Imagine you've got the alleged bomber's computer, it has hundreds of thousands of images with long hexadecimal names like 384d38b0c32aaf03.jpg and you're under pressure to figure out where the missing fifth bomb is before everybody finds out the hard way.

Now, on one hand you've got a simple image viewer built with WUFFS: https://github.com/google/wuffs which you are completely sure is safe for viewing the images, you could perhaps glance at a hundred images per hour, although if there's anything subtle you'd miss it.

On the other hand, you've got a fancy AI-assisted tool that processes over 1000 images per minute and cross-matches them with over a hundred law enforcement databases and other sources to understand what it sees. It might be able to pick out anomalous images in time to make a difference. Still, it was written in C++ and the last time you used it the program crashed three times with mysterious errors.

Which do you choose? If the bomb blows up and kills sixty elementary school kids while you're glancing at image #406 having not noticed that school is in the background of images #284, #301, #305, #313, and #326 and never guessing that the unknown interiors in images #192-198 and #350-400 are from that same school - you're going to feel like an idiot for choosing the slow path.

But if the bomb blows up when your AI assisted image processor is exploited by a C++ JPEG library zero day inside image #4861 and that sends the "explode now" code to a custom web site the bomber set up for exactly this eventuality, you're going to feel like an idiot for not using WUFFS.

This sort of trade-off is how Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep" begins. Humans (roughly) are poking around in an apparently forgotten archive in deep space. They could be slow and careful, but it's too tempting to choose quicker methods, smarter methods, letting the archive direct how to improve their AI to better understand it. By the time the humans realise their AI is doing what the archive wanted it to do, not what they wanted it to do, it's far too late for them.

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