CONCEPT
Searching for Safety
Wildavsky's 1988 doctrine that safety is not a state to be achieved but a process to be maintained through trial, error, and institutional learning — the philosophical core of the resilience-over-anticipation argument.
Searching for Safety is both the title of Wildavsky's 1988 book and the name of his central doctrine: that safety emerges from the capacity to absorb surprises rather than from the fantasy of preventing them. The argument inverts the intuition that safer technology is produced by more careful prediction. Wildavsky demonstrated across domains — medicine, industry, environment — that anticipation strategies consistently fail because no society has ever possessed the predictive capacity they require, while resilience strategies succeed because they build the institutional muscle to correct errors as they emerge. The doctrine has become the intellectual spine of contemporary critiques of the precautionary principle, and applies with particular force to the AI transition, where the speed of capability change outstrips any conceivable anticipatory regime.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The core argument rests on an asymmetry Wildavsky spent decades documenting. Anticipation requires predicting which harms will occur, which requires understanding causal chains that run into the future.