The New Plain People: A sect is coming that opts out of AI

Drive through Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, America's oldest and largest Amish settlement, and you will see a small wooden shed at the end of a farm lane. It looks like an outhouse, but it’s really a phone booth.

That is the part everybody gets wrong about the Amish. 

The Amish do not reject the telephone. They reject the telephone in the house. A phone in the kitchen interrupts dinner, but a phone at the end of a quarter-mile lane in February only gets used when it truly matters. It’s the same technology, just different placement for a different family.

Instead of a blanketed ban on technology, they insist on deliberation. Every church district has an Ordnung, a written and unwritten set of rules.

And new tools get evaluated against one question: what will this do to us? 

Diesel generators are ok, but grid electricity is prohibited. Battery calculators are allowed; however, television is not. The logic may look inconsistent from outside, but every call is absolutely deliberate.

And we’re not talking about a small community here…There are roughly ~400,000 Amish in North America, and the population has been doubling about every twenty years.

Think of your friend from the gym who isn’t on instagram, or your kid’s nanny who has no clue AI exists, don’t they seem totally fine? I interviewed an author this week, he swears he never has and never will interact with AI. He called it brain chip, he was a little whacky.

I predict this group will eventually unite into a movement and create its own written and unwritten set of rules regarding the use of AI.

Keep in mind, these are not tech-illiterate people who missed the boat. They look at the boat, price the ticket, and decided to stay on the dock purposefully. They are going to pick a year and lock in, except instead of whatever year the Amish picked, they may opt for ~2009.

Here is what I think their Ordnung might look like.

No machine may speak in a human voice. You may use the tool, but it must sound like a tool. The moment it sounds like your daughter, you stop being able to remember what you are talking to. (Yes, I stole the concept for this one from Dune, you nerd)

Nothing enters the house that listens before it is asked. No always-on microphone. No car that records the cabin. And definitely no doorbell that keeps a copy of when you come and go.

Every decision that changes a life carries a human name. Think denying a loan, setting bail, firing someone, dosing a patient. An algorithm may advise, but a person decides.

You may not consult an oracle. A tool gives you an answer and leaves the decision to you. An oracle makes the decision and hands you the verdict. 

No image of a real person that the person was not present for. If they did not stand in front of a camera, the picture is a forgery.

No black-box output. If a machine produced something and you can't account for how it reached that result, you don't get to pass it off as finished work.

The dead stay dead. No voices reconstructed and no grandmother chatbots. Resist the urge, that is not actually her lasagna recipe.

Children are taught by humans. No AI tutors, no algorithmic classrooms, until they are old enough to choose one. Future class warfare problems, the rich kids will have human teachers.

Their kids can sit still for ninety minutes, which stops being a quirk and starts being worth money. And when the AI goes down, and it will, the people who can still do the work by hand get to charge whatever they want. Ask anyone who could still weld in 2021.

Then there is the pickup. In a country where the average new car runs two dozen sensors and quietly sells what they collect, a 1994 truck with no telematics and no cabin microphone becomes a genuine privacy product. It does not record the drive, and it does not testify eighteen months later.

Here is the catch: When AI designs a cancer drug, they will take it. Of course they will. But that drug only exists because millions of other people used the tools they refused to touch. Their entire way of life depends on most of the world making the opposite choice. 

Skip the robes and the ledgers. The real story is that the Amish have a technology adoption committee and your company does not.

Every business in America is writing an Ordnung right now, by accident, in the form of ten thousand small unexamined decisions. Somebody turned on an AI agent. Somebody let a model set prices overnight. Somebody is generating inventory descriptions nobody reads before they post. 

The good news is, your business doesn't need a complicated AI policy. It needs to answer three questions: What can we let AI just do by itself? What must a human be responsible for? And where do we draw the line on this stuff? 

The Amish asked whether to let the telephone in. Then they decided where to put it.

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