Early in my programming career, I designed and built a piece of software that made one very specific job easy. It made the job so easy, that instead of a department of thirty people doing that job, the company only needed three, trained to use my software. I put people out of work.

It had never entered into my thinking that the code I was writing, the screens I was designing, and the system I deployed would do that. Ever since that project, I think about that. You have to think not just about what the software will do for the people you intend to use it, but what it will do to them as well.

With our headlong rush to deploy more generative capacity, there's zero consideration for this. The reasons we're ignoring this are understandable, if sad. There's too much money to be made being the first or best on the block to deploy this capability. There's too much potential control if you're the winner of this race to stop. The downsides will be felt by others, not the ones deploying the software... until they put some of their friends out of work, and even then, they won't look up and notice until it's too late.