>Imagine a mechanical engineer making industrial robots complaining about how unfair it is that they are held liable for single simple mistakes like pulping people. What injustice! If you want to make single simple mistakes, you can work on tasks where that is unlikely to cause harm like, I don't know, designing door handles? Nothing wrong with making door handles, the stakes are just different.
This is a truly absurd comparison. In the first place, yes, it is in fact much easier to make physical products safer, as anyone who's ever seen a warning line or safety guard could tell you. The manufacturers of CNC mills don't accept liability by making it impossible to run a bad batch that could kill someone, they just put the whole machine in a steel box and call it a day. The software consumers want has no equivalent solution. What's worse, in the second place, these engineers aren't actually held responsible for the equivalent of most software breaches already. There pretty much is zero liability for tampering or misuse, thus the instruction booklet of 70% legal warnings that still comes with everything you buy even in this age of cutting costs. Arguing software should be held to the same standard as physical products, when software has no equivalent of safety lockouts, is just to argue it should include acceptable use sections in its terms and conditions, which is no real improvement to people's security in the face of malicious actors.
This is a truly absurd comparison. In the first place, yes, it is in fact much easier to make physical products safer, as anyone who's ever seen a warning line or safety guard could tell you. The manufacturers of CNC mills don't accept liability by making it impossible to run a bad batch that could kill someone, they just put the whole machine in a steel box and call it a day. The software consumers want has no equivalent solution. What's worse, in the second place, these engineers aren't actually held responsible for the equivalent of most software breaches already. There pretty much is zero liability for tampering or misuse, thus the instruction booklet of 70% legal warnings that still comes with everything you buy even in this age of cutting costs. Arguing software should be held to the same standard as physical products, when software has no equivalent of safety lockouts, is just to argue it should include acceptable use sections in its terms and conditions, which is no real improvement to people's security in the face of malicious actors.