softwarm

If you ask a civil engineer why their bridge design is safe, they'd have a very clear and convincing answer, starting from saying that it meets the gov't design code, with a detour into why the design code is sufficient (or nearly sufficient). They can also show numerical analysis for safety, and that likely they or other people checked various different ways the bridge could fail, analysis with structural models, etc. An honest engineer (typical) would additionally have clear answers for the limitations for their assumptions and why their safety cases may fail. Ditto for airplane engineers, who additionally have formal verification for increasingly large parts of the input space, demonstrations that catastrophic failure conditions are extraordinarily improbable, mandated incident reporting culture, etc. And these are ~typical engineering industries, almost all of whom actually take safety seriously: industries with critical infrastructure concerns and/or public fears, like nuclear power, typically take safety much more seriously, rather than less. Software engineers (especially in consumer software companies) are the odd ones out here, mostly because historically software didn't affect the real world as much + failures are easier to roll back, and the laws reflect this prevailing (arguably outdated) notion. And AI "engineers" even more cowboyish than normal software engineers.