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I don't think it's equivalent. In the physical world, it's easy to make a mistake that destroys the entire thing (e.g. causes a power plant to explode) but it's hard to make a mistake that causes the system to do something completely random and not designed. Like, you can't make a mistake with a weedwacker that turns it into an airplane.

However I have made mistakes like that programming all the time... for example, having massively more data written out to disk than I had intended. You are never going to make a mistake in a factory that increases its electricity consumption by 1,000,000x but I have made errors that caused a million times more data to be written out to disk than planned.

[TeMPOraL]

> You are never going to make a mistake in a factory that increases its electricity consumption by 1,000,000x

Maybe not a million, but a thousand times? Sure. Just short some heavy machinery and watch the amperes light up the day like a second sun as they rush out to pour into the ground. Factories have breakers to prevent that, you'll say. Turns out software projects don't have fuse equivalents, even though they should. The reason is that bleeding electricity is expensive (and dangerous to people, which from the company's POV means "even more expensive"), whereas data leaks aren't. I hope the latter is going to change.