Imagine a naive young king who doesn't understand how to do anything for himself. He will easily be controlled by those around him that do understand the world.
Of course, nobody before ever understood everything about the world. But different people understood different aspects in depth, and education gave literacy so people could share expertise.
Software is so complex that nobody really understands it. Nobody understands how a car works, nobody understands how a phone works, because they are both controlled by hopelessly complex software. Governments can't regulate emissions because the software changes the emissions controls based on arbitrary unknown factors. Security problems are just a small subset of the surprising ways complex software behaves -- surprising even to the software engineers who build it.
And the key is that this is all new complexity that didn't exist before. Physics and biology were developed to understand pre-existing complexity, so we always made forward progress. But we are moving backwards now because we are introducing complexity faster than we are understanding it -- much faster.
Therefore this is actually worse than the naive king mentioned above. In that example, it's just an asymmetry of information, and that can be resolved through education. Software is so complex education can't hope to keep up.