ENGINEERING SEAMS: Observed, Not Resolved: What Authority Leaves Behind

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 ENGINEERING SEAMS If a system can’t explain why it acted, withheld, or remained silent, the failure mode is often upstream: an undocumented authority boundary at an engineering seam. ENGINEERING SEAMS formalizes a repeatable way to locate seams, name the missing decision boundary, and treat stop / refuse / silence as analyzable system outputs (not documentation gaps). This is deliberately observational: it doesn’t prescribe fixes — it makes the boundary visible so governance and compliance can be engineered explicitly. Implementation / enforcement model (SAB): https://zenodo.org/records/18431599Full Index: https://www.blockvectortech.com/publications.html Keywords: Stable Authority Boundary (SAB), authority contraction, refusal as safety invariant, autonomous systems, distributed systems, failure modes, silent failure, system boundaries, authority boundaries, autonomous systems governance, authority limitation, safety invariants, refusal as safety behavior, system legitimacy, governance-first autonomy, execution authority, system authority, AI systems safety, distributed autonomous systems, resilience engineering, fail-safe design, refusal as safety behavior, system boundaries, authority vs control, governance-first autonomy, trustworthy autonomy, autonomous decision-making, failure modes. #EngineeringSeams #Authority #DecisionBoundaries #Refusal #Silence #Compliance #Auditability #DistributedSystems #AutonomousSystems