I'm not aware of any books that have covered this appropriately. The biggest part of automation in my experience is boiling down the inputs to a 'unique' state

I'm not aware of any books that have covered this appropriately. The biggest part of automation in my experience is boiling down the inputs to a 'unique' state that automation can then use as inputs and be run on. For computation to do work, it requires a property of consistency, and computers can only operate accurately and do work when properties of determinism are met. Also as the OP mentions, state can explode leading to sphagetti, this is why he mentions a sieve like approach based on similarity. Some problem spaces can be fundamentally inconsistent, such as with some approximations (common methods used for such), which falls back to what amounts to guesses, heuristics, and checks in terms of exception handling. There are problem scopes that cannot be characterized too so no amount of exception handling will resolve the entire scope, which is why you need fallbacks in a resilient design. If inputs cannot be controlled and uniquely differentiated, the automation fails in brittle ways, especially with regards to external change. The main interface (with regards to your core features) would be language, or communication. There exists words right now that can have contradictory, and different meanings, where the same word may mean the opposite depending on context, and this is not a general consensus but an individual one (where the individual may be misusing it). That breaks the 1:1 mapping required for determinism, and AI weights mimicking neurons have a narrow approximation where it may work under a narrow set of circumstances but no computer today can differentiate when the inputs are the same but have two or more, different states mixed in (many people forget that absence of a state is a state too) and then decompose them. Abstract decomposition seems to be something only humans are good at, and I'm glad this is the case otherwise none of us would have jobs.