With the rise of artificial intelligence, we give more control of our lives to software. We thereby introduce new risks, and the fatal Uber crash in 2018 is the first example of AI causing an accidental death. It will be up to us as software engineers to build systems safe and reliable enough to entrust with important decisions. Our culture, however, includes praising companies that move fast and break things (Facebook), celebrate principled confrontation (Uber), fake self-driving demonstrations (Tesla), and are right, a lot (Amazon). As an industry, we need to radically improve to meet the challenge, or more people will die. In this presentation, we will look at aviation - the industry most successful at continuously improving safety - and attempt to learn. We will look at aviation safety principles, compare with similar practices in software engineering, and see how we can translate safety principles that have worked well in aviation to the software engineering domain. |