Mind the Economic Safety Gap

The accelerating pace of technological innovation - driven in large parts by artificial intelligence - means that safety engineering is becoming a substantial cost factor in many development projects. Addressing this issue will require contributions from safety engineering research to ensure that new technologies can be safely used in safety-critical systems. In this paper, we describe the impact that a lack of novel safety engineering methods would have on products in the future. Additionally, we propose using generative artificial intelligence to create an assistant for safety engineers, which would be an effective measure to address the issue of safety assurance for complex systems. Finally, we explain remaining research challenges and how they could be addressed.