Chapter 12 - Failure Modes by Region
Last updated 2026-07-13. This page hosts the operator-burden literature behind Chapter 12 - the cross-disciplinary grounding for the per-region failure-mode framework - and links to the live region-by-region diagnostic prompts and the failure-diagnosis worked example.
Companion activity
Use the diagnostic prompts and worked example to classify one failure by region before choosing a fix.
What this chapter argues
When the partnership misbehaves, the question is not "is the AI broken?" - it is "which region failed?". The chapter offers a failure-pattern map (Figure 12.1) that ranks candidate regions from a symptom and names a discriminating check for each: reasoning theatre (prefrontal), loopmaxxing (working memory), missed intent (dialog interface), side effects (motor / sensory), prompt injection (motor / sensory + nervous system), context drop (working memory + long-term memory). It is a hypothesis map, not a unique localization algorithm. Each region has its own symptom, its own root cause, and its own repair. Naming the region first prevents the most expensive class of failure: throwing the wrong fix at the wrong layer.
Key sources
Chapter 12 cites in the print book: D50. Entries below are the sources this page draws on; some are related literature cited elsewhere in the book rather than in this chapter.
- D18 - Bainbridge, L. (1983). Ironies of automation. Automatica, 19(6), 775-779. doi.org/10.1016/0005-1098(83)90046-8
- D19 - Parasuraman, R., and Riley, V. (1997). Humans and Automation: Use, Misuse, Disuse, Abuse. Human Factors, 39(2), 230-253. doi.org/10.1518/001872097778543886
Primary-source links
- Bainbridge (1983), "Ironies of automation" - the foundational paper on why automation increases operator burden in the moments that matter most. Forty years old; still load-bearing.
- Parasuraman & Riley (1997), "Humans and Automation: Use, Misuse, Disuse, Abuse" - the four-way taxonomy of automation failure modes the chapter's failure-pattern map is calibrated against.
Chapter contents
- The failure-pattern map (Figure 12.1): per-region symptoms, root causes, repairs.
- Reasoning theatre - thorough deliberation, wrong framing (prefrontal).
- Loopmaxxing - more iterations make the result worse (working memory).
- Missed intent - answer correct for question never asked (dialog interface).
- Side effects - agent action changed something the human did not authorize (motor / sensory).
- Prompt injection - tool-call payload subverted the agent's goal (motor / sensory + nervous system).
- Context drop - earlier session state was silently lost (working memory + long-term memory).
Related resources
The region-by-region diagnostic prompts page provides copy-paste-ready diagnostic probes the practitioner can run when a failure is observed but the region is not yet identified. The failure-diagnosis worked example walks one real incident through the full diagnostic process.