CONCEPT
Criticality Event vs. Product Event
The distinction between a milestone in a technology's development (product event) and a phase transition in a critical system where accumulated stress releases in cascading reorganization (criticality event).
A product event is a development in a specific technology or offering — a feature launch, a capability improvement, a threshold crossed by a particular tool. A criticality event is a system-wide reorganization triggered when a perturbation lands on a pile already at its critical angle. The December 2025 AI capability threshold is typically read as a product event (Claude Code got better, crossed a bar, changed the game). Per Bak's framework reveals it as a criticality event: the system of human technological capability had been accumulating grains for decades, approaching the critical angle grain by grain, until the natural-language interface happened to be the grain that landed on a pile already poised for reorganization. The distinction matters enormously because product events call for product-level responses (adopt the tool, train the team), while criticality events require systemic responses (build resilience, channel avalanches, prepare for ongoing reorganization).
In The You On AI Field Guide
The confusion between product events and