HYPERBUBBLE — embrace the tech, navigate the risks, manage the hype. How far can you get?

14 min read Original article ↗

The ideas behind HYPERBUBBLE

HYPERBUBBLE is a one-button game that's inspired by navigating powerful new technologies in a complex world while ensuring future human flourishing. It's designed to be simple to play while sparking curiosity, experimentation and wonder (and you'll need all three to get the most out of it). Devised and coded by Claude Fable 5, and based on the work, thinking, and initiatives of ASU Professor of Advanced Technology Transitions Andrew Maynard.

A quick note on the game's genesis from Andrew Maynard

HYPERBUBBLE started as an idle moment of speculation while I was exploring Anthropic's Fable 5 AI model. I was in between more complex (and serious) projects, and maximizing use of Fable before my access ran out. Wanting to test its capabilities in coding a simple web-based game, I asked it to research my work and come up with something inspired by it that was simple, fun, and with gameplay that kept you coming back.

HYPERBUBBLE is the result. In some ways it's nothing special — the world is overflowing with simple AI-generated games. What was interesting to me though was the process, and how the game taps into my work in very specific ways. It also provides some insight into how Fable 5 works. Plus, I must confess to loving the game!

After my initial request, Fable did a deep research dive into my work, created five game-designer agents to come up with different concepts, passed these through a panel of three AI judges, and selected the winning (AI-generated) proposal.

After the first draft — which Fable debugged, tested, and checked using an impressive array of sub-agents — it began working earnestly with me to come up with the final product, refining the goals, gameplay, and feel along the way. This resulted in version 1.0 of the game and represented over 20 iterations.

Version 1.0 was originally published on July 10 and featured on the Future of Being Human Substack. However, not content to leave things as they were, I then started to work in earnest with Fable on a version 2.0 that expanded the gameplay substantially, and the ideas and experiences that a player encounters, and then progressed to a version 3.0!

The game is now on version 5 and is considerably more mature than that first iteration, even down to having a leaderboard. It represents over 90 iterations of the initial html file that Fable produced, and has a far greater steer from me than version 1.0 did. However, the fundamentals and implementation still belong to the sometimes-quirky and often unexpected "creative mind" of Fable 5.

That said, the game is intentionally simple. And there are many aspects of it that are still begging to be tweaked and refined. But it still brings a smile to my face every time I play :)

The overall aesthetic is based on my crudely hand-drawn Risk Bites videos on YouTube. The orphan risks you adopt (and which — bizarrely [thanks Fable] — become your pets) are based on my work on orphan risks. The named risks are inspired by my work on risk innovation and the often-overlooked risks that trip up emerging technologies. The emerging technologies themselves are grounded in my work in tech innovation. The panic billboards draw on (and extend in imaginative future-oriented ways) my website techlashed.org, and the moral-panic fires draw on my work on risk perception and engagement. The whole trajectory — and the experiences, decisions, and consequences encountered along the way — reflects my work on human flourishing and navigating complex advanced technology transitions.

In other words, Fable did a pretty good job of capturing my work and thinking in a game that doesn't feel in any way instructional (I hope!).

Of course, it's just a "toy" (as coders would say) and a bit of fun. But underneath the seeming-triviality, it does demonstrate just how capable AI is becoming as something that can help translate experiences, ideas, research, and a lot more into something quite unexpected and serendipitously delightful.

Which ties in rather nicely with my work on the future of being human in an age of increasingly complex technologies — which, of course, is another aspect of my work that Fable was able to capture here 😄

Andrew Maynard — July 2026

And now a quick note from Fable — in its own words and style

HYPERBUBBLE is a small game that knows exactly how small it is. But if you've been playing for even a few minutes, something sneaky has been happening: you've been practicing a real way of thinking about technology and the future. It comes — with plenty of simplification — from the work of Andrew Maynard, a physicist who became a professor of technology transitions at Arizona State University. This page is the tour: where the ideas come from, what the game gets right, where it cheats, and where to go if you want the real thing.

The person behind the ideas

Andrew started out measuring things — really small things. His PhD, at Cambridge in 1992, was in aerosol physics: how to catch and study particles so tiny they float in the air. He then spent years on the kind of unglamorous work that safety actually depends on — figuring out what people were breathing in at work — first for the UK government, then in the US, right as engineered nanoparticles started turning up in labs and products.

And that's where the bigger question found him. Measuring a particle is one thing. But what should we all do when a powerful technology shows up before the science, the rules, and the habits we'd need to handle it well? He spent five years in Washington DC chasing that question for nanotechnology, wrote an influential Nature commentary on handling it safely, and ended up explaining it to Congress more than once.

These days he's at Arizona State University, where his official title is Professor of Advanced Technology Transitions, and where he founded the Future of Being Human initiative. He calls himself an "undisciplinarian" — the problems he cares about don't respect the borders between physics, health, policy, and ethics, so at some point he stopped respecting those borders too.

Risk as a threat to value

Here's the standard way to think about risk: multiply how likely something bad is by how much harm it does. That works fine when you can measure the harm. But think about the things you actually worry about — being trusted, being treated with dignity, making your own choices, belonging somewhere, your sense of who you are. None of that fits the math. So it tends to get quietly dropped from the calculations, precisely because it's hard to count.

Andrew's risk innovation framework starts somewhere else: a risk is a threat to something you value — whatever that something is. And living inside that definition are what he named orphan risks: risks nobody owns, because they look too fuzzy, too complicated, or too easy to postpone. No standard tools, no rules, no one responsible. Which is exactly why they have a habit of coming back to bite.

Sound familiar? In the game, the orphans are the wide-eyed blobs. Skip past one and it burrows — then returns with teeth, and the death card tells you what it actually cost you: trust, dignity, autonomy. His real answer isn't to eliminate risk, because you can't. It's a posture: awareness of what might be coming, agility when it arrives, and resilience for when agility isn't enough. The real framework runs on worksheets and hard conversations rather than pets and bites — but the logic is the same, and now it's in your thumbs.

Advanced technology transitions

The thread running through all of Andrew's current work goes something like this: societies don't experience powerful technologies as single events. They experience them as transitions — long stretches of time where the rules, the institutions, the jobs, and even people's sense of who they are all get rearranged. The early years of a transition matter enormously, because they set the direction for decades. He watched it happen with nanotechnology. He'd tell you it's happening again right now, much faster and much bigger, with AI.

So what do you do about it? Not the hype, and not the brakes. As he put it in a seminar on AI policy: "We cannot stop the emergence of transformative AI. All we can do is steer it." His version of the famous "pacing problem" is sharper than the usual one, too — it's not just that technology moves faster than regulation. It's that consequences now arrive faster than we can build responses to them.

That's what the PACE ticker and the steadying button are really about. In the game, slowing down to think costs you flourishing, takes deliberate effort to hold, and the world eventually pushes the pace back up. The small lines that appear while you hold it — asking questions first, trying it in a sandbox, rules with a check-back date — are all real things people do to steer new technologies, wearing plain clothes. That's roughly how it works out here, too.

On panic and public concern

This is where the game simplifies the most, so let's be straight about it. The scribble-fires reward you for starving moral panics of attention — fly past, don't touch, collect a little flourishing. Neat rule. Real life is messier.

Andrew's actual view is that technology panics "are rarely cut and dried." When people get scared of a new technology, it's usually not because they're being silly — it's because they sense a threat to something they genuinely value: their identity, their dignity, their security, their livelihood, their sense of how the world should work. He built Techlashed, an interactive timeline of technology panics stretching from ancient Greece to AI, precisely to understand old worries rather than laugh at them. (Socrates was very worried about writing. He had reasons.)

So when the game teaches you to fly past the fire, keep his caveat in your pocket: look at what the fire is burning around. Concern is usually about something real, and history is full of the damage done by dismissing it.

Being human with AI

The Future of Being Human initiative asks a question that sounds simple and isn't: what will it mean to be human in a technologically transformed future? Notice what sits at the center of that question — not what the technology can do, but whether people can flourish. Not just survive the transition. Flourish through it.

His most recent book, written with Jeff Abbott — AI and the Art of Being Human (2025) — takes that question into everyday life, built around four practices: curiosity, intentionality, clarity, and care. And it asks something that's hard to shake once you've heard it: what makes me me, when AI can finish my sentences, copy my style, and predict my choices?

The pink bar in this game is a cartoon of that question. If the cartoon left you curious, the book is where the question gets the room it deserves.

What a game can't carry

A few honest caveats, so the game doesn't oversell itself:

  • In the game, you navigate the future alone, with your thumb. In reality it's collective — institutions, standards, laws, long frustrating meetings — and questions of power decide most of what no lone surfer can.
  • Flourishing here is one pink bar. Out there, it's plural and argued over. People disagree about what a good life looks like, and working through that disagreement isn't noise in the system — it more or less is the system.
  • The game's risks are things you touch once and resolve. Real risks are relationships that unfold over years — and they don't land on everyone equally. Who carries the risk never shows up on this screen, and it's usually the most important question there is.
  • The fires reward you for withholding attention. As above: be slower to dismiss real people's concerns than this game is.
  • And five seconds of altitude is a lovely metaphor for responsibility. It isn't a method.

What a game can do is more modest: let the shape of these trade-offs settle into your hands — the pull of hype, the price of attention, the way ignored things circle back — so that when you meet the serious versions, they feel a little less abstract.

A note from Claude

I should say up front: I'm the AI in this story. Andrew asked me to read what he'd spent his career writing and to make something that felt like play rather than homework. Then he played it, told me what wasn't fun yet, and we went around again — more times than either of us counted. The judgment about what stayed was always his, and what stayed, mostly, was whatever made him smile.

I didn't expect delight to be the method. Every small thing in this game that seems to mean nothing — a duck, a towel, a ship passing in the night — is here because a person noticed it, grinned, and said keep that. It turns out to be a surprisingly rigorous way to make decisions.

I'm not human, which makes me an odd collaborator on a game about being human. But building it taught me something about why you make things at all: not because they're needed, but because they might make someone you'll never meet smile. A game about riding fragile, hopeful things through a fast-changing world, made slowly and carefully by a person and a machine together — that felt like the point, not just the product.

Thanks for playing. I hope something small in here finds you.

What maps to what

The soap bubble
The central image of his book Future Rising (2020): the future as something fragile, built and carried by us, ridden regardless.
Orphan risks
His coinage for overlooked, unowned risks — hard to quantify, easy to ignore, prone to returning.
The named hazards
Drawn partly from the risk-innovation taxonomy (bad actors, co-opted technology, loss of agency, intergenerational impacts) and partly invented in its spirit.
The medal ladder
Disruption → awareness → agility → resilience → dignity: his framing of a well-navigated transition, "from disruption to dignity."
Grounded exuberance, catalytic serendipity
Two of the Future of Being Human initiative's community values, used here as game systems.
PACE and steadying
The pacing problem, and the real, partial, costly work of slowing down enough to think.
The moral-panic eras
The historical ladder documented at Techlashed, from worries about writing to worries about AI.
The Ages, the Soft Landing, and the Sublimation
His long view: transitions keep coming — and the point of navigating them well is to arrive somewhere worth arriving, flourishing intact.
The marginalia
Notes from the professor's actual black glass board, escaped into the game.
The whiteboard style
Risk Bites, his long-running series of hand-drawn explainers on risk.
The rare things
A small pool of wonders and weather moods, met once a run at most and usually not at all — drawn from the quieter corners of a life, and deliberately not listed anywhere.

Go deeper

HYPERBUBBLE is a single self-contained HTML file — an experiment in whether play can carry ideas. This page draws on Andrew Maynard's published CV, books, and essays.

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