People’s freedom jeopardised by new software adopted by California’s courts
Software is currently in a strange place legislatively, in the 18th century Civil Engineering exploded (sometimes literally) and the number of disasters went up in radically (for an interesting case <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tay_Bridge_disaster" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tay_Bridge_disaster</a>), over time professional standards bodies grew alongside the maturing industry to both ensure that people working in the industry where adequately trained <i>and</i> adequately protected from external factors (people pushing them to do things cheaply, skimp on designs etc).<p>Given that we&#x27;ve handed a large part of the running of the modern world over to computers, software and the people who write that software I think at some point we need to start looking at a similar system, now the usual argument to this is &quot;We don&#x27;t want regulation&quot; or &quot;It&#x27;s not my code, it&#x27;s other peoples&quot; but that doesn&#x27;t alter the reality that this isn&#x27;t going to get better until the way the industry is run changes, it&#x27;s not a software issue, better tooling won&#x27;t save us (it might help though) and there is no perfect outcome.<p>EDIT: It&#x27;s worth noting that if as an industry we don&#x27;t work with our customers on this stuff and reach an accord that fits everyone eventually one will be imposed on us from outside, Software Engineering doesn&#x27;t exist in isolation, other fields of Engineering are covered already.