Epiphenomenal intelligence from partial models in safety management

This paper represents a rethinking of the contribution of artificial intelligence techniques to safety management, based on a long work experience in applying artificial intelligence to several engineering fields, from dam safety to environmental protection, from seismic monitoring to the protection of cultural heritage. The main issue is that developing models for assessing safety is a hard task, but integrating partial models may provide good results. Even if each single model is poor, a sort of epiphenomenal intelligence emerges from the behaviour of a system made of small partial models and users perceive it as a reliable assistant.