We have to solidify laws protecting anti-AI-ers if that's their choice.
Which is actually much more dangerous.
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.
We do not live in a system that values these
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.
The average user here thinks they're doing far more important work than they actually are.
Weinberg’s Law -- If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
- People refusing vaccination requirements in schools, offices, the military.
- Pharmacists refusing to fill certain prescriptions (like birth control).
- Restaurant owners refusing to serve gay people.
- Kids (well, their parents) refusing to study certain topics in school.
Are you implying that there isn't a "meaningful population" that is against some of these?
There are thousands of religions each with their own set of beliefs. Many of them directly conflict with each other, and with societal laws. You can make up a "religious exemption" for literally anything, and they are selectively allowed based on how the majority religion tolerates the thing.
What about an example where religious belief fundamentally excludes someone from doing the actual job? Suppose a Muslim wants a job as a bartender, but refuses to actually serve people drinks because they consider it a violation on the rule against alcohol. Should the bar grant them a religious exemption and just accept that they won't be serving alcoholic beverages when that person's the bartender on duty?
Or what if two different religious beliefs come into direct conflict? Suppose a Jehovah's Witness whose manager is also a JW decides to leave the religion. Jehovah's Witnesses consider shunning apostates to be a religious commandment, so their manager might feel obligated to fire them. Is that OK?
Depending on how we resolve those conflicts, perhaps people can at least agree that there should be limits to religious exemptions, even if they don't agree on the specifics. But perhaps that's at least a starting point for a conversation. And perhaps from there we can extend out to Durham's position.
Of note, every single one of your examples impacts multiple people in significant ways. None of them are people just wanting to practice their faith in isolation. I think the cases you describe aren't really analogous.
-employers refusing to employ queer people
-landlords refusing queer tenants
It just shows how progressive and, sorry to bring this up, socialist the US has been historically. Truly a beacon of hope in a world mired in prejudice and dogma.
What happened there?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2026/01/21/ninth-c...
I don't read it that way at all. The article is talking about two cases that not only affirm the employer's right to discretion in granting religious exemptions, but also raise the bar that employees need to clear to qualify for one. So it's basically confirming that the parent's claim was already true in the past, and also indicates that it will be even more so in the future.
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.
- 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 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."
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.
" 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.
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.
" 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
Though nothing about the Amish prohibits being a computer using engineer. Their rejection of technology is a lot more nuanced.
"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.
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.
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.
[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/intel-says-its-processors-are-n...
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.
A continuum is not isomorphic to a single point.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not arguing on this guy's behalf, I only made a comment.
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 .
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.
If you let an AI grade an exam then a big part of what comes next is a decision that you didn't take or validate. You didn't remove yourself just from the execution, you removed yourself from the responsibility and cognitive effort to take the decision, and from the accountability for that decision.
If you can simplify and call every button press "just the computer doing things", the someone can exaggerate and say a fully autonomous drone hunting humans is the same, business as usual, computers doing things.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I find your Amish example is striking and accurate.
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.
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/
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.
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'm not going to let the army tell me what my job is.
Yes, the ACS.
So you’re wrong.
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.
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.
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.
It's easy to find egregious corner cases of philosophical workflows where an LLM was inappropriately used to replace thinking, where the whole goal was thinking (which is the case here).
But we know most token use is like software development + back office paperwork. A big chunk of it is productivity improvements for things we all need (housing, medical paperwork, insurance etc.), so to me, that's where the argument should lie.
They've stopped technological progress. I tell, you since AI started taking over, my experience is that nearly all forward progress (in software at least) has come to a halt. We've been standing in place, maybe sliding backwards a bit.
Here's the thing about AI: intelligence isn't a new thing, and it isn't a tool. The Amish can tell you that having a brain doesn't meant that you don't need a plow. In some ways they're much smarter than the AI crowd, all of who loudly keep insisting that brains will make plows and tractors and combine harvesters obsolete. You're so convinced that intelligence is the ultimate replacement for tools that you've stopped climbing the tech tree of tools...
It's like the tech industry itself no longer believes in technology.
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?
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
Ai is stripping people away from their identity. There’s tons and tons of hatred for it… even here on HN.
Please read this:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r...
"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
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.