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People aren't using AI to relentlessly attack bridges and buildings with adversarial earthquakes from the other side of the country.

But also I would bet those undergo more rigorous testing than a lot of software.

by WalterBright18 hours ago|

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Buildings and bridges have very large safety margins, to account for design errors, construction errors, damage, poor materials, etc.

Airplanes have much smaller safety margins, meaning a lot more calculation is done, and there's a high emphasis on double checking everything.

Spacecraft have tiny safety margins, which amps up the design rigor to 11.

by R0m41nJosh5 hours ago|

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Airplanes and srarcrafts are operated by a trained trusted crew. Software is operated continuously by lots of hostile people and machines.

When terrorists take the control of a plane, it's a catastrophe.

by jameshart17 hours ago|

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On the contrary - this is explicitly the mission of most military organizations. There are countries in the world today where every day their bridges and buildings face adversarial attacks from state level threat actors.

The difference is, people who build civilian bridges and buildings are not actually generally expected to build structures that can withstand such attacks because preventing those attacks is considered the government’s job.

So no, they typically don’t undergo ‘more rigorous testing’ than software against security threats. The fact that governments make no effort to protect networked systems from being attacked places the burden of withstanding those attacks fully on the private civilian operators.

by pegasus15 hours ago|

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In an important way bridges and buildings are indeed proven to be sound by applying the mathematical tools of structural engineering, materials science, etc. Software Engineering also has analogous formal tools at its disposal (Lean is one gaining a lot of exposure these days), but many were being neglected because it wasn't worth the bother. In this new adversarial world, we'll be forced to reach for them more often. Luckily the models are also a big help in making these tools more approachable.