Do a search for the Therac radiation machine and you’ll see why swapping out hardware controls and safety mechanisms for software can lead to disaster.
Therac is exactly what I was thinking.
It's a valuable case study for software engineering. But I would have phrased your sentence differently.
The change from hardware to software safety interlocks didn't directly CAUSE the disasters, but removed the controls that would have PREVENTED the disasters.
The actual software bugs that caused the injuries and deaths were present in the hardware-interlocked machine too.