the three tipping points

why this moment matters more than the 80-year cycle suggests

08-Aug-25

I recently came across something Pete Leiden said that made me think. He argues we’re at a moment in history where three major technologies are hitting their tipping points simultaneously: AI, clean energy, and bioengineering. And that this happens once every 80 years or so.

The 80-year cycle part is interesting, but I’m not sure I buy it entirely. It’s the kind of pattern that sounds convincing when you squint at history, but history is messy. You can find patterns if you look hard enough. What matters more is whether the underlying observation is true: are we really at a moment where multiple transformative technologies are crossing some threshold at once?

I think we are. And here’s why that matters.

When a technology crosses a tipping point, it stops being something specialists care about and becomes something everyone needs. The shift happens fast. One year Uber is this weird thing some people in San Francisco use. Three years later, taxis are dying. The technology itself didn’t suddenly get better in year three. It just hit critical mass.

We saw this with the internet in the late 90s. I remember explaining to people what email was. Then suddenly everyone had email and the question became weird. That’s a tipping point.

The thing about AI is it crossed that line in November 2022 when OpenAI released ChatGPT. Before that, machine learning was something engineers worked on. After that, it became something your aunt was trying to use to write Christmas cards. That’s the marker. Not the technology being ready, but the moment when regular people start using it without thinking about the technology itself.

Clean energy is different but following the same path. Solar panels have been around forever, but they were expensive hobby projects for environmentalists. Then the cost started dropping. And here’s the key thing Leiden points out: solar isn’t a commodity like oil. It’s a technology. Which means you can apply manufacturing curves to it. Every time you double production, cost drops about 20%. That’s not a maybe. That’s a pattern that holds across manufactured goods.

Oil can’t do that. You can’t make oil cheaper by building better refineries past a certain point. You’re stuck with the geology. But solar? Batteries? Those follow technology curves, not commodity curves. And technology curves go down while commodity curves go sideways or up.

Bioengineering is the one that’s easiest to miss because it’s less visible. But the cost of sequencing a genome went from $3 billion to $100. That’s not incremental improvement. That’s a technology getting cheap enough to be useful in ways its inventors didn’t imagine.

When technologies get that cheap, weird things start happening. Like growing meat in a lab that’s actually meat, not meat substitute. The science of that was figured out years ago. But it cost too much to matter. Now it’s starting to cost little enough that people can experiment with it at scale.

What I find interesting about Leiden’s argument isn’t really the technology part though. That’s almost obvious if you’re paying attention. What’s interesting is his claim that these moments of technological transformation are also moments of social upheaval. That the technology and the social chaos are linked.

He’s right that previous technology revolutions came packaged with enormous social conflict. The Civil War happened right as America was industrializing. The Depression and World War II happened right as we were moving from a world of empires to a world of nation-states. These aren’t coincidences.

New technologies make old systems obsolete. And people whose power comes from the old system fight to keep it. That’s what we’re seeing now. The fight isn’t really about the technology. It’s about who gets to decide what the new system looks like.

The mistake people make is thinking the technology determines the outcome. It doesn’t. The technology creates possibilities. What we build with those possibilities is up to us. The internet could have gone a dozen different ways. It could have been locked down and controlled. It could have been more anonymous. It could have been less centralized. The technology itself didn’t determine which version we got.

So when Leiden talks about moving from financial capitalism to sustainable capitalism, or from representative democracy to digital democracy, he’s not predicting. He’s advocating. Those are choices, not inevitabilities.

But here’s what does seem inevitable: when technologies get this much cheaper and more powerful all at once, someone is going to build something new with them. And whatever gets built will look very different from what we have now. Not because the technology forces it, but because the economics change. Things that were too expensive become cheap. Things that were impossible become easy. And when that happens, new winners emerge.

The important question isn’t whether change is coming. It’s whether the people building the new things understand what they’re building. Because the window when you can shape these things is narrow. Once a technology hits critical mass, path dependence takes over. We’re still living with choices that were made about the internet in the 90s. Some of those choices were good. Some were terrible. But they’re hard to change now.

That’s why this moment matters. Not because of some 80-year cycle, but because when multiple technologies cross their tipping points at once, you get a brief period where it’s possible to build something genuinely different. After that, it hardens into place.

The question is: what are we building?