How the world will change over the next 25 years, in 55 minutes | Peter Leyden: Full Interview

Episode Overview

• The podcast outlines a thesis called "The Great Progression," a 25-year period of transformative progress from 2025 to 2050.
• This new era is driven by the simultaneous scaling of three foundational technologies: artificial intelligence, clean energy, and bioengineering.
• The current moment of social and political turbulence is framed as a transitional phase where old 20th-century systems are collapsing and new ones are emerging.
• The speaker argues that these technological shifts necessitate a fundamental reinvention of our economic and political systems to create a more equitable and sustainable "age of abundance."

Key Concepts

• The Great Progression: A predicted 25-year era of immense progress (2025-2050) fueled by three world-historic technological tipping points.
• Three Foundational Technologies: The core drivers of this new era are Artificial Intelligence (heralding an "Age of AI"), Clean Energy, and Bioengineering.
• Clean Energy as a Technology: A fundamental shift in viewing energy not as a finite commodity to be extracted (like oil) but as a pure technology (like solar panels and batteries) whose costs will predictably and continuously fall.
• Biological Production: The emerging paradigm of engineering living things with tools like CRISPR, moving away from the industrial-era model of engineering inert materials. This allows for growing everything from food to building materials.
• Systemic Reinvention: The idea that the new technological reality requires a conscious reinvention of our societal systems, such as creating a "sustainable capitalism" that is both environmentally and socially equitable.
• Historical Precedent (The Long Boom): The current inflection point is compared to the 1990s, when the digital revolution and globalization were similarly poised to launch a multi-decade period of economic growth and societal change.

Quotes

• At 0:07 - "We are at a moment here in 2025 where we have world-historic, game-changing technologies now starting to scale." - Peter Leyden identifying the significance of the present time.
• At 0:35 - "I call this moment The Great Progression." - Leyden coining the term for his thesis about the upcoming era of progress.
• At 3:01 - "That was called 'The Long Boom,' and it was a history of the future... the story from 1980, which was in our past, to 2020, which was in our future, written in the mid-90s." - Leyden providing context on his influential Wired magazine article that predicted decades of tech-driven growth.
• At 23:15 - "The arrival of generative AI... I think we're going to see that as a world historic moment. I think people will look back on that as the starting gun of what will be understood as the Age of AI." - Framing the recent advancements in AI not as an incremental step but as the beginning of a completely new historical epoch.
• At 25:31 - "One thing you can say about AI is it is a technology with the potential to create incredible abundance." - The speaker identifying abundance as the primary economic and social outcome of the widespread adoption of AI.
• At 27:15 - "It is already happening, is simultaneous language translation." - Using a concrete example of a positive, world-changing application of AI that is breaking down historical barriers between cultures.
• At 32:48 - "This is the first time we have an energy source that is a technology, 100% a technology, not a commodity." - Highlighting the fundamental difference between renewable energy and fossil fuels, explaining that its costs will inevitably fall as a technology.
• At 38:51 - "Industrial production was essentially based on engineering inert, dead materials... Biological engineering is essentially engineering living things." - Drawing a clear distinction between the previous industrial paradigm and the emerging era of synthetic biology.
• At 49:59 - "I think we have to reinvent... what I mean, I guess you could call something like sustainable capitalism... where the average people feel invested in the system, that it's working for them." - Arguing that the new technological reality requires a complete reinvention of our economic systems.

Takeaways

• View the current global turbulence not as an endpoint, but as a transitional phase toward a new technological and economic paradigm.
• Reframe clean energy as a deflationary technology with predictably falling costs, which unlocks new economic possibilities beyond simply replacing fossil fuels.
• Embrace AI as a tool for creating abundance and amplifying human capability, rather than solely as a threat, to democratize access to powerful tools.
• Recognize that biological engineering represents a fundamental shift in production, moving from manipulating dead matter to programming living systems for more sustainable solutions.
• Actively participate in reinventing societal systems, as technological progress alone is insufficient to guarantee a better future; it must be paired with updated economic and political models.