Head's Up on the Relaunch of The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050

After two years focused on the beginnings of The AI Age, this series will relaunch next week as an ambitious new project roughing out a new grand narrative of what's now possible in the next 25 years

I started this Substack series simply called The Great Progression back in 2023 as part of a new event series that was trying to make sense of the arrival of Generative AI that had recently burst on the scene.

For the next two years I hosted, curated and convened an event series at ground zero in the Ferry Building of San Francisco that brought together many of the leading experts in Artificial Intelligence as well as top innovators in many other innovative fields in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. Our goal in each event was to try to answer one key question surrounding the arrival of this potentially world-changing new tool.

I wrote up essays on what we learned in these Meetings of the Minds of 250 innovators who jammed into the Shack15 Club to listen to a dozen remarkable thought leaders give short talks on their answer to the question of the night. We also recorded all the talks and produced sophisticated videos in a documentary style of what took place.

I wanted to ensure that these early insights and ideas would get out to broader audiences so I started this Substack series to publish most of what we produced, and I made all the content free and easy to share.

I named the series The Great Progression, after a popular magazine piece I had written in the fall of 2022, just two months before ChatGPT 3.5 was released and started the Generative AI boom. That 10,000 word piece called The Great Progression, 2025 - 2050 made a compelling case that America and the world were on the verge of an era of great progress, partly driven by the arrival of three world-historic general purpose technologies, starting with AI.

The event series in San Francisco was highly successful, with waiting lists for all events, and coverage by top journalists, and our burgeoning network learned a lot together. You can still read those essays (in reverse chronological order, blog-style) and immerse in the video of the events to catch up on all that learning for yourself in the pieces already published here.

However, the story has moved on and I am now launching the next phase of this Substack series with the slightly evolved name The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050. The missing piece right now is a new grand narrative of how artificial intelligence and other transformative technologies like clean energy and bioengineering can scale up over the next 25 years and help us drive progress, reinvent America for the 21st century, and ultimately help make a much better world.

The vast majority of people can’t see how a new kind of an economy and society can be built in very different and better ways off these technologies. They need help imagining how fields like education and healthcare could go from expensive and ineffective to much more efficient and at some point even cheap.

So I’m launching a new project to help fill out that new grand narrative so more people can see the amazing opportunity that is now within reach for America and the world.

To start out for the first several months, I expect to write a new essay each week that will help put the tumultuous current events swirling around us in a larger, big-picture, world-historic context.

Each month I also will publish what I learned from an interview with a remarkable innovator who can explain how their field could change for the better in the next 25 years. They will help fill out this new grand narrative — and the first one up will be one of the most original thinkers I know, Kevin Kelly.

And each month I also will convene a virtual gathering of those of you who want to join a can-do network helping figure out how this new world could work, and work better for everyone, and over the long haul. For that, you will have to become a paid Member, for the cost of buying me one beer at a bar each month.

I also will be holding a physical event every quarter at the Shack15 club in the Ferry Building at ground zero in San Francisco, where I held The AI Age Begins series. Those will be local invite-only gatherings open to Founding Members too.

You can find more to read and watch on this new series in the About section, and the first new essay that will go much deeper than this head’s up note will come out next Tuesday.

If you don’t want to follow this next phase of the learning journey then you can turn off these emails or unsubscribe.

For those who do want to follow, get ready to kick off the first year of The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050. And start spreading the word.