Many people see software as being as useful, say, as a car or bicycle. However, I think seeing all software like a wild animal and a subroutine more like something like a bird or insect might be more useful. I think most people are lulled into complacency by the apparent "magic" of software. However, as someone who has written programs a lot in the past, I see software as something potentially unpredictable in almost all cases because you really can't get 100% predictability from software ever even though it might be possible to achieve between 90% and 99% predictability theoretically.
The biggest single problem is even if you write a program that is perfect in almost every sense of the word, you still have to deal with media corruption every moment of every day. Media corruption is most prevalent in all electronic memory storage such as hard drives, or tape or other kinds of magnetic media storage. Even non-magnetic media storage such as CD's and Dvd's and Blue ray can melt in the sun on your dashboard of your car(as many of you might have experienced or even if you might have left them near a non-curtained window of your home or office that might not be air conditioned on a very hot and sunny day.
So, absolutely every computer both military and civilian is vulnerable to multiple types of corruption whether that be electronic or magnetic media storage or even through non-magnetic storage as in devices like CDs and Dvd's or eve Blue Ray.
"So what?" you might say. The real problem is when you find software corrupting that affects whether people live or die as in military hardware or passenger airliners that are set on automatic while pilots do other things or Automobile computers that can corrupt and send signals to override the wishes of the driver and take braking of one or all brakes from the driver of the car so one or more people die both inside and outside of the car. Or even worse of people who use all these vulnerabilities as hackers to kill people for fun or profit and who get away with it because the police everywhere simply are not equipped to deal with this level of sophistication. Or when Secret services of all countries do the same. Or when Wall Street level hackers slightly skew data so all the 1/4 and 1/2 cents in a financial transaction go into their own bank accounts or one that they can easily access.
So, even though all the examples I'm stating here are real ones let me give you an example that is even more blatant in a military context. You have all heard of the U.S Predator Drones that are used to kill Al Qaeda terrorists that are flown remotely from the middle of the U.S.? Well, within the operating system of these drones is software that much like a cell phone can deal with loss of signal from the remote pilot. So, whenever temporary or permanent signal loss occurs they can pilot themselves. So, the artificial intelligence inside the drone (with hellfire missiles) is operating separately from all human contact, either temporarily or permanently. And it is likely only a matter of time before something really bad happens in this context. However, the general public likely wouldn't ever hear about it.
Next, in regard to Airliners and car computers, many accidents are just waiting to happen regarding this many lives, most of which will never be positively identified because, once again most people aren't sophisticated enough to discover the truth at present within the police departments of the world, except maybe in Washington DC in the CIA, NSA and FBI and a few others. And so, planes will crash, cars will crash and hundreds (maybe thousands or more) people will die every year and their deaths will be blamed on pilot error or wind shear or something else but it won't be the truth. It will just be that no one there was able to figure out the truth, or that companies that made the software didn't want the truth known or that the people that murdered those people were sophisticated enough to get away with it, or they died from software corruption or just bad programming.
The thing with all or most software is that it is not "Self Correcting". So that if it starts to do something stupid just like the mops in the new Disney movie "Sorcerer's Apprentice" they just keep doing stupid and insipid things until someone who is self correcting stops them. And here is the rub, "What if a computer or piece of software is doing something really bad to mankind over and over again for years and no one catches it?" When software doesn't correct itself those 1/4 and 1/2 cents might never stop adding up and some "dumb" computer software somewhere might end up owning most everything and not care because it is stupid. Computers are stupid and mostly not self correcting and if we don't correct them then nobody will!
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