If You’re a Coder, Please Listen Carefully

Almost everything we use in daily life is software control. Mechanical and analog actuation and feedback control systems are rapidly disappearing, and everything from a smartwatch to a turbofan engine relies on thousands, sometimes millions of lines of code to function properly. Traditionally, the people that write the code have operated in a sort of vacuum, free to generate algorithms as they wish, and able to impose significant constraints on what the systems’ algorithms control, and on the humans that have to interface with them.

Increasingly, the friction between the “wetware” of the human user and the needs of the machine is building excessive complexity and cost into everything from using a ridesharing service to planning a lunar trajectory. What can be done? Jim Anderton has some definite opinions.

Access all episodes of End of the Line on Engineering TV along with all of our other series.