CONCEPT
Living with Normal Accidents
Perrow's governing injunction: the response to systems whose architecture guarantees catastrophic failure is not prevention (impossible) but survival — designing for graceful failure, not flawless operation, and accepting that the measure of a system is how it bounds the catastrophes it cannot avoid.
The phrase 'Living with High-Risk Technologies' is the subtitle of Perrow's foundational book, and the verb is load-bearing. Living with — not eliminating, not preventing, not solving. Living with. Managing. Containing. Building structures that bound the inevitable failures within limits the system's inhabitants can survive. The prescription is uncomfortable because it rejects the implicit optimism of most safety discourse, which promises that the right combination of precautions can eliminate the possibility of system failure. Perrow denies that promise. Certain systems will fail. The question is whether the failures, when they come, are bounded or unbounded — whether the dam holds or whether the dam was never built.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction between prevention and survival is the most important one in Perrow's framework and the one most frequently misunderstood. Prevention assumes that the right combination of precautions can eliminate the possibility