CONCEPT
Common-Mode Failure
The engineering term for the condition in which a single cause defeats multiple redundant systems simultaneously — and the precise structural description of what happens when one mind operates across domains previously covered by independent specialists.
Common-mode failure, in classical engineering, occurs when a single cause takes out multiple redundant systems at once: both backup generators flooding because they share a basement, both cooling pumps failing because they draw from the same contaminated water supply, both navigation systems failing because they depend on the same corrupted software module. The canonical response is diverse redundancy — backup systems that do not share the same vulnerability, so that the single cause cannot propagate to all redundancies simultaneously. The concept extends naturally to cognition. The AI-augmented generalist is a common-mode cognitive system: her errors originate in a single cognitive architecture and radiate across every domain her work touches.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction between independent and correlated failure is the mathematical core of common-mode analysis. If two systems have a 1% independent failure rate each, the probability of simultaneous failure is 0.01% — one hundred times safer than either alone. If the same failure