Cory Doctorow at Google

Cory Doctorow in 2017 talking about his most recent book at the time, Walkaway, at the google.

So "Walkaway" is an optimistic disaster novel...and the thesis underlying it is that you are not a pessimistic person if you assume something will go wrong with a system. Engineers who design systems on the assumption that nothing will ever go critically wrong with them don't make good systems. They build the Titanic. And so optimism is not the belief that nothing will go wrong. Optimism is the belief that we can design systems that coast to a gentle stop when they go wrong, instead of exploding and showering all the people around them with white hot shrapnel. And it's also the belief that once they've coasted to a stop, we can get them started again.