- 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.
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.
We do not live in a system that values these
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
-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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Weinberg’s Law -- If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
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.
I'm not arguing on this guy's behalf, I only made a comment.
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 think if you mapped smart home technology to transmission preference, those who op for manual transmissions probably also opt for oldschool switches and thermostats .
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.
Though nothing about the Amish prohibits being a computer using engineer. Their rejection of technology is a lot more nuanced.
> 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.
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 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.
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
https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2026/01/21/ninth-c...
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.
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.
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.
ranger_danger•1h ago
Very true, 100% agree. I'm not saying we should get rid of AI, but we need to be aware of the dangers of relying on it too much.
joshstrange•1h ago
ranger_danger•45m ago
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?