not seeing a clear case for AI but I wouldn't discount it entirely either.
That is not for you to decide!
>We have to solidify laws protecting anti-AI-ers if that's their choice.
Protect them from what, exactly?
Exclusion from society, and the object of anger at "those darn Luddites". You can't tell an Amish he can't use physical coins. Or that his buggy is too slow for the roads (not highways), etc.
Market efficiency solves this. But whether that's healthy for society or not is an open question.
The same way as we protect those anti-internet or anti-electricity ?
Some cities have laws limiting cashless businesses, as one example of that.
That’s inclusive of have-nots too, alongside the aforementioned no-thank-yous.
The Amish have a bunch of protections and exemptions... So yes?
They shouldn’t
Precisely the ideology and attitude we need protection from
America land of the free*
As long as you enjoy your freedom the exact same way as everyone else
More likely the oligarchy will see them as an impediment to their trillion-dollar, world-consuming valuations: https://fortune.com/2026/10/28/openai-ceo-sam-altman-gen-z-d...
Which is actually much more dangerous.
Some of these issues came up with the Australian prisoner who was denied vegemite, and while Australia is different, there are similar questions involved because secular western societies are all moving in the same direction.
The fundamental issue is that historically only religious belief, that actually subscribed to a religion with a god, was considered sincere. But since then it’s become clear that many non religious people hold equally sincere ethical beliefs. The current standard being converged upon by courts, as mentioned in the article is:
> “It has to be a deeply held ethical commitment that’s analogous to a religious commitment,”
Because no one wants to go and change all the laws to replace religious belief with the above, wherever a court sees religious belief they can essentially sub in the above language.
But this has led to awful articles where media will often, after a ruling in favor of a secular belief which the courts will rule as a religious belief as a shorthand, announce that the secular belief itself is considered a religion.
This misunderstanding reached its apotheosis, perhaps, in the Alabama case mentioned in the article, where a federal judge fell for the semantic mislabeling and declared humanism to be a religion, which it isn’t.
However, that legal standard gives humanists a whole lot of newfound rights, so I don’t see anyone pushing back against it.
What are trying to say exactly? That only beliefs in a god or gods are really religion? But that any strongly held set of principles is given the same benefits by law as a real religion? What’s the point? If it is treated like a religion by people and by law, who cares if it involves believing in a god, or many, or none??
Apple ought to be made to ask their users to confirm (opt-in) whether they want their AI/Siri/Intelligence/<or whatever they decide at any given time> and everyone else should be provided with a slimmer OS and slimner OTA updates.
This is great for him until the goals given him are unachievable, in the given timelines, by human thinking and reasoning alone.
I'm not him, but I would guess that he would respond by saying that we have a moral and ethical responsibility to remain in control of what we're putting into the world. If there's a conflict between the given timelines and how quickly a human can understand the problem and the implications of the decision being made, then the thing that needs to budge is the timeline.
> moral and ethical responsibility
We do not live in a system that values these
“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.
We live in a world where most (almost all?) humans value them.
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.
There's nothing in the article to suggest that performance of his actual duties as an administrator have been called into question. The issue under contention, as the article frames it, is the University trying to dictate the details of how that work gets done.
There are some who would call that micro-management.
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"?
> 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.
I don't think that projecting opinions that you don't think are reasonable upon someone who didn't actually say those things, or clinging tightly to the Goomba fallacy with phrases like "guys like the one in the article", will get you very far toward understanding what he actually said.
Which is self-defeating. If you don't make a good faith effort to understand what he said then you're leaving yourself in a poor position to credibly argue against it.
You seem livid. Kind of bizarre.
Where is that gas pedal taking you, by the way? I can see where it’s taking people like Garry Tan: https://www.fastcompany.com/91520702/y-combinator-garry-tan-...
They're not talking to us, they're crafting a viral e/acc tweet. I admit I don't quite understand the point of doing that deep in an HN comment thread, but once you realize what's happening you see it a lot. Perhaps if you read too much viral ragebait it starts to be your default mode of communication.
So those goals and timelines should be reconsidered; If a civil engineering firm slapped up a bridge as quickly and cheaply as possible with no concern for quality, they would cease to exist. We have no standards for software quality, and therefore anything that accelerated the perceived output is enthusiastically adopted without consideration for any future consequences.
Weinberg’s Law -- If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
Exactly. I would also argue that WE DON'T NEED more software, WE DON'T NEED more features, what US, humanity, needs is MORE RELIABLE software, with less bugs, that is stable.
Big tech want to tell us that AI is great because it can write code faster than what a human can, the problem is that code is shit, is full of bugs, and is not maintainable.
Reason why my company decided to stop using AI for code that gets delivered to customers, the customer find bugs, he is not happy, you have to use time to fix bugs (for free, because it's under warranty), so we waste time, and produce code that is not easy to evolve. And even if AI is faster to write code, developers are less motivated to work, so they will just waste time on the internet while being focused on the task, and thus again, there is really no save of money.
To me all of this doesn't make sense, we want to use AI to make the work instead of US, but even if we achieve in that the result of it gives benefits only to an handful of people that are already too much rich, while the world gets polluted with all the CO2 that is produced by AI tokens, people looses jobs and gets poorer. This idea to me needs to be opposed.
All analogies are bad you can’t push reboot on a building (yes this analogy is also bad)
Imagine a civil engineer that refuses to use a computer of any kind for his work. How much do you trust scribbled long division?
Edit: what about a civil engineer that refuses to use steel. Or Arabic numerals. Or a construction worker that refuses to use power equipment. A delivery man who swears off wheels.
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.
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.
While I agree with you at some level, I can't help thinking of the Amish. They impose plenty of restrictions on themselves and still manage to flourish. There must be a way that is different than simply accepting "progress".
This is even more true when "progress" means fertility rates collapse. A culture that is not self sustaining will die, and far more quickly than most realize. It doesn't matter how awesome that culture is for a brief moment in time, it will cease to exist.
Amish have an overall fertility rate around 6, which is why there are now almost half a million Amish in America alone. They had less than half that in 2000. In a few decades, they'll number in the millions. If people don't start having babies then groups like the Amish will take over the world, very much turning "the meek shall inherit the Earth" into a completely fulfilled prophecy. In some ways it's perhaps even a self fulfilling one if it turns out that 'non-meek' behaviors result in unsustainable societies.
The Amish are an exception, one of the rare ones (along with the handful of protected, isolated tribes). The rule is that a technologically inferior group will get rolled over by a technologically superior one for the benefit of the latter.
He is an educator at a public university. I don't think they push people or goals very hard.
At that point, humans are pretty much unemployable anyway, so why worry?
> Until the goals given him are unachievable, in the given timelines, by human thinking and reasoning alone.
Would that not be tantamount to constructive dismissal? Consider: you may have your prayer times during the day, but they will be counted against you in performance evaluations.
> but they will be counted against you in performance evaluations.
That was my initial thought: he may get his exemption from use, but TFA doesn’t indicate that he will be evaluated differently during performance review.
To go one step further, would such allowances have to be accompanied by different performance standards, like oral exams for students with dyslexia also have increased time limits?
Or would the allowances be granted for the duration of employment, the latter being shortened due to performance problems?
Exactly. The person or people above him who wanted AI to be used against his will will ultimately achieve their goals---no matter what his beliefs are. At the end of the day, his views of humanism are futile against the force of those in favor of AI acceptance.
I can remember a time when the Borg's famous catchphrase was understood to be the kind of thing that only the bad guys would say.
And I also remember that even in that case resistance was in fact not futile in the end.
I remember a time when we had to go back in time to get a whale so that machines and animals could coexist.
Lots of strawmanning going on with comments about where the line gets drawn and talking about driving stick, heating his home, etc.
If you read the article, you will see that the concern is with his direct actions concerning ethics and moral, especially with interactions with others (as an admin).
There is plenty to unpack with this as it is a new concept. I'm hoping we can have a real discussion about this. For example, will this religious exemption become moot if productivity is sufficiently higher with AI giving employers an easy out? If that does happen, do we think we'll see adverse effects such as baked in biases in a hidden process?
One thing I am concerned with with AI is that everything will follow Google and Meta when it comes to things like appeals and fair treatment. There area ton of stories about people getting banned/deleted with no recourse and no insight into why. I can see this same sort of totalitarian activity spreading to other aspects of life, like finance, medical billing, etc.
> For example, will this religious exemption become moot if productivity is sufficiently higher with AI giving employers an easy out?
For this person’s job at an academic institution, I doubt it. This specific case feels very symbolic from start to finish: His management probably mandated AI use because they felt the need to do something about AI, and he used this as a perfect opportunity to stage a protest against AI. Knowing what I know about academic institutions, I suspect AI would have very little impact on productivity.
Many jobs might be the same: AI’s productivity impact can be large on a small set of tasks, but if those tasks were only 10% of someone’s hours at work then a couple people refusing AI will not make a difference to the whole department.
Workloads also flow to people who are good at that work, so the work that benefits from AI would be distributed to the AI users and more of the non-AI work would go to the few people who don’t use AI. It can be self-balancing when the number of refusals is small.
There are jobs where it’s not going to work out, though. If most of someone’s job is accelerated a lot by AI and they refuse to use that accelerator, it’s going to be really hard to avoid failing behind.
Companies do not have to retain employees who need accommodations that are not reasonably compatible with the work. AI is a hot topic and everyone has strong feelings about it, so it can help to think back to other technology leaps and consider what it would be like if your coworkers refused to use them.
What if you had a coworker who refused to use email and would only communicate on the phone? It could technically be done, but they would fall so far behind and produce enough hardship for their coworkers that it wouldn’t be a reasonable request for most office jobs. The laws do not force companies to accommodate requests that are unreasonable for the work.
I can already think of jobs where refusing to use any AI tools would put someone at so much of a disadvantage that it couldn’t be justified. That set of jobs is small today, but it’s growing.
> His management probably mandated AI use because they felt the need to do something about AI, and he used this as a perfect opportunity to _stage a protest against AI._
I think you're missing the point. This isn't a protest, this is someone exercising their constitutional rights. It's a matter of people being able to freely choose how they may live within the state and society's constraints. Our bosses shouldn't be able to so easily tell us to violate our own morals for the company's bottom line.
Where is the limit of human thinking? This late 2025 - till now models give to some real philosophical questions that are not thought experiments anymore, imagining the matrix or the 1984 depiction was a cool thing to imagine, but feeling your humanity taken away from you in the present is heartbreaking.
Not if one is a transhumanist, it feels liberating
> “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?
Can we please just look at LLMs like what they are and not some fantastical threat?
The fearmongering has cooked a lot of people's understanding of this stuff (and I wouldn't place the blame on them given the news they're likely consuming about AI).
"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes" is apt here. We don't need to return to mud huts and smoke signals because we can approximate intelligence.
I didn't get the impression that the man here was looking at LLMs as some fantastical threat. It seems like his concern was about offloading his thinking and decision making to AI, which seems pretty non-fantastical.
Can't that be done without a performative "religious exemption"? You don't need that to say "yeah, I'm not using this stuff." I imagine in practice all this will accomplish is pissing people off who are already stressed about AI.
Possibly not. I would get fired if I said "yeah, I'm not using [AI]."
I think I understand what you mean, but to me the exemption doesn't seem performative. It seems like the equivalent of him talking to his employer and having them agree to not force him to use tech he is concerned about, he just used a particular legal avenue to justify it as part of that discussion. It may be performative in the sense that it also got attention (e.g., in the form of this article), but in this case even that part of it seems like it could be a useful precedent for others who may be considering a similar route.
Then again, maybe even seeing it as _slightly_ performative, potentially, is overly pessimistic. It may seem performative simply because it's novel, but if he legitimately considers this part of his religious beliefs and his employer (seemingly) agrees, what is performative about exercising his rights like many other people of other religions do?
Was he being forced or compelled to offload his thinking to a machine?
I probably don’t share his sentiments, but that’s no different from being compelled to think in certain mandated ways (offloading being just a particular case of it), which is certainly a bad idea. If that was the case, I find it weird that he used a religious exemption mechanism, but glad he can act and think freely, the way he desires.
However, he may not have a choice of tool use or peers, and be compelled to send work to, or process results done by a non-human system, if that’s a part of his organization system (external to him with regards to duties and responsibilities). To grant him an exemption would be to discriminate upon others, no different how he can’t refuse to work with, say, a Satanist. Or a cyborg transhumanist. If that’s the case and he just refuses to feed his thinking (his part of the job) to an AI (not his part of the job), then that’s him being a zealot pushing his religious views on others. In such a case, I can quite clearly see why he went for a religious exemption, huh.
His own part of the job, his responsibilities - yes, of course he can’t be compelled on how he does it. Anything outside of that - nope, his religious beliefs end there, not his thinking - not for him to say how to do it, or refuse to interact.
I remember when in Iain M. Banks Culture Novels (I think it was _Consider Phlebas_), the heroine and its drone talk about the "Humanist" movement of a planet they visit incognito as a extremist anti-machine movement... (It is just in passing, the situation in the Culture novels is quite different from the Dune universe).
Precursor to the machine crusade?
Butlerian Jihad when??
This is great
Whilst I’m in favour of the result, how is it possible for a humanist viewpoint to be classified as a religious belief?
Why not? Religious freedoms are about deeply held beliefs. It's not like a judge will evaluate the bible or quran to check if something is or isn't a religious freedom based on what someone's deity of choice supposedly stated.
Also, if humanism is being classified this way, why not transhumanism?
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.
So all a company has to do is say "AI is necessary for the job" and the exemption no longer applies. Then why are we even having this discussion?
How would you possibly prove that AI is necessary for a job when someone has been doing the job successfully for years before AI?
Sounds like a tough argument to make to me
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.
>Federal courts have ruled that humanism qualifies as a religion. As a result, she said, humanists have the same rights as other faith groups under federal law.
Hmmm, sounds a bit ripe for exploitation, no?
>In his interview with RNS, Durman said that being a humanist means being present and paying attention to others. Using AI conflicts with that.
Does this mean I can submit complaints against the companies I work for when I'm being told to respond via email or Slack? This seems pretty far removed from my humanist perspective up being present and paying attention to others, especially when you consider the various automations and abstractions which go into that kind of communication.
Like, I know it's obtuse, but I really don't see a logical issue with someone being a humanist and sincerely believing that communicating in anyway which isn't face-to-face goes against their beliefs. And that's just one example.
>“Substituting automated machine processing for human presence, authentic listening, and personal responsibility in my work directly conflicts with my obligation to uphold human dignity and flourishing as primary,” he wrote in a letter to the University of Kentucky’s Office of Equal Opportunity.
I'm sure this guy is being sincere and somewhat reasonable with his logic, but I know people who would feel justified in pushing this way past AI if they felt it was likely to get them anywhere. Like, how can you not use the same exact reasoning to push against using other forms of modern technology?
>The letter cited Durman’s personal beliefs as well as the 2003 version of the Humanist Manifesto, which details humanist principles and beliefs. Those beliefs include the importance of freedom of conscience and human flourishing.
Hell, at what point is being forced to work in order to survive in completely opposition to this belief system? When can I start saying that my employer's expectation that I'm in the office every day is in opposition to "human flourishing"?
>Durman told RNS his work involves helping researchers at the university with grant applications and that he can do the work without the help of AI. And not using AI won’t affect his co-workers, he said.
We'll see about that. Maybe, right now, this is the case. But even moderate expectation for AI usage in the future makes this suspect. When everyone is getting 90% of their work done completely autonomously through their agents, but they're still waiting on you to respond to an email from a day ago, then will this still be the case?
>For Durman, the accommodation process was much simpler. Durman sent the letter, and then he and Huiskens met with officials at the university. “It was a very collegial meeting, and they found that there was no undue burden to David’s department,” Huiskens said. “They granted the accommodation promptly.”
Well I'm unironically happy that they were able to work this out easily. But I really doubt this will be smooth sailing indefinitely, especially as other roles which are more affected by AI end up being "targeted" in the same ways.
As a software engineer, I dread the thought of working with co-workers who just refuse to use AI based on arbitrary principals. It's one thing for them to reason that they work better without AI; it's another thing to just say that you don't agree with using the technology and everyone needs to accommodate you.
Well I'm sure I haven't said anything that everyone else hasn't immediately thought/posted, but I'm genuinely curious about these things. It seems rather important that everyone is on the same page with regards to what their rights are with respect to choosing to not use a technology like this.
> “It has to be a deeply held ethical commitment that’s analogous to a religious commitment,” he said. “That’s a fact question that presumably the employer will investigate.”
I’m curious if the opposite would work:
“As a transhumanist my religion compels me to share everything with my machines, otherwise they can’t ensure my mind uploading is up to date “
I see no reason transhumanism is any less of a religion than humanism.
> I see no reason transhumanism is any less of a religion than humanism.
TBH I agree. Religious exemptions at large only exist for the big name religions but the arguments pushed often make claims about it being a moral/ethical precedent and its just not true. I think its a matter of PR and politics if you're able to get an exemption kind of same game as a lot of things.
There's also the bit about undue burden.
We see this with people who believe it is a religious requirement to share their faith at work, even when their co-workers say they don't want to hear it.
We see this with people who say their religious belief says they don't take orders from a women, even if that woman is their boss.
If your transhumanist religion compels you to share PII with your machines in a way which breaks the law, then there's likely an undue burden.
If it means you need access to a power plug during lunch so your devices can scan your brain for 10 minutes - almost certainly not an undue burden.
> If your transhumanist religion compels you to share PII with your machines in a way which breaks the law, then there's likely an undue burden.
Some modern recording laws are not made with a machine component in mind, even if that machine is a local first-party system and does not actually store anything long-term or propagate information any further. A cyborg-identifying person with a wearable speech processor may rightfully argue such laws are unfairly preventing their functioning, as they’re lacking an important distinction.
It is very weird that University of Kentucky is asking research administrators to incorporate AI in its workflow. It’s one thing for a Silicon Valley startup to ask SWE to use AI to maximize speed of development, its another thing entirely for a University insulated from competition, with a small admin staff, asking them to use AI for what exactly?
How much additional productivity do they think admin staff can crank out, and does that even matter. Does a 100X more productive research administrator mean the University will not be “left behind”, in this new world. I think we are officially reaching mass hysteria phases of the AI revolution.
I imagine it was a blanket request for all university employees.
Even if this was true, it is very weird. When was the last time, institutions and bosses ask their employees to use a specific tool? It’s more often that employees fall in love with a tool and ask institutions to pay for it, here’s it’s the exact opposite
Huh, all the time?
We were asked to migrate from Zoom to Teams recently. We have to use git and GitHub. Recently, there's a mandate to migrate from Jenkins to GitHub Actions. We have to use Windows or Mac, no Linux. We have to have the corporate VPN and antivirus running. And so on, and so on.
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.
Great site
The ironic part is that this same guy undoubtedly relies on the expertise of millions of human agents and sees absolutely nothing wrong with that.
He is a humanist, how could relying on humans possibly go against his beliefs?
Where's the irony? Everything the article reports about Durman's opinions would seem to suggest that millions of humans mutually supporting each other is exactly the kind of thing that he wants to see happening.
“Expertise of millions of human agents” …in what? Understanding the universe that’s around us? In the cosmic sense, we humans have not done anything at all, aside from trying to understand it and “chimping out” from time to time.
It’s just that our human-centric bias is showing. We are not the main characters of this universe. Not by a long shot. Heck, in the planetary sense, we feel like earth belongs to us, but chances are we will not be in the top 1,000,0000th of its inhabitants as species by the amount of time spent living on it when life inevitably ceases to exist on it at some point in the future.
We monkeys are sure dumb and self-centered.
Every A.I. related post here has someone saying "I for one see no difference between a human being and an A.I." but this may be the first time I've seen this cliche extended to "How bizarre to meet a human being that thinks humans are not identical to A.I."
It really highlights how misanthropic many AI booster people are. I find it really discouraging to see.
Also shows how Anthropic's name is really a misnomer. :)
That doesn’t seem ironic at all. Irony is merely the condition where appearance and reality differ. In this case, if he values his own thinking he presumably values the thinking of other persons.
>human agents
What? Are you trying to say "people"?
It is an interesting approach, but I would say his productivity is what matters.
I see you value productivity. Productivity to what purpose?
The problem is that you can get any kind of exemption based on religious beliefs.
You actually cannot. There are standards to meet to qualify as a true religious exemption. There have been many court cases where people tried to claim religious beliefs when convenient for them, which were denied because they couldn’t meet the threshold for being a real religious belief.
There are also limitations on what accommodations can be requested. If you took a job mowing lawns and then had a religious belief against harming living plants, you wouldn’t collect paychecks while you watched your coworkers mow lawns. They would have to find other work for you if they could, like raking leaves or lawnmower maintenance. If they didn’t have that work, then you wouldn’t have a job.
The raking leaves example was to make a point. For a programming job you could be exempted from using AI tools to do the work, but you would still have to do the work at a reasonable standard.
> 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.
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.
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.
There are, however, constraints on these accomodations driven by job and safety requirements -- see for instance https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/standardinterpretations/2011-...:
"... there are circumstances where a tight-fitting respirator must be worn, such as when a worker is exposed to an atmosphere that is immediately dangerous to life or health (IDLH), defined as "...an atmosphere that poses an immediate threat to life, would cause irreversible adverse health effects, or would impair an individual's ability to escape from a dangerous atmosphere." 29 CFR 1910.134(b). In these situations, a tight-fitting pressure demand respirator is required. Wearing a respirator that is less protective could pose a grave danger not only to the worker who is wearing it, but also to other workers who might be called on to rescue him from the IDLH atmosphere. Preventing these unnecessary risks is a compelling governmental interest that justifies OSHA's decision not to provide a religious exemption from the respirator standard, especially as there is no less restrictive way to provide this protection."
Which is funny because people who actually work with this tech know well that facial hair is no obstacle to rigorously functional respirator use. This is more of a cultural tradition such as how genital mutilation of infant boys is necessary for health when it really took off as a way of adding value to birth support service invoices.
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.
Just chiming in: I upvoted both the post you replied to and the post it was replying to. All of yours got the thumbs down. No one appointed you the order police and this entire train was net-negative.
"[...] 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.
“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.
“Old man yells at cloud”
RIP Berry
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.
> my main issue with these people is that they think
This reminds me of the torch lighters in a classic Frankenstein movie.
> all of computing has involved "offloading" effort/thought to computers.
Effort yes, thought no, not until recent years.
The average person was able to look at the devices up until now and see a tool. Now they see something they don't understand, but sure does seem smarter than they are, and has the aesthetics of being a person on the other side of the computer.
Do you think this guy has the technical depth to make these connections? He's working off what he can see, and he will likely grow old and die still lacking that understanding. So will a vast majority of users of these services.
What you are seeing is people realigning with a baseline of their reality. They have to trust what they are being told on this by someone, and they need to figure out who and how amid malicious actors that are trying to bend their beliefs.
They did ban calculators in the Butlerian Jihad.
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).
According to Gemini, 35% to 40% of vehicles in the world today are manual transmission. While not most, it's higher than I realized.
Outside of the United States? Even then, I don't think this has been a true statement for at least a decade, if not more with the rise of EVs in places other than the USA.
I don't think I've seen a manual gearbox in Canada in decades.
This is only still true because in the parts of the world with the most population, cost is the #1 deciding factor in vehicle purchasing. Manuals are cheaper. Globally the industry is trending against manuals over time.
Also in large parts of Europe if you pass your driving test in an automatic car you _can't_ drive a manual, so it becomes the default out of convenience.
And how is that relevant here?
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 kind of automation takes the execution away from you, not the decision, and even that execution only concerns you. You wanted to shift into a higher gear, the car's computer does it for you. The result is what you wanted. A fully autonomous car that decides everything for you would be a better example.
If you let an AI grade an exam then a big part of what comes next is a decision that you didn't take or validate. You didn't remove yourself just from the execution, you removed yourself from the responsibility and cognitive effort to take the decision, and from the accountability for that decision.
If you can simplify and call every button press "just the computer doing things", then someone else can exaggerate and say a fully autonomous drone hunting humans is the same, business as usual, computers doing things.
that's me
AI that pretends to be a human mind, or takes the place of a human mind is an abomination. [what does that mean? that's the whole ballgame. defining what this means]
AI as a tool can do impressive things.
AI usage metrics by employers is ... an interesting test case.