In the bazaars of Mughal India, the muhtasib walked the lanes each morning with a unique authority.
He carried no sword but only a set of weights and a practised eye. His tasks were unglamorous such as to check that the trader's scale was honest, that the ghee remained free of any added fat, that the silk sold as Banarasi was genuine, rather than cheaper cloth dressed up in a better story.
He was, in effect, the guarantor of trust in a marketplace where the buyer could rarely verify the seller's claim alone.
Civilisations have always needed someone whose job is to notice when something has been quietly substituted for something else.
I think of the muhtasib often now, watching my own generation try to find its place in a marketplace flooded with artificial intelligence.
The bazaar before optimisation
Gen X built its instincts in a market that had yet to be engineered. We grew up before the feed was curated, before the search result was personalised, before recommendation became a science.
Trust then was earned the slow way, through repetition, through reputation, through a neighbour's word. That apprenticeship in unmediated trust is, oddly, the asset AI finds hardest to replicate or erode in us.
We remember what it costs to fake it, because we watched people try and fail at it long before software made faking effortless.
Fluency mistaken for judgement
The generation entering workplaces today is dazzlingly fluent with these tools. They work faster, are less intimidated, and feel unburdened by our scepticism.
That said, fluency and judgement are different inheritances entirely. Those who have never known an unoptimised world tend to mistake an answer that sounds confident for an answer that is correct. AI, like the cleverest trader in the bazaar, is built to please the customer first and serve the truth second. Without a muhtasib's eye, you will buy the cloth at the price of silk.
The discipline of doubt
What Gen X carries is calibration, more than nostalgia. We came of age watching technology overpromise and quietly fail. We encountered systems that misled, tools that broke exactly when they were needed, claims that crumbled on contact with reality. That history bred a habit of verification that is now, unexpectedly, a competitive advantage.
Doubt, applied with craft rather than cynicism, is the only adulteration test that still works on a machine built to sound certain.
Taste resists automation
AI has already swallowed the blank page as also the throat-clearing first draft every brand used to pay weeks for. That is a liberation disguised as loss. It frees the marketer for the part of the craft that was always human in the form of curation, restraint, the editing out of ninety per cent of what is merely fluent so that the ten per cent that is true can be heard.
Taste is a slower, more deliberate refusal. It is the opposite of a faster output.
Bad is detected by everyone. It's the "good enough" that passes through and ruins standards.
That's the advantage of being older in a manic, young world
That's also the X, Y and Z of it.
(The author is a business leader and columnist)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
