Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
While humanism is often a non-religious philosophy or a worldview, federal courts have ruled that it qualifies as a religion.
Best part of the story
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
One religious exemption, please!
Man granted first-of-its-kind religious exemption against mandatory AI use at work — Humanist argues that offloading his thinking to LLMs violates his beliefs, Title VII accommodation protects employee
Hmmm, I’ve got evidence of transhumanism going back decades. I wonder if I could argue that being forced to use poor quality weak LLMs is offensive to my people.
It’s like a car dealership having a Jesus Second Coming sale every Sunday.
So they want me to use an AI to do my job. But at the same time they haven’t fired me so presumably they understand that the AI can’t be used exclusively to do the job. So doesn’t that mean that they accept that I have better judgment than an AI and therefore my decision not to use said AI shouldn’t be a problem for them.
I would love to see them actually try articulate exactly why the above is not true in an employment tribunal.
Employment tribunal?
You must not be American.
How dare you use logic! Go, be ashamed of yourself!
Though it’s kinda funny that Humanism was the one to do it, it’s literally atheism with extra steps
Not really. At least to me although it seems to be similar, it’s less a focus on no god and more on being a good person and improving the lives of others. (You know, the things many religious folk think atheists are incapable of)
I suddenly just became religious.
Praise be to whatever gets me exemption!
You’re gonna love this article
So you can’t oppose outsourcing your brain power to a megacorp that will take zero responsibility for any consequence of its spicy autocorrect…
but you can oppose outsourcing your brain power to “the machine” because it’s against your beliefs.
I mean, if it works, yeah sure, call it a religion.
Humanism is a religion.
I mean it’s literally not, it’s a philosophy, even the American Humanist Society states so
Yeah but they’re all dorks so whatever.
True and real
Or at the very least an “article of faith” protected by the US Government. Idk about humanism tax status.
I mean, prompt writing is like wishes with Djinns.
I don’t know, Jewish tradition has golems. They’re basically human-shaped machines that are powered by the words written by their creators.
Though golems are supposed to be mute, and LLM are anything but. Maybe that’s why AI is bad.
I’m sure we can find something written millennia ago that describes precisely why we shouldn’t use gen AI now, we just have to look for it.
Evil genies
I used that bullshit to get out of beard length requirements at a job once. They dont like to question it to much, and if they do, you just have to get offended lol.
Freedom from religion is more important than freedom of religion.
Time to apply this to financial economics.
One Butlerian Jihad comming right up, Sir!
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind
Where does it say that lol
They’re referencing Dune. In the lore AI tried to kill humanity, the war was called the Butlerian Jihad. As a result, AI was banned across the galaxy. I don’t know why you’re being downvoted just for not knowing
I think the downvotes are from the “lol” where the question mark normally goes.
As is praxis.
IIRC, the war didn’t start because AI started killing humans. It started because humans opposed AI replacing them. There was a religious sect (Butlarians) who opposed this, and they eventually rose up to fight the machines. They weren’t directly attacked first.
Bah! It shall not stand that a man of such impervious ignorance should discomfort our cultured company!
It’s in the Orange Catholic Bible
If you read the bible upside down, it makes much more sense.
Trump was trying to tell us that but money got in the way.
I see what you did there, but in the Dune universe, the Orange Catholics are a religious sect, not a jab at bad makeup and trump.
What a strong work of art Dune is, after all
The Bibble, page 241.
Probably won’t stand up in the Supreme Court which only recognizes the religious rights of Christians to be bigots.
You usually don’t have any reason to go that far anyhow, corpos don’t want to have to mount a defence and just roll over about it instead
There’s more than a few Christianist corpos out there willing to go to court to bring about their theocracy–Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-a being two commonly cited examples.
That only matters if it goes to court that high.
I am in no way religious, but every retail job I’ve had that pushes credit cards I break out the Bible verses to inform management I can’t push a credit card on any American, because there’s a verse about not charging your own people interest, and since every credit card does that, It goes against my “religious beliefs”. No manager has ever pushed back against it.
The very first sentence mentions that this takes place in the UK
Edit: actually, I think I’m wrong on that. It sounds like this is a US story
University of Kentucky (UK). No worries, mate.
TIL there are more than zero universities in Kentucky.
There’s at least zero.
With how both the UK and the US are going, soon if not already the lower bound will be lower than that.
Uneducation camps
LOL when I read it my first impression was: Oh wow, I didn’t know UK also had a city called Kentucky, good that they pointed out it is not in US.
If there was a Kentucky in the UK then the one in the US would be called New Kentucky?
No, we have tons of direct names from the UK, and many other places. We have Londons, Norfolks, Portsmouths, and probably any other major city or region in Britain.
I’m from Connecticut, the town names of which* fall roughly into three categories: Native American names, biblical place names, and English names. Under the latter category, we have new Britain and new London (arguably the only two which fit that pattern, though maybe New Haven is referencing an older British city I don’t know about), but we also have Manchester, Bolton, and Glastonbury, and of course just English language words or last names, like Plainville, Plainfield, and Putnam.
*This is also true for most other New England states and probably most of the east coast, with substitution for French or Spanish (and a little Dutch) for English/British as appropriate. Actually, I could see this being mostly true everywhere in the US, with the relevant settling nationality taking over for British town names and last names, but I could also see biblical place names being less popular in some states, maybe superseded by other religious references.
There’s also a New Boston in MA right over the border from Colebrook, CT
Like New Boston, right?
good that they pointed out it is not in US.
Huh? It is in the USA.
They wrote: “at the University of Kentucky (UK)”, they could write “at the University of Kentucky (a.k.a. UK)” or “at the UK (University of Kentucky)” any of those would be less ambiguous.
Countries are offset with a comma, not put in parentheses, so maybe University of Kentucky (UK), USA?
UK is University of Kentucky.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a US act. https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-1964
It’s a funny mistake though. I think intially I also thought it was UK, the Briton.
… I’m not sure if this is a joke or not.
I was actually thinking about this wrt healthcare access earlier. I have a genuinely religious conviction against the intimate, personal details of my condition being processed by a machine and made available online. That is the business of myself and a professional caregiver, not a tech company and whatever “partners” they feel like sharing it with. You’re supposed to be able to opt out, but practically that’s almost never possible
Anyways I know it’s in an entirely different field, but this felt like a hopeful precedent. Thanks for sharing :)
Religious exemption should apply to common sense. That’s just common sense.
Common Sense is just code for “cultural zeitgeist”, there’s no such thing as common sense
This reminds me of a quote from Star Trek Insurrection- “We Believe that when you build a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man.”
When I first saw the film, I rejected that. Seemed like backwards thinking, ignorant Luddite ideology ignoring the reality that when the machine does the man’s work, you free up the man to do other things. When a man doesn’t have to plow the field, he can focus on art and science and philosophy and music and poetry and otherwise taking his mind to the next level. At least that sounded good in my head.
Then I look at what we have now. We have built machines to create art and science and music and poetry, so the man is left to keep taking out the garbage. This is not an improvement. The Baku may not have been totally wrong.
I like Cory Doctorow’s take on it differentiating the two different classes of machine:
In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.
And obviously, a reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.
Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur.
The AI trend has been pushing all of us to be reverse centaurs which is the problem with machines you’re talking about.
The problem is that you start thinking the robot tentacles are a neat tool and that you’re a centaur.
But before long the tentacles take over and you haven’t even realized you’ve become a reverse centaur.
Source : the ancient wisdom of Spider-Man 2 (2004).
I don’t think that in that case the tentacles made Doc Ock a reverse centaur necessarily, but I see the similarities. The tentacles weren’t doing the thinking, and IIRC the neural link increased Otto’s rage and aggression, and suppressed his emotions and compassion (plus his wife died so he had little to care about). Maybe there needs to be a third term where using the machine as a centaur changes the behavior and brain of the operator?
That’s Insurrection, not First Contact.
I don’t want to be a statue!
THAT is First Contact.
Also, 😭…
Nice catch. Fixed
I think the older I get and the more I see all of us being alienated from the fruits of our labors, the more I realize that there is/was value in the reproductive labor of food production, clothing production, etc. I don’t mean that we should all go back to being serfs (though, there are studies that show they worked less than we do), but I think that there’s something lost when most people don’t have anything of value they can point to and say “I made that” or “I had a hand in that.” Most people have bullshit jobs that have very little to do with human thriving/surviving and at the same time, don’t see more people doing science or art or poetry. IDK what the solution is, but it sure feels like we’ve been collectively sold a bill of goods in a lot of ways.
Those “they worked less” articles often twist and lose the truth. They worked less on the specific work for their masters maybe, but they had to because they had to work at home; everything and I mean everything took longer back then. They needed more time to prepare food and darn their socks and split firewood for the winter and whatnot. They couldn’t just run to the nearest store if they needed a loaf of bread. They had to actually make it. So yes, they “worked less” but they also worked a lot more doing their house chores just to survive.
laundry was a total bitch too
Any functional spin laundry machine is saving more time than anything else in the house.
I remember helping my grandmother with the wring washer: the tub would swish only but not spin, so you had to pull out each item and run it through the wringer assembly above the tub, like a giant set of pasta rollers just waiting to eat your hand. Barely faster than beating them on rocks.
I still hang laundry on the line to dry when weather and clean air allow.
You’ll note that I actively disclaimed a desire to go back to serfdom. My broader point is about the alienation of labor and the sole focus on product rather than process.
Also if we’re talking serfs specifically they actually had to work the lands of their lord and didn’t get anything in return, all of it went to the lord. Then also they had to work to sustain themselves and their family. It’s like if they made you today to work 3 weeks for your boss, without pay, then you can work one week for pay to earn your living.
Work with hands good. Need place, purpose
I think the distinction is what we consider “the work of a man”. I don’t consider man’s work to be just physical labor. A lot of things can do that. I think the true work of humanity is to use our ingenuity and critical thinking to do more. I’m not saying physical labor is not important, but there are several jobs that require physical labor and take thought and troubleshooting. I don’t need a human being to screw in the same screw on an assembly line a hundred times a day, but a human being may be needed to determine why that screw ends up being a failure point in the final product.
There is of course lots to be said about the value of a hard days work and the toil and effort of physical labor, but I think we are all capable of so much more. It need not just be that.
I don’t consider man’s work to be just physical labor.
The key here is that the English language currently does a piss-poor job of creating a destinction between meaningfull, avocational, enriching “work”, and meaningless, necessity-driven “labour.” Anthropologists have found pre-agrarian cultures tended to do far less labour, but had plenty of activity. I blame pretestant “work ethic” for equating taking out the trash and all that with meaningful work that makes a person.
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?
I get the reference, but that’s not really related to what I said. I don’t want to just ignore your comment if it’s a serious point, but at no point did I suggest otherwise.
I was being a little tongue-in-cheek.
I just don’t super agree with your premise that the “real” work of man is to do more, is all. I like to think it’s more to accomplish something with intention, craft, and rigor. We’ve disconnected ourselves from our “real” work.
My verbiage may differ slightly from yours, but I believe we agree. “Intention, craft” would indicate something similar to ingenuity to me. Obviously, totally OK for you to disagree, or think I did not explain appropriately, but my point was that we are not just beasts of burden, we can think and analyze and have opinions therefore allowing us to do things with “Intention” and to not just create things but to “craft” them.
The thing is that not everyone wants to do art, science or philosophy. Some people want to plow their field, they’re happy with that. Who are we to take that away from them?
Reasonable compromises must be made. I won’t lie to you, being someone that spent the better part of their career performing manual labor I would find it hard to believe you have spent any extended amount of time working a farm.
The share of people that want to perform, very specifically, back breaking labor is small compared to the number of people that would prefer to do literally anything else. We can make accommodations for that small number bit automating plowing but not science is a reasonable compromise.
