About The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 & Peter Leyden

Welcome to all those checking out this Substack series. I’ve set up two ways into the material on this About Page: The first one just below is distilled to the essence for those with little time. Or scroll down for the longer version in essay form, which is what much of the content in this series will be. You also can read them both, with little overlap. The video above is a recent keynote talk I gave that lays out the big idea behind this series too.

The Shorter Version Distilled to Bullet Points

The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 is: 

• The epic story of our times written with a big-picture, long-term perspective that an historian 100 years from now would write about as the most important developments of this extraordinary moment in American and world history.

• A grand narrative of our historic opportunity to harness artificial intelligence and other transformative technologies to drive progress, reinvent America, and create a much better world. 

• An optimistic look at what’s possible to do with AI, probably the most powerful general purpose technology ever, as well as other transformative technologies like clean energy and bioengineering to help solve our many challenges like climate change. 

• A positive reframe of many seemingly negative things happening around us today that may be necessary for this transition and ultimately will be seen as part of a more positive story that will play out in the near future.

• A new series of essays and interviews with remarkable innovators pioneering these fields as part of a year-long project to create a book version of all of the above.

• A monthly gathering to leverage the burgeoning intellectual network of Substack by virtually convening those interested in this framework to contribute their insights and dive deeper into the ideas published that month. 

• A frequent reminder of the extraordinary historic moment we’re all living through and the awesome opportunity we actually have to drive great progress, fundamentally reinvent America, and truly make a much better world. 

Peter Leyden is many things, but the most relevant to this project is: 

• The writer of these monthly essays, the interviewer of these remarkable innovators, the host of the virtual and physical gatherings, and the author of his next book The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050. 

• A longtime tech expert and thought leader on the future since coming to San Francisco to work with the founders of WIRED magazine at the start of The Digital Age and the arrival of the internet. 

• A writer and author following the front edge of technological change in Silicon Valley and the region ever since, along the way coauthoring two influential books on the future, as well as many prescient magazine articles and online stories. 

• A founder of several startups that helped pioneer fields leveraging new technologies, including the early media worlds of YouTube and then Zoom, as well as a political startup that helped transition politics to the internet. 

• A convener of gatherings, both virtual and physical, of what has become an extraordinary network of remarkable innovators from a wide range of fields that he has come to know over three decades.

• A host and curator most recently of The AI Age Begins, one of the premier AI event series in San Francisco that convened many of the top tech experts in the region for the first two years after Generative AI burst on the scene. 

• A keynote speaker who has given talks throughout America and occasionally Europe on roughly a monthly basis for the last 25 years via Keppler Speakers. 

• An advisor on strategic foresight to senior leaders as founder of his latest company Reinvent Futures. 

The Longer Version in Essay Form

The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 tells the epic story of our times and the near future much like an historian someday will explain what’s happening in America and the world now. This series will take a big-picture, long-term perspective on the arrival of Artificial Intelligence and other world-historic technologies like clean energy and bioengineering and how they could scale up to their full potential in this period.

The wide lens will include how these technologies could transform our economy and society, reinvent systems spanning from education to healthcare, and how that could reverberate through our politics and geopolitics too. 

The Great Progression will stay focused mostly on the positive side of this story unfolding around us today and will lay out the awesome opportunity we have to harness these technologies to drive progress, reinvent America and make a much better world in the next 25 years.

This is not a prediction of what will happen but a new narrative of what’s now truly possible and how we could plausibly make this transition and solve many of our greatest challenges like climate change. 

I’m Peter Leyden, a longtime tech expert and thought leader on AI, transformative technologies and the future who will be writing this Substack series of essays and interviews that will ultimately end up as my next book. I’ll also be the host of monthly virtual gatherings, as well as physical gatherings each quarter held in my base of San Francisco. 

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, building an extraordinary network of pioneering innovators across many fields in Silicon Valley over time. 

My most recent project in that journey started when Generative AI burst onto the scene and I hosted The AI Age Begins, one of the premier AI event series at ground zero in San Francisco. These gatherings convened many top AI experts in the region to collectively answer the key questions surrounding the arrival of this new general purpose technology with world-changing capabilities. (You can find essays of what we learned in those events as well as videos of what many of these experts said in the earliest material published here at my Substack through 2023 and 2024.) 

I am known for coauthoring an iconic cover story in WIRED in the mid-1990s The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 to 2020, which later became a book that went into multiple languages. That book did for The Digital Age what The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 hopes to do for The AI Age. 

The Long Boom laid out a new grand narrative about how the nascent internet and other digital technologies could scale up and create a new kind of digital economy and impact society over the coming 25 years. The Long Boom also focused on the many positive developments that could come—and largely did. 

I hope The Great Progression will play a similar role today and help everyone see the full potential of this next generation of general purpose technologies and realize the truly awesome opportunities we have to create a much better economy and society for the 21st century to supersede the 20th century ones that are far past their prime, breaking down, and causing huge problems, including climate change. 

I think people are ready to make the transition to these new technologies and make the many system changes in our economy and society that would be necessary but they are stymied because they can’t see the new way forward and how this new world of AI and clean tech and bioengineering could work for everyone, including themselves. 

So I’m going to help rough out a first draft narrative of how this transformation could actually happen to inspire others to start thinking differently about the extraordinary historical moment we are living through and the incredible opportunity that lies just ahead. 

This ambitious series has a solid foundation to build off. I wrote a popular piece of 10,000 words in Big Think magazine that came out two months before ChatGPT burst on the scene in late 2022 called The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050. Since then I have given more than 25 keynotes talks on The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 to kick off conferences throughout America and occasionally Europe. (See a full video version at the top of this page.) I have also given many other private talks on the big idea to senior leaders of C Suites and Boards through my strategic foresight company Reinvent Futures. 

This new Substack series is launching at the start of 2025 to mark the first year of the remarkable story of The Great Progression. The idea is for me to write an essay once a week for the first several months and then at least once a month that takes on a piece of this overarching story. All the written material will be open to anyone to read and share widely. 

I also expect once a month to write up the key insights and some extended quotes from an interview I will conduct with some remarkable innovator who can help explain the awesome opportunity that is now within reach in his or her field. I will draw off the network I have built up over the last 30 years of world-class technologists and entrepreneurs, academics and intellectuals, politicos and journalists, who can help fill out this grand narrative of what lies ahead. 

The series will have a monthly gathering that takes advantage of the intellectual network that is building by the month here on Substack. This virtual conversation hosted by me over Zoom will discuss the essay topics of the month or the interview of some remarkable innovator but the format will be designed to leverage the insights and expertise of those who attend from throughout America and around the world. 

This virtual gathering will be limited to those in The Great Progression Network who sign up at the monthly rate of $10, though I am open to comps to get the right people in the mix. And Network Members will be the only ones able to access the group Chat that will carry on the conversation on a weekly basis. 

The top tier of the Founders Network will get all the perks of the network as well as invites to attend exclusive physical gatherings each quarter at the Shack15 club at the top of the iconic Ferry Building at ground zero of San Francisco, where I hosted and convened The AI Age Begins series at the start of the AI Revolution. To be a Founder will cost the equivalent of $20 a month, of the equivalent of buying me a couple beers for all my efforts that month.

I think of The Great Progression Network and Founders as key parts of this ambitious project. We need to pool all our insights, knowledge and brainpower to figure out how to make the most of this awesome opportunity that’s opening up before us. I want to learn from all of you as we rough out the grand narrative of what we actually could create in the next 25 years.

We are all living through an extraordinary moment in history and the next 25 years could bring a world that humans could only dream about reaching until now. The time has come to stop dreaming and get to work. Let’s get started on The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050. Join me on this incredible journey. 

Peter Leyden
Creator of The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050