In what feels like it could be the first little rolling pebble of a rockslide that’s about to slam a torrent of boulders down around Silicon Valley HR departments’ heads, a software engineer has successfully received a religious exemption against being forced to work with AI. This is per Business Insider, which reports that engineer Erin Maus successfully lobbied her tech company employers on the idea that, as a Unitarian Universalist, using AI was opposed to her ethical and environmental beliefs, and is now back to happily writing her code by hand. And while the actions of one company in regards to one employee obviously doesn’t set any kind of legal precedent, it does feel like a bellwether for industries that are getting pretty militant about their employees filtering everything they do through the nascent technology.
Many techie Catholics, for instance, have looked to words from Pope Leo XIV, who recently wrote a hefty encyclical raising questions about the role of artificial intelligence in the modern world. The Pontiff didn’t go full Butlerian Jihad or anything—instead cautioning Catholics to simply be thoughtful in their use of the tech—but Chicago Pope weighing in on the matter at all has raised a lot of questions about whether Catholics can use those kinds of public statements as justifications for a religious exemption from AI use under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (Not that official statements from a higher authority are necessarily required; Maus got her exemption based on her own beliefs, despite the fact that the Unitarian Universalist Association has yet to publicize a stance on the matter.)
As noted in Business Insider, the modern Supreme Court has been pretty friendly to extensions of religious accommodations in recent years, whether on behalf of employers (as when it ruled that Hobby Lobby didn’t have to pay for health plans covering contraception for employees in 2014) or employees (as when a United States Postal Service worker argued in 2023 that he should be religiously exempted from working Sunday shifts). It’ll be interesting to see whether—to editorialize briefly—it’ll be quite so quick to approve of exemptions for things that don’t totally suck; in any case, this will absolutely not be the last instance of employees hoping to get a little deus in between them and the machina.
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