New Delhi, Oct. 13 -- On the last day of their meeting in Prague in August 2006, 424 astronomers of the International Astronomical Union voted to demote Pluto from its current status. Having grown up, as so many of us have, believing that Pluto was the 9th planet in the solar system, the fact that it had been reduced to a hunk of rock came as a rude shock.

The fact is that wherever there is no definitive way to verify what is what, we are forced to depend on the consensus of experts to know what the truth is.

Earlier this month, in a paper I wrote for Observe Research Foundation titled The Absorption Frontier, I made the argument that the reliability of AI systems was critically dependent on the extent to which their outputs can be veri...