Moral Latency
Failure modes
The delay between harm occurring and the system recognizing it. Automated systems create harms faster than human oversight can register, demanding velocity friction and ethical interrupts.
Focused Ethotechnic territory
Failure modes
Common patterns where responsibility dissolves and harm accelerates.
Common patterns where responsibility dissolves and harm accelerates.
Use this chapter when you only need failure modes definitions.
Filterable
Linkable
Shareable
Maintained
Return to the main glossary to search across all territories.
Browse the other territories
Every chip opens a dedicated glossary slice so you can share just the relevant definitions. Labels provide the primary cue, with short aria-label descriptors for additional context.
B. Failure modes (why Ethotechnics exists)
Common patterns where responsibility dissolves and harm accelerates.
Accountability Diffusion
Failure modes
Responsibility dissolves across teams, tools, and incentives until no one can intervene. A signature pattern of modern institutions and a direct threat to design authority.
Extraction
Failure modes
When a system pulls value—data, attention, labor, or social capital—without returning care, consent, or repair. Extraction hides true costs through externalization and steep burden gradients, hollowing trust.
Extraction by Endurance
Failure modes
Systems that depend on workers or users absorbing fragility through burnout, emotional labor, or unpaid cognitive work—often mislabeled as “resilience.” Ethotechnic practice aims to invert this burden with fair burden distribution.
Drift (System Drift)
Failure modes
The natural tendency of systems to externalize harm over time unless constrained by protective friction and moral performance indicators.
Externalization
Failure modes
Pushing risk, cost, or harm onto other teams, communities, or the future so metrics look clean. Externalization shows up as pollution, shadow labor, or brittle dependencies that live outside audits.
Ethotechnics counters it with oversight horizons, MPIs, and transparent repair logs.
Brittleness
Coming soonFailure modes
A system’s intolerance for human variance, refusal, or error.
Optimization Myopia
Coming soonFailure modes
Where metric-chasing overrides human safety or justice.
Precision Laundering
Coming soonFailure modes
Using quantitative metrics to disguise inequity as objectivity.
Compliance Collapse
Coming soonFailure modes
When rules replace judgment and harm increases.