The insidious pattern here is not that this will happen, but that when it happens as clearly predicted here, people will be shocked.

“How could we have known?!,” they will exclaim.

And they will not be held accountable for failing to look forward because we do not hold people accountable for thinking about the future effects of business decisions.

“It’s just business.” has become the law. Increasingly we see businessmen pushing for no introspection, push ahead full-speed. But business decisions have ripple effects beyond the walls of the business.

Where consequence is concerned, there are no borders.

This is the underlying problem AI will eventually make us confront: that we fail to consider the cumulative cultural effect of the fact that what is saved is also lost in as yet unexperienced ways that will not show on the balance sheet until decades down the line when someone else is in charge.

That someone else? Today’s children. They will pay this price. They always do. They always have.