Publications

David B. Forbes

David B. Forbes is an independent systems researcher focused on resilient distributed systems, governance-first autonomy, and safety-constrained behavior in autonomous and semi-autonomous systems.

His work examines how authority, legitimacy, and execution boundaries must be explicitly defined and enforced to prevent unsafe or unjustified system behavior under uncertainty. He is particularly concerned with failure modes arising not from insufficient intelligence, but from ambiguous, degraded, or improperly constrained authority.

Forbes’ research emphasizes architectural invariants such as the Stable Authority Boundary (SAB), authority contraction, refusal as correct behavior, quorum-gated execution, and degraded operational states.

Mr. Forbes created the app — built for speed, the BV Color Tool delivers instant palette selection, developed within the SEAMS framework.

SEAMS is a structured engineering framework for analyzing system behavior in autonomous and distributed systems, with emphasis on authority boundaries, failure modes, and safety invariants at the boundary between evaluation and execution. It addresses fault-tolerant autonomous systems, graceful degradation, and fail-operational design under conditions such as communication loss, network partition, and distributed consensus failure.

Developed through extensive research, SEAMS introduces concepts such as authority contraction, refusal as a safety invariant, and governance-first autonomy, providing a repeatable method for designing trustworthy autonomous systems that behave correctly under uncertainty — including when correct behavior requires non-action.

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