What is The Great Progression?
A big idea about an era of great progress opening up in the next 25 years - plus a new series of events & media from San Francisco
We’re all living through an extraordinary moment in human history. We’re experiencing the arrival of three world-historic technologies that are giving humans step-changes in our capabilities and dramatically augmenting what we can now do.
We’re crossing the threshold into The Age of Artificial Intelligence with the arrival of Generative AI that is opening up access to this super-tool to everyone. From this time onward humans will increasingly work and live with intelligent machines. We’re now on a path that will continue not just for decades, but for centuries.
We’re simultaneously entering The Age of Clean Energy. The next 25 years are going to bring the biggest and fastest transformation in energy sources that any society has ever been through before. Once we make this transition from carbon energies to all sorts of clean renewables and maybe even fusion energy— there’s no going back.
And we’re also entering The Age of Bioengineering with our increasing mastery of genetics and our new ability to design living things. Synthetic biology eventually will give us the power to create sustainable everything.
On top of all these tech shifts, the 2020s are bringing fundamental system changes in many different fields from demographics to geo-politics.
This extraordinary moment in human history is opening up the potential for an era of great progress over the course of the next 25 years. Far from a gloom and doom future that most people fear, humans could well be beginning The Great Progression.
Extraordinary junctures in history like this bring an explosion of questions: What’s really going on? What’s probably coming? What’s possible to achieve? What should we do now to achieve the best and avoid the worst?
No one person has all the answers at times like this. The best you can do is to assemble the smartest, most knowledgeable, most innovative people you can and drive conversations among all of them to figure out the answers together. No one is as smart as everyone.
I’m Peter Leyden, the founder of Reinvent Futures, a strategic foresight firm that does exactly that. We specialize in convening remarkable innovators from a wide range of fields that are shaping the future. We do that based in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and the whole Bay Area region.
San Francisco is unquestionably ground zero for the Generative AI revolution opening up The AI Age. The vast majority of the top Gen AI firms in the world right now are based in the city. And entrepreneurs and technologists from all over America and the world are moving here as fast as they can.
The San Francisco Bay Area also is also among the handful of regions in the world that are leading the revolution in Biotech and the life sciences, as well as the revolution in clean energy and climate tech.
There’s really no better place on the planet to gather leading innovators to figure out the new ways forward for these world-historic technologies opening up or the many system changes they are driving. So that’s what we did.
I now host the The Great Progression series of events literally at ground zero in San Francisco, at the historic Ferry Building on the edge of downtown. We’re holding them at the hip new club Shack15 that overlooks the beautiful bay.
We started the series with three events each focused on a key question surrounding the arrival of Generative AI.
The first was: What are the Real Implications of Generative AI? In other words, what are the capabilities of this new technology in the relative near-term and what will be the implications primarily on the business world through the 2020s?
Then we had another event on: What are the Positive Possibilities of Generative AI? This took a longer view on the larger impacts on the economy and society of America and the world over the next 25 years.
And then we had to look hard at: What are the Actual Risks of Generative AI? We tried to get to the most important and pressing of the risks, and then start to think about the responsible ways forward.
Each time we packed the club with 200 guests from many of the key networks from the tech and innovation economy of the Silicon Valley and the region. We had entrepreneurs and technologists, academics and intellectuals, VCs and investors, creatives and activists, politicians and government officials.
We had many well-known OGs, the honored old guard who had been through previous tech booms, but we also had many of the leading young founders and builders of the new wave of Gen AI startups.
We call these Meetings of the Minds because all the guests we invite have something valuable to contribute. We do select about a dozen of those who are truly remarkable to give short talks in a formal program.
But then we dim the lights, turn up the music and have more like a party where everyone can connect and potentially find ways to work together.
We also had plenty of national media cover these elite gatherings in the hopes of gleaning new insights on what is going on. They included The New Yorker, Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, Reuters, Axios and even foreign media from Asia.
The Great Progression is not just for the relatively few who can experience the physical events. What we learn from these convenings, from the gatherings of these insider networks, is valuable and we want to share these early insights with others.
So Reinvent Futures also creates media. We publicly share what we learn at the events through The Great Progression series on Substack, free to anyone online.
I personally write an essay on what we learned after each event, and we publish extended quotes from those who give short talks. We also create high-quality videos from the best of the speakers that we publish on our Reinvent Futures YouTube channel and in Substack too.
Reinvent Futures does advisory work too. We work with companies and other organizations that want to get a deeper understanding of the impact of Generative AI, or other key technologies, or think through other related developments that will impact the decade ahead and beyond.
Managing Director Joe Boggio and myself can design a variety of learning experiences for senior leaders who are grappling with those key questions that arise at historic junctures like this: What’s really going on? What’s probably coming? What’s possible to achieve? And what should we do now?
We can draw off an extraordinary network of innovators to help you answer the key questions surrounding Generative AI like: What are the real implications, the positive possibilities and the actual risks?
As I said at the beginning, we are all living through an extraordinary moment in human history. The changes that are coming are profound and the stakes are high for companies in many different industries and organizations in many different fields.
We’re heading into a tumultuous and confusing time. We’ll face many uncertainties and quite a few risks. . But we’re also heading into an incredible number of unprecedented opportunities.
I think the opportunities will far outweigh the risks. I think the next 25 years will be far more positive than negative. I think we’ll eventually look back on this period of history and see it as a time of great progress.
Let The Great Progression begin.
Watch the highly-produced YouTube video at the top of the essay to get a more visual look and feel for what we are doing with The Great Progression.