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Many are concerned about increasing amounts of risk being accepted through increasing reliance of software in all activities. This talk will discuss in which sense software technology does create specific risks, different from other technologies, and how these are evolving in the various areas of application. On the technical side, it will argue that decision-making in the design and acceptance of software systems must be based on sound, scientific, essentially probabilistic, reasoning, a need that is ignored in much current practice. It will also stress the limits of the knowledge available, an what help sound scientific reasoning offers in the face of these limits.