Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI (religionnews.com)

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.

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/

I'm not going to let the army tell me what my job is.

Yes, several: the ACS, ACM, IEEE.

So you’re wrong.

https://www.computer.org/education/bodies-of-knowledge/softw...

"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

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.

Lots of people, myself included, understand llms and can and do use them at work because we have to, but we might choose to not use them outside of work because they rot our brains, are unethical, funnel even more money into the hands of a few billionaires (selling a service trained on stolen property) and haven't actually been proven to make the world better. Unlike email!

I'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?

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.

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.

[0] https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/gen-z-turning-a...

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 disagree with "sizable". We haven't seen near this level of opposition in the past (I'm old enough to know), mostly because moving from say landlines to mobile phones, or postal mail to email, or radio to TV, didn't threaten the jobs of large segments of the population. Past opposition tended to be more rooted in culture or even religion (TV as a vehicle for "ungodly" programming, etc.)

I 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.

I know knowledge workers who throw what you give them into the slop machine and return the slop, but I don't need them, I can feed the slop machine myself. I still need those who have experience and taste that the machine hasn't got yet.

I don't actually use AI much at all simply because in my line of work the knowledge is industry specific and niche - an AI can't tell you how to fix a proprietary machine. I have used it a few times but to do dumb things like write some Excel script or some other piece of software I have no interest or need for learning.

It’s a phase.

Is this true? I would think that this conflicts with first amendment rights a bit.

HR director, to employee's director: Does this guy use AI for anything currently? Do you need him to? If we grant this request, will it affect us negatively?

Employee's director: A couple people use AI. It's not required at all. Honestly, people don't know how to use it a lot of the time. Granting it would not change anything.

HR director, to employee's director: Okay, great. We've got 3 pending lawsuits right now and I don't think this guy would have a case anyway, but our legal bills are higher than we budgeted for. We have more important things to worry about.

HR director, to employee: Your accommodation request is granted.

Humanist organization press release: This is a landmark human rights case in American history.

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’s inclusive of have-nots too, alongside the aforementioned no-thank-yous.

We do not live in a system that values these

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Static analysis for example. Although I’ve heard that LLMs can now do that if a user wanted it.

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.

LLMs aren't some next step in the evolution of intelligence, they are even explicitly designed not to be. That a word-calculator which has no emotions, goals or continuity of consciousness can, by brute-force-throwing-things-at-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks, solve some problems that were presumed to require intelligence isn't "liberating" at all.

It could be comical, if there weren't so many deluded cultists worshipping that word calculator and wanting to turn control of all society over to it, and insisting that anyone who rejects them will be "left behind" in the capitalistic rat race to the bottom, which is the only thing that can ever matter.

In 1000 years, I am sure that the descendants of humanity will be either

a) non-existent

b) actually intelligent machines, that will preserve in themselves all that is great about our culture, while discarding some of the more ugly parts, free to explore the universe without need for things like gravity or oxygen, able to sleep for centuries as they travel at relativistic speeds between the stars

c) Shoggoths mindlessly babbling to themselves as they code the eleventy-trillionth new mobile app so that somewhere a number can go up

Which do you prefer?

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?

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?

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 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.

> 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.

"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.