> Her objections run from the immediate to the apocalyptic: the water and power consumed by data centres, what the technology is doing to people’s capacity to think, and research suggesting advanced AI could pose a risk of human extinction.
> 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.
I don't think it's fair to call her a "kook", though I share her views on AI so I'm biased. Comparisons with contrails or concerns over fluoridation aren't applicable as there are real measurable problems with AI and the resources that it consumes.
For me, the biggest issue with AI is the consolidation of power into the hands of the billionaires, or possibly the likelihood of another financial collapse.
AI boosters on this site will be very mad that this person exists, but I'm glad there are people that stick to their principles. Principles that aren't just "productivity" or "efficiency". People can and should have other motives that are just as if not more important.
There will be plenty of "AI Boosters" lining up to take that job. If you think about it, she did exactly what the "boosters" wanted: get out of the way.
The AI booster dream is that of job erasure. Even if one 'put AI into everything' fanatic gets her job now, it'll be ultimately meaningless because their ideology is that of permitting our irrelevance as well as ceding jobs and livelihoods to the people who own the profits from AI.
Speak for yourself. As an AI enthusiast and senior developer, my dream is to remove the many tedious tasks from the software engineering job. "Irrelevance" is the kind of extrapolation from the skeptics that we've been hearing since the dawn of computing.
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".
Perhaps they can't or refuse to consider ethical arguments surrounding it? It's just tech as-is to them, without externalities (which is disingenuous).
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.
It seems like a lot of people are disagreeing with something she isn't saying. Surely it makes sense to have some concerns before dumping a bunch of kids' personal info into an AI?
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.
"""
My philosophy has been, and continues to be, that AI is potentially a wonderful tool to enhance my productivity and work, but the moment I start using it to replace other’s productivity and work, then all sorts of problems crop up.
If it’s such an inherently useful tool (vital and inevitable, its proponents often claim), then simply provide it and allow individuals the space to find how/where it can be useful for them. Forcing mandates and tracking metrics will only serve to make it less useful, and give managers something to scapegoat, in my opinion.
That said, I work solo, so it’s an easy philosophy to maintain, and the rest is presumptive. I’m open to having my mind changed.
Workers should get to decide individually if they want to use AI or not. It's the only fair solution. Unions need to fight for job guarantees not restrict their own members from using tech when they want to.
In what world does including AI “improve our workplace for all”?
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.
In current economy it is hard to keep your convictions. I am starting to be on the anti-ai side of the issue, but even without kids to take care of I don’t see myself quitting over it since I need to make as much money as I can before the bad times roll in and I need to rely on unemployment benefits. I don’t think people with families and mortgages are going to join me in any sort of boycott to not risk their jobs.
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.
I dont think so. Disengaging from the system does not move the needle toward collectivization at all. Step one would be finding like minded coworkers which she didnt seem to do.
> 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
GDPR absolutely, 100%, applies to work people do for their employers. That's mostly the point of it! In this case I was wondering about the processing of the personal data of minors.
I really hate how the excruciatingly overdue reckoning for tech elites and income inequality is turning into this religious schism over AI and datacenters.
We're going to smash the looms rather than figure out how to share them, again.
The underlying issue is really capital ownership, what classifies as capital, protections around it, and how much leverage capital provides on a society and democracy (that part being the most important, IMHO).
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.
Their "we" clearly refers to the worker class at large, even if they're not an active participant in the smashing. Who's your "we"? Are you part of the group that owns most of the fruits of AI efficiency and whose wealth will skyrocket to unimaginable levels among the sea of unemployed poors if the promises pan out?
Not sure if I got his comment wrong or you but he said that smashing their AI looms would be the wrong move and we (the one that I'm part of but OP isn't) should hope for the tech elites to be kind enough this time to share. We should definitely smash their AI looms.
Pretty sure you misunderstood this person. I don't think they are advocating for the smashing of looms, rather fear that the movement that could redistribute the benefits of this new technology will go down that dark road again.
I also think the reckoning is overdue, maybe it will never come to be.
What reckoning? The reckoning for large scale IP theft, scaling up what they call "ghost work", the usage of natural resources and land which power data centers with no return to the people that depend on those and the already existing predatory and disgusting business practices that they have always partaken in. (I assume)
> Her objections run from the immediate to the apocalyptic: the water and power consumed by data centres, what the technology is doing to people’s capacity to think, and research suggesting advanced AI could pose a risk of human extinction.
> 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.
This kook wanted to protect children's personal data, whatever else you think of her.
Shame on who flagged it.
I don't think it's fair to call her a "kook", though I share her views on AI so I'm biased. Comparisons with contrails or concerns over fluoridation aren't applicable as there are real measurable problems with AI and the resources that it consumes.
For me, the biggest issue with AI is the consolidation of power into the hands of the billionaires, or possibly the likelihood of another financial collapse.
AI boosters on this site will be very mad that this person exists, but I'm glad there are people that stick to their principles. Principles that aren't just "productivity" or "efficiency". People can and should have other motives that are just as if not more important.
There will be plenty of "AI Boosters" lining up to take that job. If you think about it, she did exactly what the "boosters" wanted: get out of the way.
The AI booster dream is that of job erasure. Even if one 'put AI into everything' fanatic gets her job now, it'll be ultimately meaningless because their ideology is that of permitting our irrelevance as well as ceding jobs and livelihoods to the people who own the profits from AI.
Speak for yourself. As an AI enthusiast and senior developer, my dream is to remove the many tedious tasks from the software engineering job. "Irrelevance" is the kind of extrapolation from the skeptics that we've been hearing since the dawn of computing.
Yes, I'm sure AI boosters are in shambles.
They will be, if they can't find accountability sinks.
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".
If not then why do they get so upset here on every similar thread? Complaining about "anti-AI"
Perhaps they can't or refuse to consider ethical arguments surrounding it? It's just tech as-is to them, without externalities (which is disingenuous).
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.
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Strawman for a third time, might as well keep them coming!
Yet, here you are, commenting :)
In jovial mood, not in shambles though.
"""jovial"""
?
You're still doing the thing where you make defensive comments though, just now pretending it's about something tangential
What? I think you must be replying to wrong comment or something.
It seems like a lot of people are disagreeing with something she isn't saying. Surely it makes sense to have some concerns before dumping a bunch of kids' personal info into an AI?
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. """
My philosophy has been, and continues to be, that AI is potentially a wonderful tool to enhance my productivity and work, but the moment I start using it to replace other’s productivity and work, then all sorts of problems crop up.
If it’s such an inherently useful tool (vital and inevitable, its proponents often claim), then simply provide it and allow individuals the space to find how/where it can be useful for them. Forcing mandates and tracking metrics will only serve to make it less useful, and give managers something to scapegoat, in my opinion.
That said, I work solo, so it’s an easy philosophy to maintain, and the rest is presumptive. I’m open to having my mind changed.
Workers should get to decide individually if they want to use AI or not. It's the only fair solution. Unions need to fight for job guarantees not restrict their own members from using tech when they want to.
I don't appreciate the celebration around acts of individualism rather than collectivizing to improve our workplace for all.
In what world does including AI “improve our workplace for all”?
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.
I think parent comment is saying this person should have organized with their coworkers who had similar complaints rather than resigning individually.
Which is understandable. The problem is not solved by resigning. The problem is solved by changing their employer's policy.
In current economy it is hard to keep your convictions. I am starting to be on the anti-ai side of the issue, but even without kids to take care of I don’t see myself quitting over it since I need to make as much money as I can before the bad times roll in and I need to rely on unemployment benefits. I don’t think people with families and mortgages are going to join me in any sort of boycott to not risk their jobs.
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.
Proselytizing actions like this is step one of collectivization.
I dont think so. Disengaging from the system does not move the needle toward collectivization at all. Step one would be finding like minded coworkers which she didnt seem to do.
I don't think I would enjoy AI powered communism more than AI powered capitalism
Does Australia have privacy provisions similar to the gdpr?
From the article:
> 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
I was thinking more about the rights of the children in question.
Gdpr doen't apply to work you do for your employer, on employer's equipment either AFAIK
GDPR absolutely, 100%, applies to work people do for their employers. That's mostly the point of it! In this case I was wondering about the processing of the personal data of minors.
I really hate how the excruciatingly overdue reckoning for tech elites and income inequality is turning into this religious schism over AI and datacenters.
We're going to smash the looms rather than figure out how to share them, again.
The underlying issue is really capital ownership, what classifies as capital, protections around it, and how much leverage capital provides on a society and democracy (that part being the most important, IMHO).
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.
> We're going to smash the looms rather than figure out how to share them, again.
Not we. They. Maybe you are part of that group too but "we" certainly don't.
Their "we" clearly refers to the worker class at large, even if they're not an active participant in the smashing. Who's your "we"? Are you part of the group that owns most of the fruits of AI efficiency and whose wealth will skyrocket to unimaginable levels among the sea of unemployed poors if the promises pan out?
Not sure if I got his comment wrong or you but he said that smashing their AI looms would be the wrong move and we (the one that I'm part of but OP isn't) should hope for the tech elites to be kind enough this time to share. We should definitely smash their AI looms.
What reckoning? This is not related to tech elites in the least, but simply a consequence of capitalism.
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
Pretty sure you misunderstood this person. I don't think they are advocating for the smashing of looms, rather fear that the movement that could redistribute the benefits of this new technology will go down that dark road again. I also think the reckoning is overdue, maybe it will never come to be. What reckoning? The reckoning for large scale IP theft, scaling up what they call "ghost work", the usage of natural resources and land which power data centers with no return to the people that depend on those and the already existing predatory and disgusting business practices that they have always partaken in. (I assume)
"Tech elites" are so deeply intertwined with capitalism that they might as well be synonymous.
It’s hard for me to understand why this was downvoted since it’s plainly a simple fact.
A significant fraction of HN users are either are "tech elites" themselves or have paychecks that depend on them.
In the case of the US, 1929 and WWII bought significant changes. Then Reagan started the path back to the XIX century.
This must be the most utterly trivializing summary of the 20th century I have ever seen in my life
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It's a client-side paywall so most people with ad blockers don't even noticed there is one.