mithriltabby | ...rambling... (Reply)

In today’s meeting, I expressed my relief that our current project at EFI is code-named “Atlantic”, which is something that is unlikely to explode or catch fire. Our standard product here, you see, is named “Fiery”, and is not exactly crashproof.

Someday, in some context, whether a game or a story (if ever I get my fiction writing career off the ground), I’m going to have to work in a bit of future history concerning the spaceplane named Icarus.

When a pointy-haired marketer at the aerospace company suggested the name, the engineers, as one, blanched and suggested some alternatives. When the marketer insisted, the engineers came back with cost estimates based on a design with quintuple redundant fail-safe systems and overengineering to handle an order of magnitude more peak stress than expected.

The project gets approved, and proceeds toward implementation. Sometime after the budgetary point of no return, the pointy-haired marketer gets sacked and replaced with a sensible one, who realizes that it’s a unique opportunity: no one could have gotten approval for this on a business plan because of the expense of overengineering, but now that it’s do-or-die, the company can sell the thing on its safety features. Space transport accidents, after all, gather a lot of bad press, and even if the probability of an accident is lower than getting hit by a car, people with precious payloads may be willing to shell out a little more for the mental security of flying the safest thing in the sky.

So the Icarus winds up with an excellent service record, and kicks off a quiet revolution in quality control.

This is all part of a musing I came up with a while ago when looking at the whole notion of cutting-edge cyberpunk technology: as a software engineer, would I want something running anything with the quality of modern technology surgically implanted? I decided that any believable future that included a notion of widespread reliable implant technology would require that there had been, at some manner of Quality Revolution. Occasional slogans have occured to me, the best of which was: “How many loved ones have you lost to software errors?”