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Old 26th Mar 2015, 13:25
  #1199 (permalink)  
PanPanYourself
 
Join Date: Sep 2005
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No it won't. You cannot rely on your average home computer to work correctly 100% of the time despite them being around for 30 years and more.
Rely on only computers to fly a passenger carrying aeroplane? That would be the death of the industry.
(a) computers are programmed by humans. Once the programme is locked in then any errors made are locked in too.
(b) old programmers adage - there is always one more bug.
Driverless cars are already safer than human operated vehicles, there is no reason to think this won’t be the case with pilotless aircraft.

We rely on dedicated software to keep nuclear power plants from melting down, and other critical, life or death applications, like medical software, and don’t forget the armed drones sent to kill people!

Mission critical software is not “your average home computer”, this is software that is dedicated to specific tasks, not general purpose, "jack of all trades” software like Windows, which is much easier to screw up and let bugs creep into. The chances of mission critical software catastrophically failing is orders of magnitude less likely than a pilot suicide.

Moreover, it doesn’t have to work correctly 100% of the time, just more than human pilots do.
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