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"Presumption about reliability of computers"

Anyone else get the sense that these were laws written without any input whatsoever from people who actually have working experience in complex systems?

I'm convinced that no moral software engineer would ever suggest a conviction on the presumption that the system is correct. At minimum you'd have to investigate.

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The presumption was about mechanical instruments, from a simpler time. As computers expanded from being purely mechanical, it never got revised, which is why it is being revised now (three or four decades too late, I'll grant you, but legislation is a slow process.)

Except it was revised once already to point out that computers aren't reliable. And then a decade later, at the peak of the dot-com boom, that revision was reverted after a review by committee.

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