Kentucky man wins first religious exemption from AI as a humanist

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.

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.

I kind of feel like this is a non-story. The ask was small and reasonable. It was easy enough to grant the accommodation and avoid a confrontation. HR in companies does this all the time.

This is great for him until the goals given him are unachievable, in the given timelines, by human thinking and reasoning alone.

I agree with the principle that if it meaningfully impinges on your core ideals that you shouldn't be required to do that.

On the other hand, it seems like this particular ideal is being supported because of an underlying public sentiment. Not because the ideal itself is held.

I think if you are going to fully support variances in beliefs like this then it should be done on an equal standing.

That includes principles about proprietary software, abusive software, the belief that information cannot have ownership, advertising is inherently immorral.

There are a lot more principles, it is clear that some people have these at a level where they consider it a core part of their being,

Why shouldn't they also be supported. Should companies be required to offer open source solutions for employees in the same manner as this case is suggesting for non-AI?

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.

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.

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.