Future of Being Human an Arizona State University initiative

Tipping points, broken symmetries, and the non-predictive past

Last updated 2026-08-07 · Markdown version

Humanity is at one of the most profound tipping points in its history — and Andrew Maynard’s deepest argument for why comes not from AI at all, but from a rope ladder in a Cambridge physics lecture in the early 1990s. The demonstration he calls “Pippard’s Ladder” (the demonstration is the physicist Brian Pippard’s; the name and its extension to technology are Andrew’s) carries a lesson that most debate about transformative technologies never touches: in complex systems the past cannot predict the future, which means the most common reassurance about transformative AI and other transformative technologies — “it always worked out before” — fails at the level of logic, not just judgment. This idea is the load-bearing floor under the initiative’s whole framing of advanced technology transitions.

The argument

Start with the physics. In 1980 the Cambridge physicist Brian Pippard published a paper on classroom demonstrations of critical behavior and broken symmetry — the physics of discontinuities, which he noted “pervade our everyday lives — a dripping tap, a snapping branch, a breaking wave” even though physics students treat continuity as “almost a religious principle” (Pippard, 1980, as quoted by Andrew in the essay of 2023-05-04). In a public lecture in Cambridge in the early 1990s, Pippard held up a miniature ladder — four evenly spaced rungs on two cords — and slowly rotated the bottom rung, asking the audience to predict the outcome. The audience — Andrew among them — predicted a smooth transformation into a neat double helix. Instead, at a point fiendishly hard to predict, the cords between two rungs abruptly twisted together into a tangle — and reversing the twist did not untangle them. An abrupt, irreversible transition, at an effectively unpredictable moment, in about the simplest system imaginable.

Andrew — who attended the lecture — has carried the image for four decades, because of what it says about the kind of thing a critical transition is. If a four-rung ladder makes the where-and-when of its tipping point practically unpredictable, prediction does not get easier when the system is a planet’s climate, or a global economy meeting generative AI. This is what “broken symmetry” means in his usage: near a critical transition there is no predictive symmetry between past and future. How a system behaved before the transition tells you almost nothing about what it does at or after it (2023-05-04).

Now the move that carries the weight. The standard reassurance about transformative technologies runs: people feared earlier technologies; those transitions turned out fine, or at least not catastrophic; therefore this one probably will too. Andrew grants the premise has “a ring of truth about it” for at least some technologies — and then points out that the inference is structurally invalid. It is an induction over a system’s past behavior, applied to precisely the class of systems whose defining property is that past behavior does not constrain what happens at a tipping point. “It always worked out before” is not merely optimistic; it is the wrong argument form for the system it is about (2023-05-04).

Three claims support taking this seriously now. First, we are plausibly in the relevant regime: the coupling between what our technologies do and what happens to us and the planet has tightened to where there is “a growing tension between what we can achieve with powerful technologies, the growing demands of a global population, and the constraints imposed by living within planetary boundaries” that is “indicative of a highly complex and increasingly unstable system” (2023-05-04). Second, some tipping points have already been crossed: reviewing the twelve months after ChatGPT’s launch, Andrew wrote that “The introduction of ChatGPT was one such tipping point” and that it and the unexpected behaviors of large language models “led to changes that cannot be undone, nor forgotten” (2023-11-29). Third, the historical record cuts against complacency rather than for it: steam power, synthetic fertilizers, the internet — technology-driven tipping points are arguably “the norm rather than the exception in human existence,” making the current stable patch the anomaly (2024-08-18).

Note carefully what the argument does not claim. It is not doom. Andrew is explicit that climate models suggest sudden global tipping is less likely than it can seem — a planet has more ways of absorbing and adapting to stress than a four-rung ladder (2023-05-04). The target is the reasoning, and the unearned confidence it licenses; the conclusion is a choice, not a forecast: “Do we continue to charge full-steam ahead with technologies like AI, gene editing, quantum technologies, and others, until something gives … Or do we get serious about how to successfully navigate these advanced technology transitions, so we don’t jeopardize the future simply because we were naive enough to assume it would be just like the past?” (2023-05-04).

Getting serious is where the thread turns constructive. By 2024 Andrew had rebuilt the ladder — in Lego and ribbon — for an IEEE keynote, using it to stage a quadrant model of transition strategies (avoid, adapt, extend, embrace), offered explicitly as a thought experiment and “admittedly simplistic” (2024-08-18); it is developed on Advanced technology transitions. And the thesis carries an institutional consequence: if “humanity is at a tipping point in its history where the past is a poor predictor of the future,” then thinking that merely extrapolates past thinking is mismatched to the moment — the case he made for new, radical, boundary-transcending and public-serving institutions after the Future of Humanity Institute closed (2024-04-28), and the argument beneath this initiative’s existence (what the initiative is).

Lineage

In his own words

“Yet this is precisely the point of Pippard’s demonstration: In a complex system, what has occurred in the past may not adequately predict what will happen in the future. This is very much where Pippard’s idea of “broken symmetries” comes into play, where the complexities and non-linearities of the systems we are creating mean that there is no predictive symmetry between the past and the future.”

— Tipping Points and Broken Symmetries (AI-readable mirror), 2023-05-04

“Pippard’s ladder is an example of nonlinear dynamics. It represents the tendency of complex and interconnected systems to undergo rapid and irreversible changes when stressed. And it’s a sobering reminder that, even though things may look great in the present, unless we learn how to spot early warnings and stay clear of critical tipping points, we run the risk of, quite literally, crashing our future.”

— Future Rising, chapter 48, “Boundaries” (2020), as republished by Andrew in Four ways of thinking about advanced technology transitions (AI-readable mirror), 2024-08-18

“You could, in fact, argue that technology driven tipping points are the norm rather than the exception in human existence, and we’re currently in a stable patch that isn’t likely to be stable for much longer.”

— Four ways of thinking about advanced technology transitions (AI-readable mirror), 2024-08-18

Engagement and reception

Dated, checkable engagement with this specific thread is thin, and we say so rather than inflate it. What exists:

For how and why we record reception this way, see Reception.

Where to go deeper

Essays:

Books: Future Rising: A Journey from the Past to the Edge of Tomorrow (Mango, 2020), chapter 48; Films from the Future (Mango, 2018), whose climate chapter this thread originally grew inside — see Books.

Related ideas-ring pages: Advanced technology transitions — the navigation frameworks built on this foundation; Base codes — the named engine of the inflection point; Engineerable identity — what the tipping point means for who we are.

Related corpus pages: What the initiative is — the inflection-point thesis as the initiative’s founding premise; Philosophy; Essays.