"modern automobiles are at least an order of magnitude more complex than something from, say, the 60s". I could believe a car today is even two or three orders of magnitude more complex than a car of the sixties (100 times or a 1000 times more complex).
But that's compared to Moore's law that a computer becomes an order of magnitude more complex roughly each eighteen months for twenty or more orders of magnitude increase from the sixties.
Also, modern cars do have lots of bugs in sense of suboptimal behaviors. They just cannot fail utterly without people being pissed.
We're not talking about silicon here - we're talking about software. There's no doubt that the complexity of silicon has increased by leaps and bounds in the decades since the 60s - but what about the code we write to drive them?
The complexity of code - not the compiled binary - the text you punch into the machine and what it semantically represents, has not really gotten that much more complicated over the years. We've introduced several new paradigms since the COBOL mainframes: object orientation, functional, to name a couple. It'd be hard to argue, though, that it follows Moore's Law. Not even close.
> They just cannot fail utterly without people being pissed.
This is an important point: people who expect flawless behaviour from software because other fields of engineering demonstrate it, IMHO, are misguided. Aircraft engineers work incredibly slowly because the consequences of fucking up is perhaps thousands of deaths, and billions in liabilities. Car engineers are the same on a lesser scale. There's no need to expect flawless, 100% perfect function when you don't need flawless, 100% perfect function.
We could spend 20 years developing the perfect toaster that will never, ever burn your toast. Or we can spend 2 months on something that will get it right 97% of the time, and just move on with our lives.
But that's compared to Moore's law that a computer becomes an order of magnitude more complex roughly each eighteen months for twenty or more orders of magnitude increase from the sixties.
Also, modern cars do have lots of bugs in sense of suboptimal behaviors. They just cannot fail utterly without people being pissed.