Four ways of thinking about advanced technology transitions

Can a simple analogy help understand different approaches to navigating technology-driven tipping points and transitions?

If you’ve been following my work for some time, you probably know that I have a thing about “Pippard’s ladder.”

It’s an elegant example of sudden yet hard-to-predict changes in seemingly well-behaved systems that I was first introduced to back in the 1990’s by Cambridge University physicist Brian Pippard. And it’s one that, I think, is potentially useful for exploring approaches to navigating advanced technology transitions — so much so that I thought I’d give it a whirl in my keynote at this past week’s IEEE International Symposium on Consumer Technology.

I first wrote about Pippard’s ladder in my book Future Rising. It was in a short chapter on “boundaries” and explored how the demonstration provides insights into dynamic discontinuities, or tipping-points, in seemingly-predictable systems.

The section is short enough that I thought it worth including below to introduce ideas I’ve been playing with for some years. But if you want to cut to the chase, please do skip this and scroll down to the thought experiment I explored in my keynote.

Boundaries (from Future Rising Chapter 48)

In 1980, the Cambridge physicist Brian Pippard published a paper describing what he called “experiments in critical behavior and broken symmetry.” In it, he explored particular types of transitions between the present and the future that he referred to as “discontinuities”—the blindsides of the physical world.

Pippard was fascinated by transitions between present and future that were abrupt and irreversible—transitions that occur at a tipping point beyond which everything changes and there’s no going back, such as the snapping of a branch, or the breaking of a wave.

I probably wouldn’t be aware of Pippard’s work if I hadn’t attended one of his public lectures as a PhD student. In the lecture, he held up a simple model of a vertical ladder consisting of four evenly spaced wooden rungs, held together by two lengths of string. He then asked the audience what would happen if he slowly rotated the bottom rung through one complete horizontal revolution. Naturally, we predicted that Pippard’s model would smoothly transform from its conventional ladder-like form into something that looked more like an artist’s impression of a strand of DNA—a neat double helix, consisting of two lengths of string held apart by the wooden rungs. And of course, our vision of the future was utterly wrong.

As Pippard twisted his ladder, the lengths of string between two of the rungs suddenly twisted together, destroying any semblance it had to DNA. The result was a tangled mess.

This was an abrupt and irreversible transition—reversing the twist failed to untangle the ladder. But the point at which it occurred—and the point at which some irreversible boundary was crossed—was all but impossible to predict.

Over the intervening years, it’s become increasingly common to talk about tipping points—hard-to-predict points of instability in seemingly stable systems—especially in the context of climate change. Just as Pippard’s ladder demonstrated, there are concerns that we’re in danger of crossing such boundaries that mark a point of no return as we continue to stress the environment. And if we do, we risk disrupting, and even destroying, critical pathways to the type of future we’d like to see.

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.

A Thought Experiment in Navigating Advanced Technology Transitions

While I’ve used Pippard’s ladder in the past as a metaphor for tipping points that we might want to avoid, I was interested in whether it could be extended to thinking about different ways of approaching an uncertain future.

And so I visited our local Lego store, raised my wife’s craft supplies, and created my own rather crude (but nevertheless serviceable) ladder.

It’s a little crude, but this is the video I used in the keynote to introduce the lego-and-ribbon Pippard’s Ladder. The instability occurs after the second quarter-turn.

Experimenting with the ladder while thinking through the concept of advanced technology transitions, I was interested in whether there were different approaches to navigating transitions that the ladder both illustrated and provided insights into.

The result was a quadrant framework defined by degrees of freedom in exploring pathways through transitions, and the mindset that transitions were approached with:

From the keynote “A New Science of Navigating Advanced Technology Transitions.” IEEE International Symposium on Consumer Technology, Bali, August 13 2024.

The “degrees of freedom” axis represents a more restrictive approach to problem solving on the left and a more open approach on the right, with the open approach leading to more options and thus more degrees of freedom in the choices that are available.

And the “mindset” axis represents a tendency to try and maintain things as they (bottom) versus a willingness to embrace change (top).

The model is based on an assumption that we are living in a closed system — the planet we live on — and that instabilities or tipping-points occur when we begin pushing against the boundaries of this system, whether these are related to the physical system itself or the ways we live in and utilize resources within it.

It also assumes that we cannot simply turn off technology innovation, but instead need to find ways to manage and channel the inevitability of technological change.

I suspect some will disagree with this latter assumption. But as change is fundamental to living within a dynamic universe, I’m comfortable with it.

This quadrant model is admittedly simplistic. But nevertheless I think it’s useful in thinking about broad brush approaches to technology transitions.

And some of this utility comes in exploring insights associated with each of the quadrants:

“Avoid” Quadrant

From the keynote “A New Science of Navigating Advanced technology Transitions. Press play to see the demonstration.

Starting with the bottom left quadrant, this can be seen as representing strategies that avoid tipping points by staying well clear of them. In the case of the ladder (as shown in the video above), great care is taken to stay clear of the point at which a sudden transition becomes increasingly likely.

It’s an avoidance strategy that’s common in approaches to addressing climate change, and one that is indicative of at least some efforts to avoid technology-driven societal impacts.

This is a quadrant where the societal benefits of technology innovation are critically weighed against potential adverse impacts, and decisions are risk-averse and substantially informed by social factors (equity and wellbeing for example).

Approaches to navigating advanced technology transitions in this quadrant might cover policies and other governance mechanisms designed to slow innovation where the outcomes are uncertain. They’re also likely to include proceeding cautiously while embracing approaches to anticipating potential impacts of advances across society.

“Adapt” Quadrant

From the keynote “A New Science of Navigating Advanced technology Transitions. Press play to see the demonstration.

An alternative to simply avoiding tipping points is to actively find ways of preventing them — or pushing them out into the far future to give us some breathing space in the near future.

This is represented in the lower right “adapt” quadrant, which still represents a preservation mindset, but one that embraces ways of pushing tipping points further out into the future rather than simply avoiding them.

In the thought experiment using Pippard’s Ladder, this is represented by stabilizing potential instabilities within the system — in this case, as is seen in the video above, using clothes pegs!

This quadrant has clear parallels with adaptation strategies to climate change, where rather than avoid behaviors that bring us closer to climate-related tipping points, we actively explore solutions to preventing such behaviors leading to disruption.

Strategic use of renewable energy sources might be considered as an example here as they help adapt to a world that has been pushed out of equilibrium by excessive use of non-renewable sources. A more controversial example might be the use of geoengineering to reduce the impacts of human behavior on climate change.

In the context of advanced technology transitions, this quadrant represents initiatives that focus on better-understanding instabilities that are potentially triggered by advanced technologies — the impacts of generative AI on learning for instance, or social cohesion — and developing new ways of building resiliency against such threats.

In effect, it considers how theories, models, methods, and practices might be developed that allow society to absorb and adapt to change, without experiencing abrupt and potentially catastrophic transitions.

As is seen in the video of the ladder above, it’s an approach that can build resiliency into things for a short time — but within a closed and constrained system the chances are that it just delays the onset tipping points rather than eliminates them.

“Extend” quadrant

From the keynote “A New Science of Navigating Advanced technology Transitions. Press play to see the demonstration.

The previous two quadrants assume that we’re constrained by hard boundaries imposed by living on a planet with finite space and resources.

But what if we’re not?

There is a non-intuitive approach to avoiding or navigating tipping points that is not represented by the lower two quadrants in the model. And that is — as is shown by the extended ladder in the video above — to refuse to accept that we are limited by boundaries we seemingly constrain us, and to extend them.

This is where things can get weird, as one way to navigate advanced technology transitions in this context is to literally transcend the constraints of living on Earth by becoming an interplanetary species.

While I’m a skeptic of the idea of other planets — most notably Mars — being a “plan B” that Elon Musk and others advocate for, we are already beginning to expand beyond the physical constraints of the planet we live on through the use of near earth orbit, plans to establish a presence on the Moon, and aspirations to extract resources from the moon and asteroids.

Humanity’s increasing presence in space is certainly one way to extend the boundaries that lead to tipping points. But they are only one of many creative ways to extend the boundaries we might seem to be constrained by. The prospect of nuclear fusion or other, more esoteric energy sources, is another. So is using advanced technologies to break beyond conventional constraints and extend what is possible.

For instance, developments in AI, bioengineering, quantum technologies, and even human enhancement, are all making possible what was once considered to be impossible, and it’s important to ask whether this in turn is allowing us to extend what were once thought as immoveable boundaries to thriving in the future.

And audacious as this might sound, the past ten thousand plus years of human history is full of examples where technological breakthroughs have redrawn the map of what is possible. Just to name three out of a long, long list, harnessing steam power, the invention of synthetic fertilizers, and the advent of the internet, all redefined boundaries that previously constrained us as a species.

With a creative mindset and a willingness to believe that seemingly-sacrosanct boundaries are transcendable, it becomes possible to push potentially disruptive tipping points far into the future.

But this still just puts off potentially catastrophic tipping points rather than eliminating their existence. Which brings me to the last quadrant — the “embrace” quadrant.

“Embrace” quadrant

From the keynote “A New Science of Navigating Advanced technology Transitions. Press play to see the demonstration.

Up to now, this admittedly simple model has considered approaches to navigating advanced technology transitions that seek to avoid sudden and potentially disruptive tipping points. This is vey much in line with my original thinking around the metaphor of Pippard’s Ladder.

But what if, instead of avoiding tipping points, we embraced them?

This is possibly the most challenging quadrant in the model. And to be honest I’m not sure what embracing a disruptive technology-driven tipping point might look like — and especially how it might play out with respect to who thrives and who does not through the transition.

But thinking long-term, if such tipping points are inevitable at some point in our collective future, it’s worth thinking through scenarios where we embrace what’s on the other side of them.

This is a quadrant that feels, on the face of it, quite perilous, as history has shown that disruptive tipping points are rarely painless. And yet, as I mention above human history is replete with examples where the world before a new set of capabilities or inventions, and the world after their development and adoption, is night and day different.

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.

If this is the case, I would argue strongly that we need to thinking more critically about what it means to be in that top right quadrant, and we need to be developing the knowledge and insights necessary to ensure harm is minimized and benefits maximized when we do encounter the next disruptive and irreversible tipping point in human history.

Just a ladder?

This is, as I noted earlier, merely a thought experiment designed to stimulate new thinking. It may be so deeply flawed that it should be resigned to the trash can of bad ideas. Or there could be something to using a simple example of a four-rung ladder to explore how we approach advanced technology transitions.

Either way, the exercise does underline the necessity of at least thinking more critically, creatively, and innovatively, about how we collectively and successfully transition from the present we’re in, to the future we aspire to.