'AI refuser' quit her dream job, and hopes others follow
smh.com.au
smh.com.au
Feels like a language limitation to me. It is hard to describe succinctly the complexities of AI use that preserve a human element or recognizes externalities. The wording is not immediately obvious and require subtlety that I rarely see in HN, unless it's about the tech itself and it's minutae.
Curious to see if HN could have any kind of thoughtful conversation on it but so far I haven't seen one.
https://www.commonplace.org/p/reining-in-the-unaccountabilit...
In this case this person was "responsible for getting five- to 12-year-olds to play football in the Hunter region".
She would have the occasional exposure to children, market to them, gather statistics and survey them. She asked if she could not expose this group to AI and the answer was "no".
> Boyle is an outlier, and knows it. She no longer owns a smartphone, has deleted her social media accounts and now lives in a converted Toyota 4WD.
> She followed up in writing to Haagsma, setting out research on AI’s labour market and extinction risks and asking the league to pause its adoption.
> By mid-June, Boyle had told her managers she would not have Copilot on her laptop, would not put her work through AI systems and would not direct her team to use it. She wrote that the change was causing her significant distress and that she felt unsafe at work.
> Boyle is now living in a 1986 Toyota Troop Carrier with her cat, carrying a flip phone and handing cards to strangers on their screens that read: “I’m open to talk, want to have a conversation?”
She’s a kook who thinks she’s Sarah Connor. Your employer using Copilot is not a threat to your safety, you don’t get to tell your employer what they can install on their laptop, you don’t get to stop your colleagues from using AI, and if you write to the general manager warning them about the apocalypse you aren’t going to find them very responsive.
There are thousands and thousands of people who have been pulling shit like this for every topic under the sun, from contrails to fluoride in the water for generations. We don’t give them publicity because we understand the proportionality of their grievances and react accordingly. This is only making the news because the topic of this person’s fixation happens to be AI.
Shame on who flagged it.
Aside from that, the AFL doesn't seem to realize that using AI means uploading data to another company.
""" The AFL also gave her a technical answer. Copilot, its technology team explained, can only see files and emails Boyle could already open herself. It doesn’t give anyone new access to anything, the AFL’s information stays on the AFL’s own systems .... """
This statement seems reasonable enough
""" Meanwhile, on March 16, Boyle emailed to report that a trainee planned to tidy up a list of registered AFL program participants by putting it through an AI tool. The list held children’s personal details, drawn from PlayHQ, the platform community clubs use to register players. No AI policy existed at the time.
“Sharing detailed personal information of our registered participants to third-party AI companies seems like it would be in breach of their privacy,” she wrote. """
Finally, this alone is reason enough to rage quit.... """ Boyle says the facilitator told staff to give their AI assistants human names, rejecting suggestions like “Chatty” as insufficiently human, and to have the AI generate pictures of them. """
I can see the long term safety issues but have trouble seeing shorter term ones. Her attitude reminds me of President Benjamin Harrison refusing to touch the newly installed light switches in the White House for fear of electrocution circa 1891. I don't doubt his woman's sincerity or sanity, so I would like to better understand her safety concern. If her answer is "Roko’s Basilisk" I'll be at least sympathetic.
All I see (as a software developer) is bad developers producing way more bad code which just increases my workload as I need to review it, which in turn they will just feed back into the hallucination machine so I just end up remote prompting something until it is “good enough” and I will fix it properly when I next work on that part of the code base.
Managers push everything to AI and to Southeast Asia trying to get things done cheaper without realizing how much technical debt they are taking on. Worst part is that if this continues actual good workers, like myself, will be fired for slowing down progress and in decade either so will be the bad developers as then the managers can just prompt the code or whole software industry will collapse under all this bad code.
Either way I see no improvement for anyone except the Epstein class.
Which is understandable. The problem is not solved by resigning. The problem is solved by changing their employer's policy.
This battle sadly was lost before I was even born. People let Epstein class get all the power and do whatever they wanted and now it is too late to make a difference. This economy will collapse one way or another and status quo won’t change before that.
We're going to smash the looms rather than figure out how to share them, again.
If your think smashing this generations looms will get you there, your mistaken. See what it took for communism to take hold, and plan for that
Who owns the looms and what they do with them isn’t inherently an issue if all loom owners can do is buy an extra Yacht. Instead they can enforce ungoverned law on society through a combination of disproportionate influence in government and through market forces where private policy (especially at large) become nearly undifferentiated from law (the policy that benefits them becomes so widespread and normalized that alternatives are for all intent and purposes impractical or unreasonable, therefor private policy within a capital ownership domain is law or they’re a monopoly so their policy is the policy).
But I think you’re right, as always we’re going to focus on the adjacent issues vs addressing the root of the problem. The issue is what wealth inequality affords one, when it is capable of infringing on rights and livelihoods of others, not that they necessarily have to share the other luxuries and rewards of their attained wealth. I care not how many luxuries in life Musk has, I may be envious from time to time but whatever. I care a lot more when things he does or says has unrealistic influence and affects me directly, just because he sits atop a mountain of capital and we pretend that mountain of capital somehow was bestowed upon him from divinity that he should have such influence. I’m picking on Musk because he’s the richest and has clear examples of this, he’s by no means alone… it’s that class of wealth at large.
Not we. They. Maybe you are part of that group too but "we" certainly don't.
> The AFL’s refusal to allow Boyle a choice is not unlawful. Employers in Australia can install software on the equipment they own, are exempt from privacy law when handling employee records