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The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

(thedailywtf.com)
449 points lemper | 1 comments | 27 Aug 25 06:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.348s | source
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isopede ◴[27 Aug 25 08:23 UTC] No.45036862[source]▶
I strongly believe that we will see an incident akin to Therac-25 in the near future. With as many people running YOLO mode on their agents as there are, Claude or Gemini is going to be hooked up to some real hardware that will end up killing someone.

Personally, I've found even the latest batch of agents fairly poor at embedded systems, and I shudder at the thought of giving them the keys to the kingdom to say... a radiation machine.

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SCdF ◴[27 Aug 25 09:05 UTC] No.45037102[source]▶
The Horizon (UK Royal Mail accounting software) incident killed multiple postmasters through suicide, and bankrupted and destroyed the lives of dozens or hundreds more.

The core takeaway developers should have from Therac-25 is not that this happens just on "really important" software, but that all software is important, and all software can kill, and you need to always care.

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hahn-kev ◴[27 Aug 25 09:21 UTC] No.45037211[source]▶
From what I've read about that incident I don't know what the devs could have done. The company sure was a problem but also the laws basically saying a computer can't be wrong. No dev can solve that problem.
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1. sim7c00 ◴[27 Aug 25 09:29 UTC] No.45037255[source]▶
as you point out this was a messup on a lot of levels. its an interesting effect tho not to be dismissed. how your software works and how its perceived and trusted can impact people psychologically.