I want to talk about teaching and how difficult it is.
When I was teaching, there was always the “wall.” That thing that prevented what I was trying to convey from getting through.
You see, my students were generally very young, eighteen to twenty-one. There were middle aged students who returned to school and a good number of veterans, and they were wonderful students. But the great mass were the young ones. And they were inexperienced
Without perspective, they could not draw a conclusions from a similar circumstance. You could lead them to the right answer but they had enormous difficulty applying the reasoning to anything else.
I used to show a clip from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” where the learned knight leads the local peasants to a completely wrong conclusion (that witches burn because they are made of wood). And while they thought it was funny, they didn’t get the hard cold fact that leading people in the wrong direction is not that hard and the tools we depend on for teaching are not always that reliable.
It soon became evident that they had never been trained to understand the implications of what they were learning. In fact, for most of them learning was just a long boring process of getting the necessary paperwork for later employment. I taught every new class the rationale for why each major subject was part of their course of study and fit my own classes in that picture of whole trained human being.
So, I began to plant seeds. It seemed to me that if I placed an idea with wide applications in front of them several times, they would realize at some point later the implications of that idea. So, I taught the great ideas. I showed legendary movies, and I would tell the great stories of Western Culture. I was talented enough to make those things interesting.
Did the seeds grow? Probably. Ideas especially ideas deeply embedded in the culture have a lot of relevance and staying power.
But do I know that for a fact? No. You never know what effect your teaching has. You just hope.
It seems based on the evidence of the press reports and interviewed witnesses that teachers at an elementary school put “sleeping” patches on the children in the classroom regularly in large numbers. These are small children as young as four years old. I am outraged. You just don’t give other people’s children drugs. That they didn’t actually kill anybody is just dumb luck.
Here’s a quote from the article:
Najla Abdullah asked her four-year-old son if he too had received a sticker. “He said, ‘Yes, mommy. I get a special sticker,’” Abdullah told ABC. “I said, ‘What does it look like?’ He said, ‘I get it right here on my hand, and it has the storms with the clouds and the star and the moon.’”
My son is entering his thirties so I didn’t even know these things existed (sleeping stickers). So, I went over and opened my Amazon account and there they were in large numbers and variety of colors and various capabilities. I’m sure many parents whose children have sleep problems find them to be of some benefit.
However, drugging entire classrooms of tiny tots to make your job easier is wrong! (to put it mildly) Since, I assume there will be firings and criminal charges, hopefully the idea of drugging small children will not catch on as a teaching aid.
As an expert on business ethics, my analytic abilities are wasted here. What analysis can you do? Is there a moral argument about giving other people’s children drugs? I think not. There is no way the teachers or teacher’s aides had any idea of what medications the children were already taking or the existence of an medical conditions the children might have had so administering any drug on a large scale is highly dangerous. These acts endangered children. End of moral analysis.
If I may quote from a legendary source of moral support: In the New Testament, Jesus Christ issues a stern warning against harming children. In Matthew 18:6, Jesus says, “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
This is a catastrophic failure of business ethics. The school is hunkered down. There is no listing of classes involved, number of students or if this was the only set of violations. We can expect this story to develop.
If I were advising the school. I would recommend an outside investigator be hired and as early as possible personnel decisions. They need to share as much information as is possible under the circumstances and new rules specifically banning these actions put in place.
As technology moves forward with often amazing speed, the law struggles to keep up. New offenses never even thought of before are happening every day. One tragic trend is the posting of fake nudes of high school students and there are many others. The internet is a massive information super highway of fraud, deception and filth. I don’t need to tell you in any detail because you see and experience yourself the horror of what the internet has become.
This case detailed in the links below alleges that Dazhon Darien used AI technology to imitate the Pikesville high school’s principal. The fake recording had the principal disparaging minority students and teachers. It was spread about on the internet. Darien was under accusation of having billed the school illegally for about $2000. It seems the motive was revenge.
Using cloning technology, Darien forged an audio clip in which it sounded as if the principal was frustrated with Black students and their test-taking abilities, police wrote. The recording also purported to capture the principal disparaging Jewish individuals and two teachers who “should never have been hired”.
The AI attack was very successful. The principal was temporarily replaced as complaints flooded in. This was a truly vicious unprincipled attack. There are many disturbing elements, the main one being this is a first use case. There will be others and the results are likely to be at least as tragic and probably much, much worse.
We must as a society find ways of dealing with these issues of technological criminal innovation much more quickly. AI is a revolutionary technology. To say that it could be used to kill is not an exaggeration. And I while I am seeing a great deal of concern and discussion, I’m not seeing much legislative and administrative action.
Our legislatures, our Governors, our federal system are all creatures of the past with long and storied histories. But they were developed in the age of the horse as the main instrument of travel and the written letter, the primary medium of communication. Let me just give you an example, in the great majority of states, Corporate law requires the Board of Directors to meet annually and keep records of that event. This is directly from an era in which they traveled by train and horse. Isn’t it obvious that the corporate board be regularly involved, meeting often and having some kind of regular contact with the company? Yet the law requires no more than that single meeting a year. And we’ve had the internet, automobiles and telephones for quite some time now and we have not adapted the the statutory law to mandate more contact in an ongoing business. And that is the story across the board in the United States. The laws are based on circumstances that have become obsolete.
I suggest that the Justice Department create a division devoted to technological innovation and crime. This will give the government a slim chance of getting ahead of the curve of these new kinds of crime. We really don’t want to wake up one morning and find that AI had killed, destroyed reputations, collapsed companies and crashed infrastructures without legal recourse for the victims or the government.
We need to act. We must act now. Because the wicked actors both here at home and overseas are not resting. They are actively plotting and will given any opportunity take advantage of these new technologies.
On January 16, a Gmail user known as TJFOUST9 sent an email to three teachers, including Darien, at their school email addresses. The subject line said, “Pikesville Principal — Disturbing Recording.” A sound file was attached. A man could be heard speaking. Among other disparaging comments, including one about two teachers and another about Jewish people, the man said Black students couldn’t “test their way out of a paper bag.” The recording proliferated. A teacher who didn’t get along well with Eiswert admitted to sharing it with a student “who she knew would rapidly spread the message around various social media outlets and throughout the school,” the report said. The teacher also sent the recording to media outlets and the NAACP.
I ordered this online and I have been very impressed. This is the first book by Chris Hedges that I have ever had. I am annoyed with myself for not having discovered him earlier.
Here is an excerpt – The inability of the liberal class to acknowledge that corporations have wrested power from the hands of the citizens, that the Constitution and it guarantees of personal liberty have become irrelevant, and that the phrase consent of the governed is meaningless, has left it speaking and acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality. It has lent its voice to hollow acts of political theater, and the pretense that democratic debate and choice continue to exist.
I think the correctness of his reading is illustrated today by the negotiations over the debt ceiling held between Congress and the President. The liberals, toothless and pointless, are not at the table. The great accomplishments of the liberal and progressive movements over the past one hundred years lay like so many cuts of meat served up on the negotiating table between the two sides, and the Progessives in Congress may just as well not exist. The President proposes cuts to both Social Security and Medicare with no one to stop him. Even the AARP folded like a house of cards. Liberalism as an effective political force is a joke, a satire on its past and a cautionary tale of expediency and stupidity destroying a movement. In particular, the willingness of its candidates to court corporate money and to sell out teachers, workers, soldiers and retirees speaks more of a moral vacuum than it does of effective politics. Without idealism and morality, political movements based on doing the right thing for the poor, the working class and the disadvantaged, have no identity.
I am often asked what we should do about a Wall Street excess, an unfair law, the rich evading taxes and many other things. I’ve taken to dodging the question because explaining to concerned citizens and students that there is no one to turn to, no one to vote for, no one to ask for help, … is depressing in the extreme.
There are two parties in the United States. One is devoted to privilege and a desperate need to stay in power. The other is devoted to privilege and a desperate need to stay in power. Neither deserves a single vote or a moment of serious concern.
Nevertheless, the only remaining arena of possible action is there. However, I have been getting a sense of the nation, that perhaps other choices beside the peaceful are being considered. I do not want to see violence but it is more and more likely.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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