Science & Technology

“The Unabomber Was Right”#11: Phone Wars

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Lately that most familiar of technological marvels, the telephone, has been making me crazy and my life miserable almost daily because of abuse, misuse, and overuse.

Let me count the ways, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning would say:

1. I just saw an allegedly hilarious TV add about “multi-processing” showing people walking into poles, tripping over obstacles and falling into trash cans while walking in public while either staring at a smart phone screen or chatting away using the speaker. I don’t even recall the product (Effective ad there, guys!), but it did tick me off. it’s not a funny phenomenon. Just yesterday, and asshole walking along staring at his phone nearly collided with me and Spuds, startling both of us, and I had to fling all of my weight against the leash from keeping my protective dog from biting the asshole’s face off—which he deserved, but my dog would be the one blamed. One woman nearly did the same thing a few weeks ago jogging while looking at her phone. People who do this are inconsiderate, reckless and self-absorbed fools, and dangerous as well. Yet such conduct is rapidly becoming a social norm. Last week, also while walking Spuds, I noted that eight straight pedestrians I encountered including three dog-walkers, one mother pushing a toddler in a stroller and three teens were all proceeding while staring at a phone screen or talking into a phone held in front of them. They are effectively cutting off the world while they are in the world, furthering the isolation of humanity, and increasing the alienation of American from each other. It is uncivil—rude—as well. When ethics fails law takes over (and usually makes a mess of things), so I am not advocating a law, but social disapproval, beginning with parents telling their kids not to do this would be a nice start.

2. I recently had to call the D.C. Office of Corporate Registration (or whatever it’s called) to eliminate my still-born law firm, BernsteinMarshall, PLLC. Screwed up beyond belief like everything else in the District, the “convenient website” had no link for ending a company, so I had to call the office. The pert, friendly, chatterbox of a recording went on for ten minutes telling me all the things the office could do for me, then spent another five telling me about all the options (“which may have changed”), then after I pushed one button, started down another list of topics while I screamed, “SHUT UP!!!!!” like Michael Palin in the Monty Python Torremolinos” travel agent skit.

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The “Get Trump!” Files: The Washington Post Weaponizes “The Streisand Effect”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Of course it did.

Some, or many, Trump-haters out there…or the Democratic National Committee—after all, Democrats cheat—sent out into social media the above fake photos of the President kissing White House aide Natalie Harp, the young aide who has been targeted by the Angry Left as a possible object of Trump’s sexual attention. This went “viral,” The Washington Post claims, though if my fanatically Trump-Deranged Facebook friends didn’t peep about it, and they believe anything if it can be interpreted a barely negative about the President, I am dubious.

So the Washington Post decided to make certain that as many people see the photos as possible. Althouse’s immediate reaction was “WaPo wants you to know it’s fake… but you’ve got to see this, got to get it imprinted on your fragile brain.” Bingo. The Post even introduces the fake photos with “‘Hoaxes like these are “death by a thousand cuts’ that chip away at people’s trust, one expert said.” And here’s another cut! I wonder if the Post staff stood around in a mob while the article was being prepared, chanting “CUT! CUT! CUT! CUT!”

The Post did include references to BBC journalist and fact-checker Shayan Sardarizadeh’s nine-part thread on X, explaining his process for determining that both images were resolutely fakes. That arrives deep into the article however.

In 2003, Barbara Streisand sued to force an aerial photographer to remove a photo of her Malibu cliff-top mansion from a website. The lawsuit made the photo into global news, and hundreds of thousands of views and downloads when the photo had only been downloaded six times, twice by Babs’ lawyers, before the controversy. Techdirt later coined the term “The Streisand Effect,” which has come up many times on Ethics Alarms. Frankly, I’m surprised that the Axis of Unethical Conduct hasn’t been using AI-generated fake photos far more than it has so far. “CUT! CUT! CUT! CUT!” Of course it is an unethical and despicable practice, but as Harry Reid will remind us from the Lake of Fire in Hell, “It works!”

AI Hysteria and the “Do Something Scale”

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

In 2023 I presented the Ethics Alarms “Do Something!” Scale, which was subsequently enhanced and expanded with suggestion from AM Golden and Michael West. Right now, in great part because one of our political parties depends on fearmongering as its primary campaign strategy, we have seen an increase in Doomsday scenarios regarding the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, escalating protests, and various well-meaning prescriptions to save humanity, or something. A substack essay by Damien Charlotin has received a great deal of attention: you can read it here. It is thoughtful, erudite, thorough and deluded. The essay is also a typical “expert” reaction to “Do Something!” hysterics.

Here is the revised scale….

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Ethics Quiz: The Law Student’s AI Query

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I am something of a persona non grata on the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers (because I’m on to them, and they know it) listserv, but the list still has its uses. For example, one of the more ethical ethics lawyers circulated a question he received from a student in his legal ethics class regarding the use of artificial intelligence in class:

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Ethics Quote of the Month: New Mexico Supreme Court Justice C. Shannon Bacon

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“Do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what’s going on in the world? Because the problem with lawyers relying on AI hallucinations is an above-the-fold story every single day.So either you have buried your head in the sand … and that’s an intentional choice to be uninformed, or you took a gamble, and neither of those are consistent with the code of conduct.”

—-New Mexico Supreme Court Justice C. Shannon Bacon excoriating lawyer Stephen Aarons for submitting a brief riddled with ChatGPT “hallucinations.”

Good for her, but still not strong enough.

Aarons’ brief included references to imaginary witnesses and fake testimony from at least one real witness. That AI bots are likely to make up case cites and even statutory language has been recognized and publicized widely, not just in legal publications but in the general news media since early 2024. Lawyers, including those with large national law firms like Morgan & Morgan and even the Justice Department continuing to file these bogus bot-authored court documents is amazing to me. And they are too stupid, ignorant and lazy to even proof-read what the bots wrote! One judge recently railed specifically at using ChatGPT for legal work, which he compared to using Mad Magazine as a legal reference.

Bacon threw the metaphorical book at Aarons, removing him as attorney from the case of a 60-year-old man convicted last year of murdering his wife, found him in contempt of court, ordered him to pay $5,000 to a client protection fund, and referred him to the bar for potential discipline. The murder appeal will be handled now by a public defender.

It isn’t just lawyers, of course, who deserve tongue-lashings like this. Teachers, professors, newspaper editors, legislators, politicians, screenwriters, and, yes, judges to name just a few of the affected groups have an obligation to keep up-to-date on the AI revolution, and a disturbing number of them are not even close, which is inexcusable.

Two veteran members of Congress, Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. James Clyburn recently indicated that they were ill-informed regarding AI. That this is, frighteningly, not unusual shouldn’t give us any comfort. Lawmakers are notorious for taking an inordinate amount of time to understand new developing technology, as when the late Senator Ted Stevens, while chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, described the internet as a “series of tubes.” Like the internet but perhaps even more so, however, artificial intelligence is a civilization-altering (and perhaps -threatening) phenomenon moving at the speed of light. Those who are too dim, indolent, unimaginative and irresponsible to keep up need to get out of the way and retire to some nice, safe, quiet pursuit like beachcombing or golf.

Oh…it’s the Rules of Professional Conduct, Your Honor, not the “code.” Judges have ethics codes. Lawyers haven’t been governed by a “code” for 40 years.

Try to keep up.

On The California-Texas Foiled Baby Murder Case, Part I: Prelude

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Yesterday, an ugly abortion controversy was resolved by the birth of “Baby Gabriel.” Here the legal/ethical gray areas involving hired surrogate mothers and the legal/ethical not-quite-so-gray areas regarding legal abortion mated to create a monster.

Upon learning that the baby gestating in their surrogate’s womb was not perfect (the unborn boy had a congenital heart defect), a California couple decided to exercise a provision in the surrogacy contract and force the mother-by-proxy to undergo an abortion. Instead, the surrogate fled to Texas, where abortion is illegal. Thanks in part to the intervention of Texas AG Ken Paxton (who is running for governor), the baby in question was born. Now there is a dispute over who gets custody. The birth mother has decided she wants the child anti-abortion activists have named “Gabriel.” The couple that wanted to have him killed wants him too.

Guess which I would choose, were I the infant.

I’ll examine that mess in Part II, but ahead, from the EA archives, is the last post Ethics Alarms had regarding the generally messy ethics issue of surrogate motherhood, from 2016, Pre-Unethical Conditions: Surrogate Mother Contracts And Making Babies With Jerks…

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Hey Asshole: Look Up and Say “Hello!”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I had a doctor’s appointment today. Taking the elevator from the 9th floor to the lobby, I encounter one you man riding in the elevator already, with his face buried in his phone. Two more riders got on at stops as we went down. All walked in already focused entirely on their phones, and their eyes didn’t move. I looked around for a friendly face, a smile, some hint of humanity. Nothing. I came this close to booming out, “Well, hello, everybody!” (I did that once.)

I regard this behavior as simply rude, and its slow but steady development into a social norm as ominous for society and the species. I was already pondering the problem earlier in the week after seeing another one of those Progressive ads about the coach who tries to stop young couples who have become home-owners from “turning into their parents.” It’s a funny series, but in this particular installment, most of the conduct from the young homeowner was simple friendliness to a stranger.

Indeed, my father was always prone to chat up strangers. Not my mother: if you weren’t Greek, a family member, or someone already known to her, you were presumptively an enemy agent or a disguised invader from outer space. In this realm, as with many others, I took Dad as a role model, and experience has taught me that it is the right approach to the world and society around us. For one thing, I have learned how a random act of attention and kindness can brighten an otherwise dreary day.

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Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC)

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Clyburn is already presumptively a blight on the body politick since he is widely regarded as responsible for “saving” Joe Biden’s candidacy in 2020. And didn’t that work out well!

Even aside from his role in the Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck, Rep. Clyburn has one of the worst Ethics Alarms dossiers of any politician. Most recently, EA noted that Cliburn told the dim-bulb ladies “The View” that Republicans were trying to restore slavery, and that isn’t even necessarily the dumbest thing he has said in public over the years. Cliburn is neither honest, ethical, fair or bright, but he did walk shoulder-to-shoulder with the sainted Martin Luther King in civil rights protests, and that is sufficient justification, according the the Left’s addled value system and his South Carolina district, to guarantee the man a lifetime sinecure in Congress.

Every now and then Clyburn says something so outrageous that it even has to make progressives and Democrats doubt the wisdom of letting the 86 year-old hang around to make Congress dumber. This week, he was asked by a Vox reporter about artificial intelligence and its tremendous influence on the workplace, education, and the economy. Not only did Clyburn answer that he’s never used AI, he admitted that he hadn’t heard of ChatGPT before this month. The exchange in part:

Reporter: “No ChatGPT, no Claude for you?”

Clyburn: “Believe it or not, I didn’t know what that was until about a week ago. ChatGPT, or whatever it is.”

Reporter: “You didn’t know ’til a week ago? Wow. I mean, I’m jealous. You’ve kept yourself in a bubble.”

Clyburn: “That may sound strange to you. I didn’t know what that was.”

…

Reporter: “How do you effectively legislate as a member who is distant from some of those technological shifts that are affecting folks’ lives right now?”

Clyburn: “I have a great staff. I wish I could know everything. I don’t know everything, and I don’t spend my time trying to learn everything. What I spend my time doing is trying to surround myself with people who do know stuff. I know how to legislate. I know how to build relationships, and I hire people to bring knowledge into the game that I can put to practice.”

Give him credit for one thing: Clyburn is at least transparent about how clueless and incompetent he is. He wishes he knew everything? How about knowing that massive technological changes are occurring right now and that the AI revolution erupted in 2024? Clyburn really said that he knows how to legislate while admitting that he doesn’t keep informed of what he needs to legislate about.

Nobody who pays any attention to the news, the culture, social media, the law, education, the economy…anything current, really, could have missed “ChatGPT, or whatever it is.” Ah, but Rep. Clyburn still marched with MLK Jr., and that’s what really counts in 2026.

Ben Franklin’s Curse

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The House this week passed a measure, the Sunshine Protection Act, that would set America’s clocks to daylight saving time permanently once it clears the Senate and is signed into law by the President. The bill itself raises no ethics issues at all: it is the reactions to it and the reasons, real and alleged, for those reactions that ping ethics alarms.

The headline is tongue-in-cheek, incidentally. Most of my life I heard that Daylight Savings Time was Ben Franklin’s idea. Ben was an amazingly prolific innovator and out-of-the-box thinker, but he was not the originator of the practice, so we can neither blame him nor praise him. Another myth is that DST was implemented for the benefit of farmers. Actually, farmers have been one of the strongest opponents of DST because the factors that influence farming schedules, like dairy cattle’s readiness to be milked, are dictated by the sun, so clocks going back and forth just complicates things. In general, Retailers, sports, and tourism interests like daylight saving, while agricultural and evening-entertainment interests do not.

Personally, I just want one time in place all year, because the changeover is traumatic for me whenever it happens. I have a long list of screw-ups, missed deadlines and meetings on my record. I bet no year has ever passed without one.

Like so many policies, the Daylight Savings Time tradition has had and continues to have all manner of unintended consequences, and those are controversial too. There is some data that shows that crime and accidents are reduced by DST, but precise causation issues make such data inherently dubious. A 2017 analysis of 44 studies concluded that DST leads to electricity savings of 0.3%, but we now know, or should, we can’t trust studies because we can’t trust the reseachers who perform them. Ditto for a 2017 study in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics that estimated that “the transition into DST caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually,” primarily by increasing sleep deprivation. Another study claimed that hospitals see a 24% increase in heart attacks and a 6% increase in fatal crashes each year when the time changes.

President Trump has advocated permanent Daylight Savings Time, so that’s enough for the Axis of Unethical Conduct to oppose it. Predictably, the Washington Post rushed to publish “Why standard time is better for your health than daylight saving time: A proposed bill would make daylight saving time permanent. But standard time is actually better for your body, according to science.”

According to science! Even the Post’s readers tended to agree that this take was hooey. A typical reaction:

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How’s That Computer Strike-Calling System Working?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

My verdict: it’s an improvement over relying entirely on the fallible home plate umpires, but ethical problems remain.

The current system gives each team two challenges if they think a ball or strike call is wrong. The teams can keep challenging as long as the ABS (Automated Ball and Strike) system backs their judgment. If a challenge proves mistaken, the team loses the challenge.

We have learned that knowing when a ball or strike call is wrong from the players’ perspective is harder than it looks. A few players are really good at it, but most are not. Because the prospect of a key pitch call being blown at a crucial juncture late in the game when the victimized team is out of challenges looms large, players have become increasingly reluctant to challenge pitches early in a game.

Ironically, the system takes accountability from umpires in some cases. In a recent Red Sox game, Boston’s opponent was out of challenges. In the 7th inning with the game close, a 3-2 pitch was called out of the strike zone, and Boston’s batter walked to first base with two outs. The pitch was, in fact, a strike, and should have ended the inning. Instead, the Sox had a long rally, scoring six runs. The announcers harped on the fact that it was the miscalculations of the losing team in using up their two challenges that opened the floodgates, but that’s not why the team lost. The team lost because the umpire blew the call, and it’s his job to call pitches correctly.

This situation, and there have been many of them so far this season, convinces me that players should not have to challenge bad calls, and the results of games should not depend on whether an umpire’s botch is challenged or not. The ABS system knows when a ball is in the strike zone with every pitch. If an umpire calls a ball a strike or vice-versa, the bad call should be instantly overturned without having to be challenged.