Resilience Is Not Uptime

Broader work (full dissertation / SAB 2026):Authority, Refusal, and Resilience in Autonomous Systems — DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18431599 • Record + PDF: https://zenodo.org/records/18431599 Resilience is Not Uptime defines resilience as purpose-preservation under authority limits (not uptime), and provides the measurement lens used throughout SAB.. It argues that systems optimized primarily for uptime risk persistent misalignment when conditions change, and that resilience instead requires the capacity for intentional constraint, selective degradation, and refusal of action when continuation would compromise core objectives. The discussion distinguishes resilience from reliability, robustness, and redundancy, and frames interruption not as failure but as a legitimate outcome of controlled design. The treatment is intentionally abstract and domain-agnostic, establishing criteria by which resilient behavior may be evaluated independent of specific implementations. Keywords: Stable Authority Boundary (SAB), design invariant, authority contraction, refusal, silence, resilience, decision boundary, engineering seams, autonomous systems, distributed systems, compliance, auditability. #EngineeringSeams #Authority #DecisionBoundaries #Refusal #Silence #Compliance #Auditability #DistributedSystems #AutonomousSystems