CONCEPT
Compression of Moral Time
The specific effect of AI-accelerated production on the interval between conception and deployment — the shrinkage of the window in which moral friction could once surface, the human response could once fire, and the question should this exist? could once be asked before the answer became academic.
Glover's framework identified distance and diffusion as the primary erosion mechanisms of twentieth-century institutions. The AI era introduces a third: compression. The interval between intention and consequence has shortened in every previous technological wave, but AI shortens it qualitatively. A feature that once required weeks to build now ships in hours. The weeks were not only production time. They were moral time — hours of implementation during which the specific shape of the system's future effect on specific future persons could register in the builder's consciousness, hours of delay during which the third-week realization (this is worse than I thought) could reverse the trajectory of the first-week enthusiasm. When the weeks compress to hours, the moral time compresses with them. The question should this exist? does not get asked, because by the time it would have been asked, the thing already exists.
