Build, Test & Iterate Until Safe...

I'm of an age that I can remember when heaters in cars were an optional extra and not standard fitments. As were radios - cassette-players were only just appearing, and at some considerable expense [again optional, mostly third-party add-ons] - and as for sat-nav, well, let's say that geo-stationary orbital arrays were quite a way off into the future distance back in the sixties. The kind of stuff we take for granted these days, even as relatively recently back then at the height of the post-war boom years, with its 'white heat of technology', would have been as but science fiction to us.

But back then, we hadn't committed our entire economy and existence to essentially one strand of technology: electronics and computing were merely adjuncts to the existing engines of commerce and industry; and bureaucracy was run pretty much by pen and typewriter on paper and card. Fast forward to now, and nothing - nothing [essential to our lives in the so-called 'First World'] - happens without its mediation through software and the algorithms deployed through its agency. Nothing. Every aspect of our lives is now controlled through software. Every action that we take to interact with the world: shopping, bill-paying, social contact for a large swathe of the population; and all of our critical services like banking, healthcare, social care, transport, etc., is controlled and mediated by software. And we trust it to simply work because we have been raised on the myth of machine infallibility.

Such is the naivety and folly of mankind. The abstraction of computer technology has allowed enormous quantities of flawed, poorly-written and downright dangerous code out into the wild under the invisibility cloak of technical complexity - pretty much unchecked - at the behest and service of - guess what? Profit. The exemplification of this and very much a warning to the wise, is the ongoing Post Office Scandal, still not resolved. The simple reason for, and cause of this horrendous travesty and affront to justice and human rights, was badly written, poorly tested and too-soon-deployed software. Throw in an arrogant and expedient corporate refusal to face up to the reality that machines are only as good [especially in the case of data science - and now, further still, AI] as the people that make, program and manage them, and you have real human tragedy as the result. And the future? Start worrying, read the right stuff, and most of all, don't sleepwalk...