This slide is course-added. It walks one night of the opening case with the AI recovery assistant unavailable.

How the slide uses the five objectives

The four Rs: the assistant may speed recognition, but recovery must work without it. Dependencies: its sign-on, hosting and data are dependencies like any other. Swiss Cheese: trained on the organisation’s runbooks, its gaps are likely to line up with theirs. Survivability: if it is essential to recovery and can be lost or compromised, it is a softspot. Degraded service: its use in a fallback must not expose data or grant it emergency power.

Automation bias. Under pressure, people tend to follow fluent, confident instructions without checking them against the current system state—for example, steps that assume the primary copy is usable.

Deskilling. When a tool handles routine cases, people practise less, so their skill is weakest in the unusual situation where the tool fails. Classic work on the ironies of automation describes this pattern; it extends the source’s trade-off between automation and human flexibility.

Emergency authority. An assistant, or an AI agent able to act, should not hold standing emergency privileges. The source’s rule applies: named responsibility, bounded scope, an audit trail and restoration of normal controls.

The case is course-created. Optional further reading: Bainbridge, L. (1983), Ironies of Automation, Automatica.