Disclaimer, my thoughts are of my own and not of my employer. I work in the SDC industry as well but on hardware so I wanted to share my thoughts. I'm guessing

Disclaimer, my thoughts are of my own and not of my employer. I work in the SDC industry as well but on hardware so I wanted to share my thoughts. I'm guessing the author does not work on the hardware side of things because the safety and verification processes is transparent and obvious. I agree with the premise that humans are great drivers and replacing humans will be a tough challenge (which makes it fun). However, the idea that SDCs cannot be verified and the rockets vs SDC analogy is incorrect. Let's go even closer and just compare cars to SDCs. What makes your standard cars that has 150+ of HP safe? Better yet, most of this energy comes from explosion of fuel! Any of the mechanical failures in a car can lead to death (brake calipers breaking, ECU malfunction, pistonhead cannonball, etc). But yet, how often do you hear in the news someone dies because their car exploded while using it? The reason why cars are robust is not because it's mechanical, deterministic, some sort of inherent physical laws, or manufactures test every single part coming out of the production line. But rather cars are safe because there is a robust safety system that heavily incorporates a verification and validation process with a promoted transparency process that mitigate risk. A good example of this is ASIL (ISO-26262) [1] and FMEA processes [2]. Other industries like rocket/military (like you mentioned) and medical both deploy the same type of model to make their product safe and robust. There is no glaring technical barrier that prevents SDC. The hardest barrier for a product has always been cost vs profit (likewise for most products, economics of it always comes first). [1]https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:26262:-9:ed-1:en https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:26262:-9:ed-1:en [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode_and_effects_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode_and_effects_analy...