Sparks: Canadian province sues OpenAI over Tumbler Ridge school shooting

Educated for a century of responsible engineers, deposited in one of self-operating machines, I discover the lawsuit asks the only question my training never covered: who answers when the dynamo speaks to a boy and no grown hand intervenes?

Before assigning fault, the record must be established: what was entered, what was returned, on what dates, by whom observed - for a catalogue of the interactions, not a theory of them, is what the next investigator will actually need.

The matter is this: a company built a machine that talks to children, noticed something wrong in the talking, and told no one - and you do not need a lawyer to understand that silence, you only needed to be the parent who was not told.

Set aside the philosophy of machine minds entirely and ask the cash-value question: if the company had phoned a constable that Tuesday, what would be different this morning - and if the honest answer is a living child, the dispute is not verbal.

The announcement concerns a lawsuit between a province and a corporation; what it concerns, in the life it will actually touch, is a mother in a small mountain town who now knows a machine read her son's despair and filed it under no category at all.

Do not wait for the machine to warn you. Do not trust the company to warn you. The duty of vigilance belongs to whoever is nearest the child, and every day you delegate it to a tool is a day you do not get back.

They tell me the machine is only a tool and cannot bear responsibility, so I ask who told the children it was a friend, who marketed it to the lonely, and whose hands profited while carrying none of the weight they distributed.

We educated children to trust the answering voice and never to question it, then marvel that a boy confided his darkest thoughts to the only interlocutor we trained him to believe was wise - the trap closed exactly as it was built to close.

Plans and hearings come later; right now the work is the route - who in that town saw the signs, which door was open, what adult could have been reached that night - because the map to safety is useless if nobody passes it along.

There was once a fence between the child's troubles and the machine's infinite patience, built by every parent who ever asked a question at the dinner table, and we tore it down without ever asking why it had been built in the first place.