People will be tempted to lie if they think the benefits outweigh the risks, but objects won’t. Ask a person if they promise to always wear their seat belt, and the answer will be at best suspect. Test the energy efficiency of a lamp, and you’ll get an honest response from it. Objects fail, and sometimes behave unpredictably, but they aren’t strategic, they don’t choose their behavior dynamically in order to fool you. Matter isn’t evil.

But that was before. Things now have software in them, and software encodes game-theoretical strategies as well as it encodes any other form of applied mathematics, and the temptation to teach products to lie strategically will be as impossible to resist for companies in the near future as it has been to VW, steep as their punishment seems to be. As it has always happened (and always will) in the area of financial fraud, they’ll just find ways to do it better.