Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI
religionnews.com396 points by danso 9 hours ago
396 points by danso 9 hours ago
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.
It is more that knowledge workers are less sophisticated at using AI. It is not that hard to check whether sources are real, using AI or other tools, for example. Something like functional testing will come to non programming tasks.
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.
This was true before AI too.
In practice, lawyers generally don't ever disbarred except if they lie to clients or steal from them.
Yes exactly. It isn’t a surprise that the industry with no professional standards worth discussing is also the one having the biggest field day with ML. My point is that in many other professional arenas acting like a software “engineer” is called malpractice.
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.
Well hang on, "just work" implies an objective standard of correct vs incorrect. No such standard exists. I'm sure that there will be legal AIs that reliably do... something... but the whole point of the legal system is to allow space for humans to argue their case. If an AI "does legal" deterministically, without human intervention, how can it be said to be "working" if its very use defeats the purpose of the system it has learned to navigate so expertly?
That’s utopian thinking unburdened by reality or the need to explain how this will work. I have no interest in that.
We aren’t talking about the new version of SV spiritualism here, we’re talking about systems people actually care about.
"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."
If lawyers and article writers are in the knowledge realm. Then your thesis has plenty of counter-examples of people who just use AI to create stuff and don't correct it.
I don't personally know of any software engineers using AI as "fleets of agents" in a "factory." Sounds like a nightmare.
I usually have a high-level agent drafting plans, then spawning sub-agents to build parts of the plan, other sub-agents to check the work of those agents. Then the PRs have different code review agents looking at the code, on top of the agents for people on my team also reviewing my code.
And I'm probably on the more amateurish end of AI development. As I learned these techniques from YouTube.
When you hear about the work Anthropic researchers are doing, they seem to be using hundreds or thousands of agents to solve problems.
> When you hear about the work Anthropic researchers are doing, they seem to be using hundreds or thousands of agents to solve problems.
There's a reason they're Anthropic researchers. The value proposition tanks when you actually have to foot the bill for the tokens you use.
Subagent flows can improve overall performance, but it generally also comes with disproportionately high token use. That gets worse with parallel subagents that are often doing the same things at the same time and cannot share a cache.
So the point I was trying to make is that I'm maybe in the 25th percentile of developers and am using multiple agents for a task, and Anthropic researchers are at the 99th percentile and are using thousands of agents per task.
So the median developer is probably using 5-20 agents at a time for a task. I'm not sure if that crosses the threshold of being a "fleet of agents".
They are doing that because they are running into hardware limits with single agents. If one agent made correct decisions and explored spaces efficiently, they would not need hundreds of thousands of agents. It's is the luxury of great wealth that they can produce a large number of possibly defective samples and then select the ones that are not defective.
you... don't read hackernews much I take it? This is like 10% of all submissions lately, lol.
Yeah, I very much dispute the characterization GP made as to how software devs are working. I know some are. But I do not believe it's the majority of people in the field, not by a long shot.
Every PR now has auto reviews. That's like at least 3-5+ agents depending on the repo.
Devs are just early. What you describe knowledge workers doing is what devs did a year (or two) ago and in fact my dev colleagues still use it like that. Web interface with a chat, copy pasting code.
It’s a phase.
Was going to say, to the extent I rely on Claude, I'm closer to the old school than the new hotness. I don't run fleets of agents per se, I just use Claude Code with a good bit of back-and-forth and review. So not quite web browser level usage, but I don't have a big swarm of agents working full time. I guess CC can spin up multiple agents, but I don't know if that counts.
Fortunately I'm in a shop that isn't being judged by feature output quantity, but is absolutely judged on whether or not our internal or external customers go out of service. We don't have pressure to pump output.
We have 5 star restaurants, fast food and street meat yet we still have kitchens. We can go to the super market to buy eggs, and produce yet I know people who have gardens to grow their own food and a scant few have chickens for eggs.
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.
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.
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
Current AI models are incapable of doing software development either, but that isn't stopping some people.
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...
I love giving it different supplier docs and having it read them all allowing me to get pros vs cons and act like search.
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
The centaur / reverse-centaur is another interesting way to describe this split.
This looks like the classic "AI can do everybody else's job but mine still needs me".
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.
> 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.”
There's a great anecdote about that in the book _Dealers of Lightning_, where the Xerox execs were indifferent to a demo of the Star personal computer but their wives were ecstatic about it.
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.
I’m in my mid forties. If VR/ar devices like the Apple Vision Pro were to go mainstream, I can’t imagine myself learning how to use it effectively as a daily driver device to get work done. Heck, even the Internet, I’m pretty sure my relationship with it is more of wary scepticism than most people in their thirties.
I can see why someone who never used email until their fifties would never get fully comfortable with it.
It hasn't exactly worked out well for email, either...
Why?
i have 4 email accounts, and I check them maybe once a week. nobody sends me emails any more, everybody uses "messaging"
(actually, i forgot i have 2 or 3 others, I check them even less, perhaps a few times a year, really only when i need to reset a password associated with them)
Out of roughly 400 billion emails sent daily worldwide, estimates pin actual human written messages at around 10%. In personal inboxes, human correspondence is essentially extinct. Checking my own personal email inbox right now, the entire first page is 2FA, Amazon, some shit from my climbing gym, my car, my employer health insurance, my bank... My spam filters are aggressive and there are literally thousands of unread emails in there waiting for me to click select all -> delete. Even at work the overwhelming majority is automated Jira noise, CI/CD noise, calendar shit, compliance blasts... I have received maybe 2 or 3 actual human typed messages in the last 2-3 weeks.
It's a fucking log dump for machines.
40 billion/day is extinct ?
For personal correspondence? Yes. Most of what email was used for, for actual humans in their personal lives, has transitioned to SMS and other apps like WhatsApp, WeeChat, Signal, Discord, and that happened a decade ago.
You see that 90% of the daily volume is sludge and think this is a healthy communication network for humans?
Refusing to use technology isn't the Amish way, they communally decide how and when to use technology.
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/
As anyone in the Rust Belt can tell you, the average worker might experience higher wages over time, but the average worker is a statistical fiction, not a flesh and blood person.
Individuals and entire communities can live out the rest of their lives destitute and hopeless in the wake of changes that leave them behind. Things might be brighter for those who come after, but let's not pretend we're not doing real violence to those left behind.