The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

I'd be interested in knowing how many of y'all are being taught about this sort of thing in college ethics/safety/reliability classes.

I was taught about this in engineering school, as part of a general engineering course also covering things like bathtub reliability curves and how to calculate the number of redundant cooling pumps a nuclear power plant needs. But it's a long time since I was in college.

Is this sort of thing still taught to engineers and developers in college these days?

I was taught about it in university as a computer science undergrad, thought about it often since I ended up working in medtech.

This was part of our Systems Engineering class, something like this: https://web.mit.edu/6.033/2014/wwwdocs/assignments/therac25....

Im too curious, I made a poll. I for sure wasnt in computer science uni. I only heard about it vaguely online.

https://strawpoll.com/NMnQNX9aAg6

It was taught in a first year software ethics class on my Computer Science programme. Back in 2010. I'm wondering if they still do

I studied design and I wish we'd had a design ethics class, which would have covered instances like this.

I was taught Computer Ethics back in the early 2000s as part of my CS degree.

A big thing that was emphasized in my computer engineering courses at Purdue in the early 90s with regards to machine interfaces was hysteresis. A machine has a RANGE of behaviors throughout it's operating area that might not be accounted fro in your programing and you must take that into consideration (i.e. a robotic arm or electric motor doesn't just 'stop' instantly).

Analog systems do not behave like computers.

This and Tacoma Narrows are literally the only topics covered in engineering ethics, which itself is literally only a one hour presentation.

The therac-25 was just one of the many incidents we covered in my Software Ethics course for my Computer Science degree. The problem is not "we have to teach it", the problem is that at least half the talented people in the room with me in that class considered the entire thing "a joke" bullshit class that just wasted their time.

You can't teach people to care.

Don’t forget the Hyatt Regency walkway, too.

Thanks for posting this. The Leveson article is IMO the definitive study on this incident. I’m going to repost at top level for emphasis.

The "IBM Black Team Debugs a Tape Drive" story comes to mind: https://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html