In Idiocracy, the world doesn’t fall apart because people become evil. It falls apart because the system keeps rewarding what’s easy.
Convenience wins, repeatedly.
Shortcuts become standard.
Standards become optional.
And, eventually, nobody remembers what “good” looks like because the environment stopped requiring it. That’s the ethical risk AI introduces into ABA organizations. It’s not that a tool will suddenly “go rogue” or that clinicians will wake up and abandon their values.
The more realistic problem is slower. AI makes certain kinds of work easier, and that ease can quietly reshape what we practice, what we measure, and what we teach new clinicians to do.
If you care about ethics in the age of AI, the question is not “What should we ban?” It’s: What habits do we need to teach so that convenience doesn’t shape our ethical compass? And, will our workflows still require ethical behavior to occur.
Because ethics, in real organizations, is not primarily a code or a checklist. It is a pattern of action prompted, reinforced, and sustained by the environment.
Why Ethics Training Breaks Under Automation
Traditional ethics training was already fragile before AI entered the picture. It often relied on abstract principles, lists of prohibitions, and infrequent refreshers delivered far away from the contexts where real decisions get made. Most of the time, ethical behavior survived anyway, carried by professional norms, supervision, and the natural friction of human judgment.
AI changes that balance.
Automation reduces friction. It accelerates output. It standardizes language. It introduces scores, flags, and recommendations that feel increasingly authoritative as workloads rise. Under those conditions, ethical decision-making becomes less visible. This isn’t because anyone purposively is unethical, but because fewer moments explicitly call for rigorous analysis.
In Idiocracy terms, reflection doesn’t vanish because it’s outlawed. It vanishes because nothing in the environment asks for it anymore.
Teaching ethics in the age of AI therefore requires a different approach. Instead of treating ethics as a set of constraints layered on top of technology, it has to be taught as a set of habits embedded inside everyday work.
