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Life-and-death software is already regulated fairly strictly and generally has decent quality. But of course the companies developing it also try to cut costs and in the end it's more about checking off boxes to avoid liability than producing correct software.



Hmmm, on the sliding scale of harmless to life-and-death software, it seems that as time goes many programs and services migrate from being closer to the harmless end to bring closer to the life-and-death end.

I feel that migration is often ignored or discounted. For example, Facebook in the early years was considered mostly harmless, but now has migrated to being exploited by state actors to brainwash populations into hating each other, interfering in elections, or at worst performing genocide on a minority group. We need to stop assuming that just because a software application is harmless now, that it will stay that way, and we need to adjust its "correctness" accordingly as it migrates along the harmless <> life-and-death scale.




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