CONCEPT
Engineering Resilience (Holling)
The speed of return to equilibrium after perturbation — the dominant conception of resilience in mechanical and computational systems, and the wrong conception for the AI transition.
Engineering resilience is the measure embedded in most mechanical and computational systems: how quickly does a system return to its original state after disturbance? A bridge that deflects under wind load and recovers exhibits engineering resilience. The assumption is that there is one correct state and the system should return to it as rapidly as possible. Holling's 1973 paper argued that this conception is fundamentally inadequate for complex adaptive systems, which exist in multiple possible states and can shift between them. The AI transition is widely analyzed in engineering-resilience terms — how quickly can workers retrain, organizations restructure, markets stabilize — but the dynamics it exhibits are ecological rather than engineering.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Engineering resilience assumes a single equilibrium. The task is to return to it. This assumption works when disturbances are small, conditions are stable, and the system's structure is well-characterized. It fails when disturbances are large enough to push the system across basins of attraction, when conditions are themselves