Artificial Intelligence, Human Error, and Why Accountability Still Matters

If you feel exhausted by AI drama, you are not alone. We have reached that phase of the technological cycle where every panel discussion begins with “transformative disruption” and ends with someone invoking OpenAI, Google, or Nvidia as if reciting a trinity. Artificial Intelligence is no longer a tool; it is a mood.

India’s AI summit added an unexpected subplot: a local university managed to goof up in a way that reminded us that while machines may be learning at exponential speed, human beings remain gloriously linear in their capacity for embarrassment. No algorithm has yet been trained to prevent institutional self-sabotage. The future may be autonomous, but the microphone still needs muting.

There is something oddly comforting about this. For all the breathless commentary about machines replacing humans, the week’s events suggested the opposite: AI may be artificial, but stupidity is organic.

Meanwhile, on Dalal Street, the Sensex and Nifty performed their own philosophical experiment. The day after a much-celebrated trade deal with the United States, markets rose with patriotic enthusiasm. Commentators declared a new era. PowerPoints were updated. Optimism was priced in.

And this Thursday, without scandal or shock, the stocks fell sharply, as if there had been no trade deal at all. No crisis. No macro meltdown. Just a quiet reversal, like a cat knocking over a glass to confirm gravity still works. Experts duly rationalised it as profit-booking, delayed US Fed rate cuts, and global uncertainty.

But sometimes the simpler truth suffices. Markets move because they can. They are not morality plays; they are mood swings with a trading terminal and owe little to fundamentals.

This is especially amusing in the age of AI. Investors now speak of “AI-driven alpha” as though uncertainty itself is a software bug awaiting patching. Algorithms will optimise, hedge, predict. The implication is that volatility is a primitive relic of human error.

Yet the same week’s gyrations suggested otherwise. Markets remain deeply human constructs – narratives wrapped in numbers. They respond not just to information and policy but to complex emotions and psychology. You can automate trading, but you cannot automate conviction.

Moral Reckoning
If the AI summit showed us institutional fallibility, and the markets demonstrated emotional reflexes, the global headlines offered a third, rarer development: accountability.

The arrest of Prince Andrew, whose name has long hovered awkwardly over the scandal involving Jeffrey Epstein, signalled that even those wrapped in aristocratic insulation are not entirely beyond reach. For years, that saga functioned as a grim inventory of elite impunity. Any tangible consequence, however belated, feels like a corrective footnote.

Similarly, the life sentence handed down earlier to former South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol remains a striking reminder that democracies can, at times, discipline their own. South Korea has made a habit—sometimes excessive, sometimes admirable—of prosecuting former leaders. It is rarely pretty. But it is evidence that institutions, though imperfect, are not purely decorative.

In a week saturated with technological hype and market theatrics, such moments matter. They suggest that beneath the noise, value systems are not entirely extinct. Civilisations wobble, but they do not always collapse. Elites err, but they are not always untouchable.

The contrast is instructive.

Artificial Intelligence promises to optimise systems. Markets promise to price reality. But neither guarantees justice. That requires something older and less programmable: norms, laws, and the stubborn insistence that power be accountable.

The drama around AI is, in many ways, a projection of our anxieties. We fear obsolescence. We crave efficiency. We oscillate between utopia and apocalypse depending on the latest earnings call. But technology amplifies intent; it does not manufacture virtue. If governance is weak, AI will simply accelerate weakness. If institutions are resilient, AI will amplify resilience.

The same is true of markets. They are not guardians of morality; they are aggregators of belief. They can reward excess as enthusiastically as prudence. Expecting them to behave like wise elders is a category error.

And yet, amid summit mishaps and index reversals, the occasional act of accountability offers a different narrative: human systems still possess a capacity for correction. Not always swiftly. Not always cleanly. But sometimes decisively.

Perhaps that is the real antidote to AI fatigue.

We do not need machines to save us from ourselves. We need institutions that function, markets that absorb shocks without hysteria, and a public discourse that remembers technology is a tool, not a theology.

So yes, there is too much AI drama. There are too many declarations that history has pivoted irreversibly because a model parameter count has doubled. There are too many charts explaining why yesterday’s rally was destiny and today’s fall is disaster.

But the week also reminded us of something sturdier: humanity remains in charge of both error and correction.

AI may write the code. Markets may flicker in green and red. But accountability, even if messy, delayed and imperfect – remains our most advanced invention.

In that quiet fact lies sufficient balm for the soul.