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khafra comments on Existential Risk and Public Relations - Less Wrong
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Incompetence is not a necessary condition for failure. Building something new is pretty near a sufficient condition for it, though. For instance, bridge design has been well-understood by engineers for millenia, but a slight variation on it brought catastrophic failure.
Moon landings? Man in space?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_flight#Early_notable_transatlantic_flights
...shows that after the first success there were some failures - but nobody died up until The White Bird in 1927.
Engineers are pretty good at not killing people. In fact their efforts have created lives on a large scale.
Major sources of lives lost to engineering are automobile accidents and weapons of war. Automobile accidents are due to machines being too stupid - and intelligent machines should help fix that.
The bug that destroyed the world scenario seems pretty incredible to me - and I don't see a case for describing it as the "default scenario".
It seems, if anything - based on what we have seen so far - that it is slightly more likely that a virus might destroy the world - not that the chances of that happening are very high either.
"Notable attempt (3)" - "lost" likely means "died".
Thanks. I had edited my post before seeing your reply.
Powered flight had a few associated early deaths: Otto Lilienthal died in a glider in 1896. Percy Pilcher in another hang gliding crash in 1899. Wilbur Wright almost came to a sticky end himself.
I'd never compared the likelihood of those two events before; is this comparison discussed anywhere prominent?
I don't know. Looking at the current IT scene, viruses, trojans and malware are probably the most prominent source of damage.
Bugs which are harmful are often the ones that allow viruses and malware to be produced.
We kind-of know how to avoid most harmful bugs. But either nobody cares enough to bother - or else the NSA likes people to be using insecure computers.