CONCEPT
The End of Certainty
Prigogine's radical argument that the future of complex systems is not merely unknown but unknowable — and the thermodynamic challenge to every confident prediction about AI's trajectory.
In the final decades of his life, Prigogine made an argument so radical that many physicists refused to accept it. The argument was not about chemistry or dissipative structures. It was about physical law itself. In The End of Certainty (1997), Prigogine proposed that the fundamental equations of physics must be reformulated to incorporate irreversibility and probability at their most basic level. The determinism of Newton and Laplace is not merely a practical impossibility. It is a theoretical one. The information that would determine the future of complex systems does not exist, because the future of far-from-equilibrium systems at bifurcation points is genuinely undetermined at the level of physical law.
In The You On AI Field Guide
If Prigogine is right, the future is not hidden. It is not yet formed. The events that will determine the trajectory of far-from-equilibrium systems at their bifurcation points have not yet occurred, and no amount of data about the present state can substitute for the