[SystemSafety] a discursion stimulated by recent discussions of alleged safety-critical software faults in automobile software

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

On 11/12/13 9:49 AM, Nancy Leveson wrote:
> I'd like to suggest that mixing up engineering and law is a mistake. 

To the contrary, you could barely do any engineering at all without a legal framework in which it
proceeds. You make a car. Somebody buys it, and uses it to run over the Head of Government, killing
her. The Government decides it's your fault for making and selling the car, and takes over your
company, distributing the proceeds amongst the Cabinet Ministers. Your company won't make or develop
another car, obviously.

I would suggest that the legal framework is why Germany, the US and Japan have car industries, and
Syria, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe don't.

> In addition, the legal definition of "cause" is not necessarily the same as the engineering
> definition of "cause." 

For most engineering intents and purposes they are the same in most western countries, namely the
counterfactual sense.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de