Flight AI-171: 365 days of not knowing

The BJ Medical College canteen in Ahmedabad is back in business now Students are sitting at the tables again If you came to campus today without knowing its history it would be difficult to imagine that a year ago this was one of the photographed places in IndiaOn June 12 2025 the Air India Flight AI171 crashed seconds after takeoff The crash tore through the college complex Killed passengers crew and people on the groundFor days everyone in the country watched in horror It was headline everywhere A year later the physical scars have mostly gone away The debris is all cleared up The damaged buildings have been fixed Classes started up again a time ago Life just keeps moving like it always does What has not moved forward with certainty is our understanding of what actually happenedFile picNimesh DaveThis is probably the thing about disasters that happen with modern technology It is often easier to fix the damage than to figure out what went wrong in our minds When the plane crashed the people investigating got a lot of evidence to look at They had the boxes the recordings from the cockpit data recorders sensor logs and the satellites dataModern planes make an amount of information that we can use Even with all that information a lot of people are still not satisfied This is not because the investigators are not doing their job It is not because we are missing some evidence It is because technology has become so complicated that it is hard to understand what went wrongFor a time when planes crashed people would look for one main reasonMaybe a part was faulty or someone made a mistake when they were fixing the plane Maybe the pilot did something Maybe the weather was bad Modern planes are different They are not just machines They are like worlds with a lot of things working togetherA Boeing 787 is a network of computers sensors and software systems all working together When something goes wrong the challenge is not just finding out what failed The challenge is understanding how many systems affected each other in a few seconds That is why one particular conversation from the cockpit is getting a lot of attentionAccording to the investigation one pilot asked the other a question ldquoWhy did you cut it offrdquo The pilotrsquos reply was simple ldquoI did notrdquo These three words have become a big deal The issue is not whether the machine is right or wrong The issue is that itrsquos difficult to see how one thing causes anotherWe live in a world where humans and machines can see things differently This tension is everywhereItrsquos not about aviation Itrsquos about how we interact with machines Boeing 787 is a system Boeing 787 has systems These systems interact with each other Sometimes they interact in unexpected ways The question of whether this dynamic was a factor in AI171 is something that investigators need to figure out The evidence needs to be looked at on its ownWe should pay attention to the bigger issue because it is becoming a major problem of our time We are creating systems that are so complex that no one person can fully understand them For example no single engineer knows every line of code in a modern airplaneNo one person fully understands the system that supports modern communications around the world No single expert can explain everything that happens inside the most advanced artificial intelligence systems today Knowledge is not limited by one person it is spread out One team knows about sensors Another team knows about software Another team knows about maintenance Another team knows about operations The system works because thousands of specialists contribute their knowledgeThe problem is that when something goes wrong it is tough to figure out who is responsible and what happened When everything is working the complexity of the system is not noticeable When something fails it becomes a big deal Air travel has always been an achievement of engineering Every time a flightrsquos successful it shows just how precise and careful the engineering is Millions of people arrive at their destinations safely because all the different systems are working exactly as they shouldWe should not forget about these successes We should also learn from mistakes Making things more complex is not without cost Every time we add a layer of automation software and technology that is connected to other things we create new ways for things to go wrong that we might not be able to predict or understandOne year after AI171 I am not really thinking about whorsquos to blame I want to know how we look into what went wrong with technology in our worldWe are living in a time when we really like to collect information about everything We measure things we record things we store things Having all this information does not mean we really understand what is going on Sometimes the difficult part is not getting the information It is figuring out what it meansThe place where AI171 crashed has been fixed up The campus is back to normal People are not talking about it in the news anymore We still have a lot of questions Not about what happened to Flight AI171 About the kind of world we are creating A world that is going to be managed by systems that are really powerful really automatic and really complicated The people who were hurt by AI171 deserve to know what happened They deserve to be told the truth They deserve an investigation that will follow the facts wherever they lead Most of all they deserve a society thatrsquos willing to learn from mistakes rather than just forgetting about them Because the real test of how bad a disaster is is not how quickly we clean up the messIt is whether we understand what happened so we can stop it from happeningOne year later we still have a lot of work to doNishant Sahdev is a theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill United States He makes sense of the AI era in your favourite Sunday midday