In the long mythology of American innovation, crises are often met by visionaries before the rest of the world even understands what is at stake. Today, a crisis is unfolding quietly inside our courtrooms — not in the headlines, not in Silicon Valley boardrooms, but in the fragile machinery of justice where the constitutional rights of millions hinge on an accurate record. It is a crisis that threatens the very idea of due process, and yet it remains largely invisible to those with the power to intervene.
So this is a plea — a genuine, desperate one — to Elon Musk: please look at what is happening in our legal system before it becomes irreversible.
The Disappearing Record
Across the nation, courts, agencies, and private litigation firms are replacing human stenographers — the guardians of our legal record for more than a century — with automated speech recognition systems. These systems promise savings, speed, efficiency, and futuristic convenience. But they deliver something far more dangerous: the slow erosion of truth itself.
ASR does not hear accent, dialect, emotion, nuance, or context the way a trained human reporter does. It misidentifies speakers. It mistranscribes technical language — medical terminology, legal jargon, names, citations, and even the most common words when spoken simultaneously or in heated exchanges. It collapses over crosstalk. It breaks under stress. It cannot swear an oath. It cannot interrupt a witness for clarification. It cannot preserve the integrity of a record when the stakes are life, liberty, or millions of dollars.
Yet it is rapidly replacing the only profession designed to protect the accuracy of testimony: stenographers.
A Death Spiral With No Replacement
The public has no idea how severe the consequences will be when stenographers disappear. And they are disappearing. Not because they are obsolete — far from it — but because:
- Training programs have closed under the false narrative that “AI will replace them.”
- Equipment manufacturers have stopped investing in hardware development because they see shrinking markets.
- Software companies are pivoting away from reporter-focused tools.
- Schools, administrators, and legislatures are being pressured to adopt ASR as a low-cost fix for perceived staffing shortages that largely do not exist.
This is how industries collapse: not through lack of value, but through misaligned perception. The disappearance of the stenographic infrastructure — machines, software, education pipelines — means that even if the public wakes up later, the profession may be impossible to rebuild.
You cannot resurrect a profession once the ecosystem that sustains it has been gutted.
Without a Protected Record, There Is No Justice
Ask any litigator: trials do not run on memory, goodwill, or AI confidence scores. They run on the record — the exact transcript of what was said, when it was said, and by whom. The record is the spine of appeals, post-conviction relief, judicial review, and the entire adversarial system.
If the record is wrong, muddled, incomplete, or unverifiable, justice dies quietly, bureaucratically, without any dramatic collapse — just a steady decay of reliability until no one trusts the outcome.
ASR has no chain of custody.
ASR has no method for authentication.
ASR cannot certify accuracy under penalty of perjury.
ASR cannot defend its transcript on appeal.
ASR cannot take responsibility for an error.
When courts replace humans with machines that cannot provide accountability, they create transcripts that cannot be trusted. And when transcripts can’t be trusted, verdicts cannot be trusted.
This is how democracies drift toward authoritarianism — not in one sudden move, but through the systematic erosion of the mechanisms that protect truth.
Tyranny Does Not Begin With Violence — It Begins With Silence
History teaches that governments become dangerous when they can operate without scrutiny. In the United States, the stenographic record is the scrutiny. It is the public’s eyes and ears inside proceedings that otherwise occur behind closed doors or inside intimidating institutions.
Eliminate stenographers and you eliminate the transparency that guards against corruption, misconduct, coercion, and state overreach.
Imagine a future where:
- A defendant’s words are mistranscribed because ASR failed to distinguish similar-sounding phrases under stress.
- A prosecutor’s misstatement goes uncorrected because no human reporter stops the proceeding to clarify the record.
- A witness’s testimony is altered by an algorithmic glitch or microphone interference.
- An appeal fails because the ASR transcript contains errors too severe to determine what actually happened.
Now imagine thousands of such cases — because that is not hypothetical. It is already happening.
A justice system without verifiable records is not a justice system. It is a simulacrum of one — a procedural performance whose outcomes cannot be challenged because the record itself is unreliable.
Why You, Elon?
Because you understand systemic failure.
Because you understand existential risk.
Because you understand what happens when institutions cling to outdated assumptions about technology’s capabilities and limitations.
Because you understand the fragility of infrastructure — electrical grids, satellite networks, supply chains, governance structures — and how quickly they can collapse when neglected.
And because you are one of the few public figures who can spotlight this issue loudly enough to interrupt the momentum toward something catastrophic.
This is not a request for money or endorsements or involvement in industry politics. It is a request for awareness. For amplification. For someone with global reach to say:
“Stop. Look. Think. If we lose the ability to reliably capture the record of our justice system, everything downstream collapses.”
You have repeatedly warned the world about AI’s unintended consequences. Here is one unfolding right now in real time: AI is being deployed in the one place where error is intolerable.
Jury Nullification, Miscarriages of Justice, and the Quiet End of Rights
When the record fails, juries cannot be properly instructed, appellate courts cannot properly review cases, and litigants cannot properly challenge wrongdoing. This creates fertile ground for:
- jury nullification based on incomplete or inaccurate transcripts
- wrongful convictions sustained because appeals courts cannot rely on the record
- civil litigants losing millions because an ASR system could not transcribe overlapping speech
- government entities avoiding accountability because no human intermediary exists to certify the truth of what happened
This is not dystopian fiction. It is where the current trajectory leads.
The Last Line of Defense
Human court reporters are not replaceable cogs. They are the last line of defense in a system that survives only if the truth is captured accurately the first time. They do not merely record words; they ensure that the record is correct, complete, and legally defensible.
They are not a cost center. They are constitutional infrastructure.
And once they are gone, they are gone.
So, Elon, Please — Say Something
If you were to publicly acknowledge this crisis, policymakers would listen. Courts would hesitate. Legislators would pause before signing contracts that outsource justice to an algorithm. Technologists would question the ethics of deploying ASR in environments where human liberty is at stake.
A single sentence from you could spark national conversation.
A single tweet could change the trajectory of an entire profession — and more importantly, preserve the integrity of a justice system that cannot survive without a reliable record.
Please, Elon. See us. Hear us. The justice system is standing on the edge of a cliff, and most people do not even know we are in danger.
Without stenographers, there is no truth.
Without truth, there is no justice.
Without justice, there is no freedom.
Save us, Elon — before it’s too late.
StenoImperium
Court Reporting. Unfiltered. Unafraid.
Disclaimer
This article reflects my perspective and analysis as a court reporter and eyewitness. It is not legal advice, nor is it intended to substitute for the advice of an attorney.
This article includes analysis and commentary based on observed events, public records, and legal statutes.
The content of this post is intended for informational and discussion purposes only. All opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are based on publicly available information, industry standards, and good-faith concerns about nonprofit governance and professional ethics. No part of this article is intended to defame, accuse, or misrepresent any individual or organization. Readers are encouraged to verify facts independently and to engage constructively in dialogue about leadership, transparency, and accountability in the court reporting profession.
- The content on this blog represents the personal opinions, observations, and commentary of the author. It is intended for editorial and journalistic purposes and is protected under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
- Nothing here constitutes legal advice. Readers are encouraged to review the facts and form independent conclusions.
***To unsubscribe, just smash that UNSUBSCRIBE button below — yes, the one that’s universally glued to the bottom of every newsletter ever created. It’s basically the “Exit” sign of the email world. You can’t miss it. It looks like this (brace yourself for the excitement):
STENOIMPERIUM 