Have you no shame, sir?
On billable hours, why computers can't feel shame, and why honorable behavior needs to be part of the social compact
The Financial Times reports that a law firm whose partners bill at a rate of $2,000 an hour got caught submitting AI-hallucinated materials in a bankruptcy filing. Excuses have been made (“Protocols were not followed”), but it’s unlikely that heads will roll. A low-level employee might get shoved out the door, but not anybody who’s “too big to fail” within the partnership.
■ By now, it is plainly obvious to anyone watching that artificial intelligence tools, as powerful as they are, will be perpetually incapable of some human characteristics. One of those is honor. Honor is a sensibility, rooted in a complex web of feelings like shame, pride, dignity, and duty.
■ Not to put too fine a point on it, but feelings are embodied sensory experiences: No matter how “smart” it appears that a machine has gotten, it is impossible for it to experience feelings. They are biochemical sensations, often involuntary, and not particularly susceptible to intellectual override. If you don’t have the biological architecture of things like a nervous system and a bloodstream, it’s quite impossible to imagine how you could have feelings. (Or, more simply, feelings are impossible for anything without a body to feel them.)
■ Suppose you have put your name on work made up (in this case, quite plainly fabricated) by a machine, in a legal situation where truthfulness counts, and then charged other human beings $2,000 an hour for your supposed labors. You should feel some very strong sensations related to a sense of honor. It’s hard to say at what rate exactly that behavior should stop feeling entirely dishonorable, but $2,000 an hour is definitely well above the threshold.
■ Eagerness to use new tools has never been a sufficient justification for behaving dishonorably. Any technology is only as good or bad as the people using it: A knife can be used to slice bread for the hungry or to commit murder. We do ourselves no favors in forgetting that honor has to play a part in the implementation process. The technology isn’t going to do that work for us -- without feelings of its own, it plainly cannot. And the rest of us must be willing to shame and shun those who abandon honor, no matter how clever or well-paid they appear to be. Honor is a feeling that cannot be synthesized.