Resumen
The article focuses on risks. A car company that boasts its new product has more computational power than needed to take Apollo to the moon. However, programmers of a different generation would be embarrassed by that admission. One may infer that high performance, physical or digital, sells cars. Should crashworthiness, physical and digital?A safe flight in limited visibility requires reliable flight data-airspeed, altitude and so forth-now electronically displayed. A new failure mode, screen malfunction, has occurred in two accidents and other incidents. But display systems are not considered safety-critical. If there's a deadly sin of safety-critical computing, hubris must be one. To recall, safety involves human affairs, of which the law is an instrument. To imagine otherwise was, perhaps, pure hubris. In 1993, Airbus noted the amount of airborne software in new aircraft doubled every two years. Has the ability to construct adequate software safety cases increased by similar exponential leaps? One method-extrapolation from the reliability of previous versions-doesn't apply; calculations show that testing cannot increase one's confidence to the high level required.