The Old Man in the Cave

A post-apocalyptic community survives by following an unseen 'old man's' judgments about safe food and crops. Major French exposes the oracle as a computer, destroys it, and persuades the town to eat contaminated food; almost everyone dies even though the opaque system was right.

An accurate but unexplained safety-critical system becomes a single point of failure because users cannot independently verify its advice or preserve trust under political attack.

The computer is consistently correct; the disaster is a governance, redundancy, and calibrated-trust failure rather than model misalignment.