Anthony Lawton and Dr Felicity Mellor on the importance of humans who design systems and execute decisions taking responsibility for them
Your article on the Iran school bombing rightly challenges the reflex to blame artificial intelligence (AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying, 26 March). However, the deeper problem lies not in the technology but in the language now forming around it. To say that there was an “AI error” quietly removes the human subject from the sentence. Where once civilians were “dehoused” or “collateral damage”, responsibility is now displaced altogether: from people to systems.
This matters because moral accountability depends on clarity about who acts. However complex the chain of analysis and command, it remains human beings who design, authorise and execute these decisions. To obscure that fact is not a technical error but a civic one.
