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[–] 91 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I suddenly just became religious.

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  • [–] 37 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    Praise be to whatever gets me exemption!

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    You should have seen me getting out of jury duty. Legendary sermon. They dismissed our whole group.

    I would have preferred to talk about rational reasons to oppose the torture/gulag system, but unfortunately this enslaver state only privileges religious ideology.

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  • [–] 243 points 1 week ago (27 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 92 points 1 week ago (22 children)
  • [–] 16 points 1 week ago (19 children)

    I mean it's literally not, it's a philosophy, even the American Humanist Society states so

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  • [–] -1 points 1 week ago (14 children)

    There's no objective difference between religion and philosophy.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (7 children)

    One is a way of thinking, the other is an interpretation of reality.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (3 children)

    The other one is bullshit *

    And philosophy isn't bullshit for sure.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    I dunno, some philosophy is bullshit

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    Yeah, but just because all then all philosophy is bullshit. Some movies are bullshit but not for that the cinema and all the movies are bullshit too.

    Anyways, every statement, even stating that philosophy is bullshit or isn't knowledge, is a philosophic statement to some degree or another.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (2 children)

    “an interpretation of reality”… so it’s just a re-occurring thought lmao?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    No it's a set of fundamental assumptions about the nature of the universe and reality.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    Where a christian would draw faith from their spiritual deity, a humanist might draw faith from the fact that they’re alive because of the human spirit, no? A “spirit” which only exists because an absurdly bizarre amount of coincidences happened… so many in fact, that it honestly makes total sense that even the most intelligent people among us could believe (or in my perspective: fall for) that it was actually instead the doing of a being who is in a completely different realm of existence from our own.

    I promise I’m not just being pedantic or whatever, I’m truly trying to understand how there’s any difference between a philosophy effectively based on some santa-clause-tier shit and one simply based on the (actually phenomenal) evidence we have available.

    Hell, I even grew up as a christian before I gained full consciousness and wondered why the fuck god would torture me with a life that is so comically filled with absolute horrors that go beyond anything I would comprehend on my own.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (3 children)

    There is.

    Philosophy is structured and rational thought.

    Religion is the opposite. Easy.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (2 children)

    It is impossible to construct ethics from first principles. A study of philosophy would tell you that. Logic can take you from one step to another, but at the end of your chain of reason will always lie some pure belief, an act of faith.

    For example, many ethical systems can be traced to a few basic axioms, like "human suffering is bad." Or "humans deserve to live." Or "all lives have value." But these are statements that cannot be produced through mathematics. There's no equation that can tell you it's a good thing for a child not to die of hunger. At some point, every moral system traces back to certain basic axioms that are pure beliefs, not rationally derived from any logic or mathematical equation.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    It is impossible to construct ethics from first principles.

    You've never read Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals? That's pretty basic stuff, like Ethics 101 basic.

    And I'm not even a huge Kant fan let alone a deontologist, in fact I'm more of a situationist, but you should at least be familiar with the Categorical Imperative before you make a nebulous claim like "A study of philosophy would tell you that."

    Sometimes abstraction is good and necessary, but a statement like "There's no equation that can tell you it's a good thing for a child not to die of hunger" is an over-abstraction. There's no need to abstract it further, because the situation is already concrete. Anyone who has experienced grief can tell you that, and an ivory tower that's too sterile to taste grief has nothing to offer the world in the way of ethics.

    Only a sociopath would have to wrestle with the question of whether there's anything objectively bad about children dying. Do you expect anyone to try to prove it mathematically? Because that would be entirely the wrong approach.

    If you can't state "living is a good thing, and therefore premature loss of an innocent life is a bad thing" as a first principle, then there could be no point in debating ethics with you because you're already amoral.

    I'm not accusing you of thinking that way, I understand you're presenting a line of reasoning in the abstract as a thought experiment. I'm simply telling you what my response would be to someone who tried actually arguing along that line.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    I mean, prompt writing is like wishes with Djinns.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 40 points 1 week ago

    Freedom from religion is more important than freedom of religion.

    Time to apply this to financial economics.

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  • [–] 34 points 1 week ago (4 children)

    Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

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  • [–] 34 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 33 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (26 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    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).

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    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?

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  • Maybe there needs to be a third term where using the machine as a centaur changes the behavior and brain of the operator?

    Over in the fuck cars communities we call it carbrain when driving does this to people but I'd be surprised if there wasn't a more general term.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 week ago (5 children)

    That's Insurrection, not First Contact.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)
  • 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.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 week ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    laundry was a total bitch too

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • 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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    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.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 week ago* (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 26 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

    One religious exemption, please!

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  • [–] 21 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    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 :)

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    I view it more from the sacredness of the human voice and word.

    Civilizations that existed closer to the invention of writing treated it a mysticism and magic. The ancient Egyptians would write on their tombs, "speak my name and I shall live again." Words are extension of the spirit. They allow a piece of yourself to transcend time, place, and even death itself. Words have power. The words you write are a piece of your soul.

    I don't mind AI for replacing things that are not works of human expressiveness and creativity. Want to use an AI to test new compounds for potential medicinal effects? Go nuts. Want to use AI to optimize some soulless manufacturing process? Be my guest.

    But no human being should ever be forced by their employer to have a machine speak for them. Or to make art for them. Or any other endeavor where genuine human artistry and creativity are involved. My words are my own. My thoughts are my own. Everything I write, for good or ill, is an extension of my own mind and spirit. And I find something deeply morally wrong about people who take the soulless words of a machine and pass them off as their own.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    You've expressed really well here why nothing gets under my skin quite like someone parroting off AI responses as a meat-proxy for some LLM. It's like watching someone voluntarily give up their autonomy, or even just abdicating their birthright of consciousness.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 week ago
    [–] 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Though it's kinda funny that Humanism was the one to do it, it's literally atheism with extra steps

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  • [–] 17 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    If Scientology can get a tax exception as a religious institution, then this guy can get title 9 coverage to not use AI at work as far as I am concerned.

    If it was anywhere but a university I would have also expected him to be on the short list for layoffs next round for such a choice as well.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 week ago (1 child)
  • [–] 13 points 1 week ago

    hold up. keep your torches lit.

    It should be noted that while anyone can request a Title VII exemption, it will only be granted if the applicant has a deep moral conviction that could count as an article of faith. Aside from that, the law also states that the request should not place an “undue hardship on the employer’s business.” So, even though Durman is no longer personally required to use AI tools for his tasks, he is still expected to attend meetings and cooperate with colleagues who use AI or to submit materials to AI tools, as needed.

    TLDR; this guy won, but you probably won't.

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