Even If a Robot Builds a Car, Responsibility Still Lands on Humans — What I've Been Saying for 20 Years
Even If a Robot Builds a Car, Responsibility Still Lands on Humans — What I've Been Saying for 20 Years A few days ago, Anthropic had an incident where a source map was exposed externally. What struck me more than the incident itself was the first question that rippled through developer communities right after it broke. "Was this a human mistake or an AI mistake?" Did someone fat-finger a deploy config, or did an AI agent touch a file and miss something? Only Anthropic's internal team actually knows the root cause. But the fact that this was the first question the outside world asked — that's the interesting part. This is what 2026 looks like. When something breaks, the first thing people wonder is whether the cause is a person or an AI. And right behind that question comes an even more uncomfortable one. "If the AI did it, who is responsible?" That same question sits underneath what students worried about their careers, computer-science seniors ...