Flight 171: Why India needs a right to digital autopsy

One year after Ahmedabad, India, must rethink who owns the truth when technology fails

In 1964, the mathematician Norbert Wiener published a remarkable book titled God & Golem, Inc. Wiener, widely regarded as the father of cybernetics, spent much of his career thinking about a question that has only become more urgent with time: What happens when human beings create increasingly intelligent systems but gradually lose the ability to understand, supervise, or challenge them?

To explain the danger, Wiener often returned to the old tale of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. A young apprentice discovers a magical broom capable of carrying water. Delighted by the prospect of avoiding hard work, he sets the broom in motion. The problem is that he does not know how to stop it. The broom faithfully follows its instructions, carrying bucket after bucket of water until the entire house is flooded.

The lesson was never that the broom was evil. The lesson was that obedience without judgment can become dangerous when complexity exceeds human control. Sixty years later, Wiener’s warning feels less like philosophy and more like public policy.

A few days ago marked one year since Air India Flight 171 crashed shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad, claiming 260 lives and becoming one of the most devastating aviation disasters in recent Indian history. Families continue to mourn. Survivors continue to live with trauma. Investigators continue their work. The purpose of revisiting the tragedy is not to prejudge the outcome of any investigation. The final conclusions must come from evidence, not opinion columns.

Yet Flight 171 raises a larger question that extends far beyond aviation. Who owns the truth when technology fails? For most of the twentieth century, major industrial accidents were primarily mechanical events. Investigators examined broken structures, damaged engines, fractured metal, failed components, and physical evidence. Understanding what went wrong was difficult, but the evidence itself was visible and accessible. That world is disappearing.

Modern aircraft are not simply machines. They are software — defined systems operating in an environment. Millions of lines of code interact with sensors, computers, control systems, and automated decision-making architectures. Every flight generates enormous quantities of data. The modern jetliner is, in many ways, a flying data center.

Aviation is not unique. The same change is happening everywhere. Cars are becoming software platforms on wheels. Hospitals increasingly depend on algorithmic systems. Financial markets are based on automated trading infrastructure. Electrical grids rely on digital controls. Military systems increasingly incorporate autonomous capabilities. Artificial intelligence is being embedded into everything from customer service to critical infrastructure.

As technology upgrades, the most important evidence after a failure is often not physical. It is digital. The challenge is that digital evidence does not behave like physical evidence. When a bridge collapses, investigators can examine the steel. When a boiler explodes, engineers can inspect the fragments. When a software — driven system fails, the answers may exist inside proprietary algorithms, protected databases, encrypted logs, firmware architectures, and corporate intellectual property frameworks.

The result is a growing tension between two legitimate interests. Companies invest billions developing advanced technologies and naturally seek to protect proprietary information. Intellectual property drives innovation and competitive advantage. At the same time, societies have a compelling public interest in understanding failures that result in large-scale loss of life. The question is where those interests should meet. Flight 171 illustrates why that question can no longer be ignored.

One year later, public discussion remains dominated by speculation. Every new development generates another wave of theories, accusations, and counter-accusations. The absence of definitive answers creates a vacuum, and vacuums are quickly filled by narratives. This uncertainty is not merely an aviation issue. It is a preview of a future in which increasingly consequential decisions are mediated by systems that few people fully understand.

The traditional response has been to reassure the public that there is always a “human in the loop.” The phrase appears constantly in discussions about automation, artificial intelligence, and advanced control systems. The concept sounds comforting. No matter how sophisticated the technology becomes, a human remains responsible. In practice, however, the reality is becoming more complicated. Modern systems often operate at speeds, scales, and levels of complexity that exceed normal human cognition. Human operators are frequently asked to supervise processes they cannot continuously monitor in detail. Most of the time, automation works exceptionally well. Indeed, modern aviation remains one of the safest forms of transportation ever created.

But when highly automated systems encounter rare or unexpected situations, investigators must examine not only human decisions but also the design assumptions embedded within the technology itself. That requires transparency. Transparency does not mean publishing every line of source code on the internet. It does not mean eliminating intellectual property protections. It does not mean undermining innovation.

It means recognising that mass-casualty events occupy a different category of public interest. When a major technological system fails and human lives are lost, independent investigators should possess the legal authority, technical access, and institutional capacity necessary to examine the relevant digital evidence. India should begin preparing for this reality now. The country has emerged as one of the world’s largest digital societies. Hundreds of millions of citizens rely daily on sophisticated technological infrastructure. India is simultaneously becoming a major aviation market, an AI adopter, a semiconductor participant, and a significant player in the global digital economy.

With that growth comes responsibility.

Just as environmental regulations evolved during the industrial age, new accountability frameworks must evolve for the software age. One possible principle is straightforward: systems that exercise substantial influence over public safety should be subject to independent forensic examination after catastrophic failures.

Call it a digital autopsy. A traditional autopsy seeks to determine the cause of death through scientific investigation. A digital autopsy would seek to determine the role played by software, automation, data, system design, and algorithmic decision-making in a technological failure. The objective would not be punishment. The objective would be learning. Aviation itself became extraordinarily safe because every accident generated knowledge that improved future systems. Investigations were designed not merely to assign blame but to prevent recurrence.

The same philosophy should guide the software era. As artificial intelligence becomes embedded within transportation, healthcare, finance, energy, and defense, society will increasingly depend on technologies whose internal logic is often inaccessible to the people affected by them. That imbalance cannot continue indefinitely.

Citizens should not be expected to place blind trust in systems they cannot examine. Governments should not be forced to rely exclusively on corporate explanations when investigating major failures. Public confidence requires independent verification.

Norbert Wiener understood this long before the first commercial jet carried a passenger or the first AI model processed a prompt. His concern was never that machines would become malicious. His concern was that human beings would become dependent upon systems whose complexity exceeded their ability to supervise them.

One year after Flight 171, the most important lesson may not ultimately concern aviation at all. It may concern transparency.

In the twenty-first century, power increasingly resides in code, algorithms, and digital infrastructure. When those systems succeed, their benefits are extraordinary. When they fail, understanding the reasons cannot remain the exclusive privilege of those who built them. The families who lost loved ones in Ahmedabad deserve answers. Future generations deserve safer systems. And democratic societies deserve the ability to independently investigate technologies that increasingly shape life, death, and everything in between. The age of software — defined infrastructure demands a new principle: when technology becomes critical to public safety, the truth behind its failures must never remain locked behind a proprietary wall.

The writer is a physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a columnist on AI, infrastructure and global systems; Views presented are personal.