You are living through an extraordinary moment in history. The year 2025 stands a good chance of being seen by those in the future as the exact juncture between two very different historical eras. We are finally seeing the end of the long 20th century and starting to see the new 21st-century world emerging, too.
Look backward through a political lens, and watch how American President Donald Trump and his new administration are dismantling the bureaucratic welfare state that has reigned supreme for the last 80 years. And how he and other right-wing populist allies in the West are rolling back the Pax Americana that has structured geopolitics since the end of World War II.
Look forward through a technological lens, and watch the astonishing breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, the latest and probably greatest general-purpose technology that humans have ever developed. In the two years since generative AI burst onto the scene, we have begun to more fully understand how fundamentally the world could change in the age of intelligent machines that has now arrived.
The best way to get oriented to the apparent chaos and expanding trauma of this world-historic transition is to study the image just below this section and recognize that “You Are Here.”
You are at the very auspicious historic moment when the old systems that defined the 20th century and worked well for the last 80 years, for four successive generations, for anyone alive today, are rapidly breaking down and now failing us.
Those systems don’t just include the governmental systems that Trump, Elon Musk and people on the political right are trying to tear down. They also include the 20th-century systems of carbon energy and industrial production that have caused increasingly catastrophic climate change and that those on the political left are trying to dismantle.
You are also at the very exciting moment when the new systems that will define the entire 21st century are just being born.
Those new systems are not just about AI. They include other transformative technologies that have gone from dreams 15 years ago to world-changing, general-purpose technologies today. Clean energy technologies, such as solar energy and electric vehicles, have crossed the tipping point into mainstream commodities that are rapidly scaling and getting cheaper every year.
Breakthroughs in gene-editing technology, such as CRISPR, have brought us bioengineering, the ability to engineer all living things, and are opening up the possibilities of a much more sustainable world more in sync with nature. With these new technologies, among others, we actually have a shot at turning the corner on climate change and solving many of our most daunting challenges.
You are here, at this exact historic moment, whether you like it or not. I am here to help you more fully understand what we are all going through, and most importantly, where we all could be heading.
The Great Progression new Substack series and overarching worldview
The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 is a new Substack series of essays, interviews of remarkable thought leaders, and gatherings of innovators from throughout the Substack ecosystem who want to figure out how to make the most of this historic juncture. All of this will culminate in a new book.
I’m Peter Leyden, a longtime tech expert and thought leader on AI, transformative technologies, and the future, and I will be writing all this and hosting these events. I came to San Francisco to work with the founders of WIRED magazine at the dawn of The Digital Age when the internet first opened up, and I have followed the front edge of technological change in the region ever since, including the recent explosion of all things AI.
I’ve done many things throughout my career that are relevant to this ambitious new book project, including writing two influential books on new technologies and the future. (I will explain more about my background in the next essay, but for now you can check out my website.)
I originally started The Great Progression Substack series a couple years ago as a way to spread what we were learning in a physical event series that I hosted in San Francisco. That event series gathered many of the leading innovators in the tech world to try to answer the key questions surrounding the emergence of generative AI. I wrote essays on what we learned in the key events, and I shared videos of many of the short talks given by the world-class experts who attended. You can still find all that content in the archive, and many of you reading this initially subscribed for that material.
I am now relaunching this Substack series as The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 with a different mission because what the world needs now is changing. This new series will attempt to do several things at the same time throughout the year:
First off, I will tell the epic story of our times for what it is: a rare moment in American history and, really, with the biggest lens, in world history. This means writing about what is happening around us with a big-picture, long-term perspective that tries to focus on what will prove to be important over time. That means ignoring much of the craziness of the day-to-day news cycle that most of the mainstream media and social media outlets seem fixated on and that mostly confuses everyone who tries to keep up. How would a historian in 50 or 100 years talk about what’s taking place around us today? That’s the essential story I want to tell.
I am going to help create a new grand narrative of what’s possible in the near-term future, the next 25 years. I will venture out into this relatively virgin turf to help everyone see what’s now possible if we in America and the world make the most of the new wave of transformative technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, but also clean energy tech and bioengineering. These are world-historic, general-purpose technologies that are giving humans a step change in our capabilities. Almost no one is thinking big enough about the kind of economy, society, and, ultimately, even civilization that we could build off these world-changing tools.
I’m going to focus on the positive potential of these new technologies and the new systems that could be built with them. I acknowledge that there are legitimate concerns about what could be done with these technologies, but there are more than enough people and organizations focusing on the risks and potential negative consequences of AI and the like. Almost no one is breathing life into understanding the awesome opportunity opening up to harness these new technologies to drive progress, reinvent America, and make a much better world.
When you take all these perspectives together, you get a positive reframe of what’s actually happening in America and the world right now. To me, this positive, can-do perspective is the missing piece that more people need to see. This is particularly true for those in Blue America, the half of America who voted Democrat or who call themselves progressives. They are having a difficult time right now watching an ascendent Trump with Musk and those on the Tech Right tearing down old systems at a frantic pace. I know since I have been based in San Francisco for the last 30 years and come from that world.
At a historic juncture like this, you do not want to defend the old systems of the status quo at all costs but look to what much better systems could now be built going forward. I think the best thing that could happen to America, the West, and the world is for those on the left and the right in politics, conservatives and progressives alike, to look ahead and start to compete in building a fully 21st-century world.
A reorientation like that is exactly what happened the last time the world went through a comparable historic juncture coming off the tumultuous 1930s and World War II to build the new systems of the 20th century that we largely are still working within today. Eighty years ago we started building the Post-War world that was dramatically different than the world that came before. Back then, the next 25 years from 1945 to 1970 brought an extraordinary explosion of bipartisan progress, a reinvention of America, and created a much better world.
Here we go again.
The practical aspects of this ambitious new series and what to expect
Now more about the practical aspects of this new series and what you can expect going forward from The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050.
For the first several months of the series, I will be writing an essay like this one each week. These initial pieces will lay the foundation for understanding the overarching story and introduce the key elements of the grand narrative of what’s now possible that I will continue to fill in more thoroughly throughout the year. The pace of essays may slow down as this book project evolves, but it will never be less than one a month.
Each month I also will write up what I learned from a deep dive interview with a remarkable thought leader who will lay out the awesome opportunity in his or her field of expertise that is now possible to achieve in the next 25 years. This interview will not be a traditional podcast that lays out the entire conversation but will focus on the insights that help fill out our understanding of the potential of The Great Progression, backed up by extended quotes from the transcript.
I would like to keep all my written pieces outlined above available for free to anyone. I want to encourage everyone to widely share these ideas because we need many more people understanding the awesome opportunity opening up before us. But to sustain this ambitious project, I am relying on building a network through two kinds of gatherings.
Each month I will host a virtual gathering over video for those in the burgeoning ecosystem of Substack who want to talk more about the ideas laid out that month and discuss what they are seeing from their perspective. I expect to invite various guests to those gatherings, and I have built up a pretty amazing network of top technologists and entrepreneurs, academics and intellectuals, creatives and innovators of all sorts over my 30 years working in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area.
These virtual gatherings will be limited to those who sign up to be Members for $10 a month, the cost of buying me a beer for my efforts that month, though I am open to comping those who need help. Members will also be the only ones able to keep the discussion going on a weekly basis in the Chat.
Each quarter I will host a physical gathering in my base in San Francisco, which is ground zero for the development of artificial intelligence as well as many of the other transformative technologies we will be exploring. These invite-only events will be open to Founding Members who will pay the equivalent of $20 a month and will be held at the hip club Shack15 in the Ferry Building overlooking the bay. The Shack15 club (seen in the photo of me above) is where I hosted my previous event series, “The AI Age Begins,” in the first two years after the surprise arrival of generative AI.
This next stage of The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 is being done in partnership with Freethink Media, the creators of Freethink and Big Think, among other products. They will be syndicating my essays and interviews through their vast ecosystem of email lists and social media beyond Substack, as well as within their world in Substack. They will co-host the physical events and be videoing those presentations and conversations for wider distribution in their YouTube world, too.
Freethink deserves some of the credit for getting this big idea of The Great Progression off the ground. In 2022 they commissioned me to write a long magazine piece that would act like a sequel to a famous cover story I wrote for WIRED magazine in the mid-1990s. The WIRED piece projected how the digital revolution could play out over the next 25 years — and it mostly did. (I will explain more about that project, which evolved into my first book, in my next essay.)
The result was a 10,000 word article called The Great Progression, 2025-2050 that came out just two months before ChatGPT burst on the scene. This first pass on that big idea proved quite popular, and since that time, I have probably given 40 keynote talks throughout America and some in Europe that kept iterating the concept — including this one last fall to 1,300 senior leaders from 17 countries building data centers around the world that can be watched in full.
When I first wrote that magazine piece three years ago, I was speculating that by 2025 events on the ground would have evolved to the point that growing numbers of people would understand that the world was going through a fundamental change and that they would be open to the possibility that those changes might be for the better.
I speculated that the year 2025 would be year one of a growing recognition that we are living through a world historic moment and better do everything we can to make the next 25 years ones of great progress.
Here we are, folks. Time to get started. We’re just beginning year one of The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050.
A last word on the technological forces about to propel us forward
To end this essay, let’s circle back to the chart we previously presented and particularly zoom into the key years from 2010 to 2025 where the thick black line starts out very slowly before it ultimately ramps up.
That line is meant to represent the technology adoption curve that is commonly understood by those of us in the tech world in Silicon Valley. Every successful new technology goes through a very similar slow build in the early days as innovators and early adopters figure out how the new technology works and how best to use it.
There comes a time when enough people can see the usefulness of the new tool that the technology hits a tipping point and moves into a phase of exponential growth in adoption. This explosive takeoff often surprises those outside the tech world who have not been playing close attention to the incremental progress of those early phases. This can be a very jarring realization that catches almost everyone by surprise.
We happen to be hitting the tipping points of all three of our world-historic general-purpose technologies: AI, clean energy technologies, and bioengineering. Things are starting to move very fast in all three fields. All three of them had huge breakthroughs about 15 years ago and have been gathering momentum ever since.
In 2012, we had the AlexNet breakthrough: A new kind of computer system that essentially taught itself using neural networks trained on vast amounts of data dramatically outperformed traditional computer systems hand-coded by humans in an annual competition to accurately identify images.
This surprise breakthrough sparked the deep learning revolution that led to what today we know as generative AI in ChatGPT and the like. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the key players behind that initial breakthrough, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024 for his contribution.
In that same year of 2012, we saw the arrival of the breakthrough gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 that gave biologists a cheap and easy way to edit the genes of all living things. That kicked off the whole new industry of what we now call synthetic biology that is just coming of age now, albeit slightly behind AI. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, the scientists who pioneered the technique, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020.
And in the early years of that same decade, from 2010 to 2015, the prices of solar panels fell dramatically, driven by China’s mass production and improvements in solar cell efficiency. Over the course of the 2010s, the price of solar modules dropped by 80% and the scaling took off. Today solar energy is cheaper than coal, and soon it will be cheaper than any carbon energy.
The point is that we are now on the verge of explosive growth in all three of these game-changing technologies. Most people outside of these tech fields have not been watching the maturation process and so have not been preparing for the game to change.
Our extraordinary moment in history is here, now
The game is changing now. The game might not change quite as dramatically as the image above, but you get the point. You stand at a unique juncture in history.
We need to get many more people focused on how the game is changing and how we can actually use these new tools to reinvent America and make a much better world in the next 25 years.
The mission of The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 is to get people to more fully understand the epic story that we find ourselves within and to see the awesome opportunity that is now within reach. Hopefully, that will motivate more people to help actually bring about that better world.
Join me in figuring out what is truly possible. Be part of this year-long learning journey. Help make the most of our extraordinary moment in history.
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