I meant hardware in the "old-school" sense of physical linkages and hydraulics, not computer hardware whose behaviour is controlled by some massively complex blob of software.

For example, if I pull the door handle of my car, it directly activates the latch, and the only way that could fail is if something physically breaks or jams. It's not just a switch sending a signal to some "brain" in between that could just decide, deliberately or otherwise, to not honour my "I want the door to open" request.

People are often surprised to learn that, despite me making a living off software development, my daily driver is one that has exactly zero lines of code controlling it.

I meant hardware in the same sense as you. My point was that even if we assume the brain (borrowing your metaphor) makes no mistakes, introducing it does not reduce the amount of physical breakage and jammage that is likely to occur.

You're not choosing hardware over software, here - in which case I might choose differently - you're choosing to eliminate an entire link in the chain. That's always going to be a win for reliability.

Perhaps "trustworthiness" is not the best word for the concept. I'm not sure mechanical hardware is more trustworthy (mechanical stuff also fail often and can be unreliable), but their behavior is somewhat more malleable by the user (i.e. via extra force), as opposed to complex blackbox electronics/software.

I think we need a good term to describe this specific kind of trustworthiness.

nice... what do you drive? muscle car?

cycle ?