This is a recurring pattern that just blows my mind: typically some small, often academic, group knows about some problem or potential problem that everybody else is ignoring until it becomes un-ignorable.

Anthopogenic climate change falls into this category.

I have to wonder, first, what sort of obvious stupid self-destructive things am I doing right now but ignoring. And second, how can we build systems that systematically take this into account? Is there some way to short-cut the process and find and fix problems in the early stages? Or better yet, design our systems so that they don't have the problems from the start?

It is not really comparable to climate change - people have been assuming that everything is OK, but there is no well-organized campaign to persuade people that these exploits don't exist now there is good evidence that they do.

There is one attitude that exacerbates those problems that are real - the tacit assumption that concerns do not count for anything until an exploit has been demonstrated.

The key thing to take into account here is that for every one of those early warnings that turn out to be true there's also a plethora of speculation that never amounts to anything.