The Great Progression Begins

AI helps launch a new event series, a new Substack series & a new era of progress

What a wonderful feeling to be alive in the world when The AI Age Begins. What an incredible opportunity to be living when humans cross a threshold into a new age of technological sophistication and societal complexity that will be our lot from now on. What an honor to be part of the first cohort that must now figure out how to live and work with the most powerful technology yet developed — intelligent machines. 

I needed to get that off my chest. I just could not take one more gloom and doom media report about the disasters that AI will unleash upon us. I could not listen to yet another pundit or politician or public figure warn about looming catastrophes from massive unemployment to the undermining of democracy to inevitable cyberwar. I’ve heard enough from the relative handful of tech experts who even worry about some remote possibility of human extinction - when the vast majority of tech experts who I know have no such fears and are super excited like me. 

Before we try to freeze all AI development in its tracks (not happening), or throw together some half-baked regulation in Washington or Brussels, or lather the public into even more of a panicked frenzy, how about we create some space to think through all the positive possibilities of this fundamentally new technology? 

How about opening up to the possibility that the arrival of a powerful new general purpose technology in the form of artificial intelligence that is open to everyone, applicable to most industries, and relatively cheap is exactly what the moribund economies of the developed nations need to finally accelerate productivity rates and spur growth? Maybe giving every individual in the global economy a highly-capable AI assistant in the coming years would go a long way toward transforming all our societies for the better. 

How about considering that the arrival of artificial intelligence is the super-tool that humans need at this time to help solve our seemingly intractable challenges like climate change, or dysfunctional educational systems, or super-expensive healthcare systems, or our dilapidated systems of democracy? 

This positive reframe of our historic moment is what we’re going to carry out in this new Substack series called The Great Progression. We will largely be looking at artificial intelligence not as an abomination but a boon. We will be smart about risks but maintain a steady can-do attitude and help figure out the new way forward. Yet we could not call this series The AI Age Begins because as big a deal as AI is, that new technology is only one piece of the whole puzzle. 

Over time we will be looking at other technological breakthroughs that arguably will be just as significant to the quality of life on this planet in the 21st century. The shift to clean energy technologies in the next 25 years warrants calling this The Clean Energy Age Begins. Or the shift to biological engineering in the next 25 years warrants calling this The Synthetic Biology Age Begins. All three are world-historic technological transformations that will roll out simultaneously in the next 25 years. 

So we’re calling this comprehensive series The Great Progression because the best way to really understand the big picture of what’s coming in the next 25 years is to see it as an era of great progress on many fronts. The three world-historic tech drivers are only part of the reason. The world also is going through many fundamental system changes in our politics, economics, culture and society that can be generally described as finally moving from aging 20th century systems to nascent 21st century ones. 

The Great Progression is based on a framework first laid out in a magazine piece last year called The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050. That long article lays out the argument of why the coming decades will be ones of great progress, and makes the case for maintaining a can-do optimism in the face of widespread pessimism. There’s no need to read that article to follow this Substack series, but it helps give context - and will give you hope if you need a boost. 

I’m Peter Leyden and wrote that article and will write The Great Progression Substack series too. I’ve been a writer in many different genres over the years. I started my career as a journalist, writing for daily newspapers, the weekly Newsweek, and serving as a foreign correspondent in Asia, including covering China. I then moved to magazines to work with the founders of WIRED magazine covering the fledgling digital revolution, and ended up as managing editor in the heyday of the 1990s. I then co-authored two influential books on the future and new technologies that went into multiple languages, and I have written popular online series about the future in places like Medium, and the occasional magazine piece on a big idea. I’m looking forward to more regular writing here in Substack. 

The Great Progression Substack series, however, is far more than the ideas of one lone writer. This ambitious series will consistently communicate what an amazing network of hundreds of remarkable people will be learning together through a series of physical events held in San Francisco starting this summer of 2023 with a focus on the impact of Generative AI. We expect to eventually explore other technologies and many of the fields going through transformations as part of The Great Progression that is opening up in the 2020s. 

I will write up a synthesis of what we are learning in each event because I will be hosting those events and helping convene participants from a wide variety of networks in the tech and innovation economy of Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. We will try to always capture an audio recording of the conversations  so we can accurately convey some of the best passages in the written work. And for some of the events we will record in video and produce some video shorts of the best ideas that emerge.  Substack will host all three media outputs of the events: my essay synthesizing what we learned, some edited passages of the best ideas from the guest speakers, and ways to see the video shorts. 

The “we” that produces these events and related media refers to Reinvent Futures, the strategic foresight firm that I founded and that Managing Director Joe Boggio runs. This brings up the other side of my career beyond writing that is relevant. After running WIRED in the 1990s, I worked with some pioneers in the field of strategic foresight like Stewart Brand, and then I founded and ran two startups focused on the future. Much of what we did in those companies was convene innovators from diverse fields in virtual and physical gatherings to help figure out the future, and then create media off those conversations. 

For the five years before the pandemic, Joe and I co-created a very popular monthly event series called What’s Now San Francisco that built an incredible network of top technologists, entrepreneurs, business leaders, academics, scientists, intellectuals, politicos, activists and creatives from a wide range of fields. So after the pandemic we geared up to create a new event series at the hip new club called Shack15 housed in the iconic Ferry Building at ground zero of San Francisco overlooking the waters of the bay. 

Then starting in 2023, month by month, we started to feel San Francisco become energized by the arrival of Generative AI. Right about the time that the East Coast media and foreign press were coming out with their most snarky stories about the death of San Francisco - the city was reborn. Young hackers, technologists and up-and-coming entrepreneurs were streaming into the city and literally half of all AI investments in the United States was pouring into California startups. Everyone was buzzing about Generative AI and the opportunities opening up. 

The closest analogy for many tech veterans like myself was the feeling in San Francisco at the time of the opening up of the Internet in the early to mid 1990s. Yet the arrival of Generative AI brought far more questions, generated far more fear, and attracted far more attention from those outside the region. 

Nobody in the region fully understood what was going on. Everyone wanted to compare notes with their peers. And so this provided the perfect opportunity to call for a Meeting of the Minds to pool all insights and perspectives. This was the time to assemble what I call the A team to pose the big questions and try to work out the best answers we collectively can. 

And so we launched a summer event series of three separate gatherings focused on figuring out some of the key questions surrounding Generative AI: What are the real implications of Generative AI? What are the positive possibilities of Generative AI? What are the actual risks of Generative AI? 

We sent out invites to some of the smartest, most knowledgeable, most innovative people I have gotten to know in my more than 25 years working in the tech and innovation economy of the San Francisco Bay Area. Joe did the same. We maxed out our first event with 250 people jammed in the room, with 250 on the waiting list. 

Follow this Substack series to follow what we all learned in that first gathering and will continue to learn in the coming months. Over time we expect to systematically look at many of the new technologies and whole fields that will be going through transformations starting in the 2020s but scaling up over the next 25 years. 

For each new technology or new field we will be asking four overarching questions: What’s really going on right now? What’s probably coming in the near-term, like the next 10 years? What’s possible to achieve in the long-term, like the next 25 years?  And then what should we do now to hit those ambitious goals? 

Join us on this learning journey that will draw off the insights and ideas of many remarkable people who are all trying to figure out the new ways forward at this incredible moment in time. Join us as The Great Progression Begins.