Given the state of the software industry, it's honestly more surprising that this doesn't happen more often. Our industry is a complete joke, and somehow we've been given responsibility over people's lives.
I don’t know what will turn out to be our penicillin, or our Joseph Lister, but in 1960 the former is something that didn’t exist when older doctors were in school, and latter had only been dead for fifty years. It may not have happened for us yet.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_James_A._Garf...
Like I said we are still young, so it feels sort of arrogant saying we have figured something out when I know how many things are industry standard now that almost resulted in shouting matches trying to get done even 20 years ago. Maybe our soap moment is coming up ten years from now.
But I suspect automated testing may be the wash your hands, because it represents a sort of hygiene that “we” used to just say fuck it or make a minimal effort.
It probably does. We just don't notice.
> Our industry is a complete joke, and somehow we've been given responsibility over people's lives.
Amen to that. kqr made some choice comments the other day in that thread about the airliner that came to within a hair of crashing due to running out of fuel. Thinking about risk is not a skill that we're born with and it is always sobering to read the 'risks digest' for a bit and to see how thin the ice really is.
I do not trust them and never will. This is the #1 reason why every car is buy is just a car. I do not trust techbros with devices that can kill you, especially cars.
"Move fast and break things" is not really a virtue when the thing moving fast is a two-ton hunk of steel and the things breaking are people's bodies. Getting the easier stuff right but then then also killing people isn't "doing better" in my opinion; sometimes it's better to have a lot of lower magnitude failures than infrequent but catastrophic ones.
Autopilot aside, though, the regular boring car software bits are rock-solid, and I've never had an issue with using it or after an update.
Citation needed.
In the early days of autopilot/FSD most of the fatalities were people doing stupid things like watching a movie or sleeping in the back seat. That's why it now has to monitor your face with a camera to detect whether or not you are watching the road - to stop people from being idiots.
However we must acknowledge that any change in the automotive space is going to lead to problems and some percentage of those are going to cause injuries. That is the nature of cars. They do not have the certification standards of aircraft nor the training of pilots. They can't and they won't.
It is also inevitable that autonomous driving is going to make different mistakes than a person would make. On a miles-driven basis it still produces fewer accidents and injuries than human drivers.