The families of those who perished in the Air India crash that shook the nation have spoken with a grief that is both intimate and universal. ‘We don’t look at the sky anymore,’ one widow told me, her voice a whisper against the monsoon rain. This is not a story of algorithms or quantum leaps; it is a stark human tragedy that reminds us of the thin line between the digital and the real.
As a technologist who has spent years in the shimmering corridors of Silicon Valley, I have grown accustomed to seeing the world through the lens of innovation. But when I sat with these families in a makeshift shelter near the crash site, I realised that no amount of machine learning can map the contours of loss. The sky, once a symbol of boundless possibility, now holds only silence.
The crash itself has sparked a furious debate about aviation safety, with the usual calls for better regulation and stricter oversight. But something deeper is at play here. We have become so obsessed with the user experience of our lives — the seamless booking apps, the real-time tracking, the predictive algorithms — that we forget the physicality of flight. A plane is not just a data point in a cloud; it is a vessel of human hopes and dreams.
One father, clutching a locket with his daughter’s picture, told me how he had tracked her flight on his phone, watching the little plane icon inch across the map until it vanished. ‘I refreshed the screen, thinking it was a glitch,’ he said. ‘But there was no glitch. Only emptiness.’ This is the Black Mirror moment we dread: when technology fails not because of a bug, but because it cannot bear witness to tragedy.
We must ask ourselves hard questions about our digital sovereignty. When we surrender our lives to apps and platforms, do we also surrender our ability to feel? The families I spoke to are not anti-technology; they simply want their grief to be acknowledged in a world that moves too fast. They want the algorithms to pause, to recognise that some things cannot be optimised.
Air India is now investigating the incident, but the real investigation lies within us. How do we balance progress with humanity? How do we ensure that our innovations do not lead us to look away from the sky? Perhaps the answer lies in a technology far older than any code: empathy.
I left the crash site with a heavy heart and a profound sense of responsibility. The future I usually speak of with such enthusiasm suddenly felt fragile. For the families, the future is no longer a horizon of possibilities but a void. And for me, the question is no longer ‘what can we build?’ but ‘what should we preserve?’
As we move forward, let us not forget those who no longer look at the sky. Their loss is a beacon, illuminating the path we must take: a path that honours both our technological ambitions and our shared humanity. Because in the end, the most important interface is not the screen, but the soul.
