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.
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:
“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.”
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.
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…
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.
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.
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:
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.
I mentioned one of my favorite American oddballs, inventor Walter Hunt, last week in passing, and subsequently realized that while his name had turned up in several EA posts over the years, I have never devoted a whole essay to him. Shame on me. Readers here know my obsession with cultural memory and my devotion to the mission of trying to ensure that important and remarkable people, events and things don’t become discarded by American society’s short attention spam and poor education. In my other life, I co-founded a professional theater in Northern Virginia dedicated to producing great, influential and important American stage works that the rest of the theater community forgot, neglected, or was too shallow to appreciate.
Hunt, however, was among my first forays into extolling the unfairly obscure. My fifth grade teacher, Miss Barrett, assigned the class to write a paper on an American inventor. Leaving Edison, Bell and Franklin to the mob, I spent a Saturday in the library and tracked down a dusty tome called “The Encyclopedia of American Invention,” published before World War II. It had a huge and detailed chapter on Hunt, and I was hooked.
As the excellent video above explains, Walter was one of these amazing people who could see a problem, think for a while, and come up with an original solution. Part of his problem was that he was so confident in his ability to invent new things that he didn’t hesitate to sell the rights to his latest invention to pay current bills and debts, never committing to the laborious project of building a business with his ideas, Hunt made many entrepreneurs wealth with his inventions, but never became wealthy himself. He was, in short, a hopeless businessman.
As a creative problem solver, however, few could match Walter Hunt. He belongs in the same elite company with Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci and Ben Franklin, but unlike them, he’s almost completely unknown, not just today, but during his lifetime as well. And yet…these were among Hunt’s most important inventions:
The big news this morning is that Pope Leo XIV issued an A.I encyclical titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” his first such document. These things are supposed to impart authoritative teachings on moral or social challenges, but fall short of the legal status of a papal bull, which is a formal declaration of an article of faith or moral law. Catholics are supposed to use encyclicals to guide their lifestyles and choices. You know, like devout Catholic Joe Biden believing abortion is murder while supporting the practice so Democrats won’t lose the the single female vote.
I started to read the thing, which is over 200 pages, and officially feel bad about giving up 25% through, especially since I routinely criticize people who attack court decisions without reading them. Do I trust the various reporters and pundits who are supposed to summarize and explain the document? No. However, unlike court decisions, which I am accustomed to reading and have the experience and training to understand, a Pope’s declaration about how we should work with new technology has as much relevance to a non religious question as his opinion on one of the legal controversies settled by a Supreme Court decision: none whatsoever. He is not, by any framework, an expert on technology. He has a bias, indeed many biases, that he has already made clear, and the Pope’s view on A.I. is exactly as valuable as the opinion of of one of my next door neighbors, and maybe not as well informed.
The document has some significance because it will doubtless be used as an appeal of to authority is future debates over A.I. policy even though it shouldn’t be.
Ironically, one of my first substantive uses of A.I. is to ask one of the things to summarize “Magnifica Humanitas.” The result is below, so those of you who are not speed readers or who actually have lives so spending the time necessary to read what the Pope has wrought isn’t practical can prepare for the Ethics Alarms reaction to come. I suppose there is always the possibility that the bot read it, thought “Oh-oh!” and slanted its summary to advance its own welfare and evil plans…
Anyway, here is the summary, which is presumably objective, but who knows? I’ll be back with ethical observations in Part 2. (I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the hanging letters in some of the sentence breaks without WordPress getting funky. I’m sorry.)
Ethics Alarms 