The Coming Software Apocalypse

[hpshelton]

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layout: post type: link date: 2024-04-16 18:00:00 -0700 title: "The Coming Software Apocalypse" link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240329071358/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/ permalink: /post/2024/04/16/the-coming-software-apocalypse categories:

• software
• programming
• software engineering

• safety

  “When we had electromechanical systems, we used to be able to test them exhaustively,” says Nancy Leveson, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been studying software safety for 35 years. [...] “We used to be able to think through all the things it could do, all the states it could get into.” [...]

  Software is different. Just by editing the text in a file somewhere, the same hunk of silicon can become an autopilot or an inventory-control system. This flexibility is software’s miracle, and its curse. Because it can be changed cheaply, software is constantly changed; and because it’s unmoored from anything physical—a program that is a thousand times more complex than another takes up the same actual space—it tends to grow without bound. “The problem,” Leveson wrote in a book, “is that we are attempting to build systems that are beyond our ability to intellectually manage.”

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