Why the next 25 years will force humanity to reinvent itself

Who's in the Video Peter Leyden Peter Leyden is a longtime tech expert and thought leader on the future. He came to San Francisco to work with the founders of WIRED magazine at the beginning of[…] Go to Profile Part of the Series Full Interview Explore series

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Become a Member Login Why the next 25 years will force humanity to reinvent itself “Old systems of the past are collapsing, and new systems of the future are still to be born. I call this moment the great progression.” ▸ 56 min — with Peter Leyden Description Transcript Copy a link to the article entitled http://Why%20the%20next%2025%20years%20will%20force%20humanity%20to%20reinvent%20itself Share Why the next 25 years will force humanity to reinvent itself on Facebook Share Why the next 25 years will force humanity to reinvent itself on Twitter (X) Share Why the next 25 years will force humanity to reinvent itself on LinkedIn Sign up for Peter Leyden’s Substack The Great Progression: 2025-2050 roughs out a new grand narrative of our historic opportunity to harness AI and other transformative technologies to drive progress, reinvent America, and make a much better world. Subscribe

We are at a tipping point. In the next 25 years, technologies like AI, clean energy, and bioengineering are poised to reshape society on a scale few can imagine. 

Peter Leyden draws on decades of observing technological revolutions and historical patterns to show how old systems collapse, new ones rise, and humanity faces both extraordinary risk and unprecedented opportunity.

PETER LEYDEN: We're living in an extraordinary moment in history. We are at a moment here in 2025 where we have world historic game-changing technologies now starting to scale. Artificial intelligence, clean energy technologies, bioengineering, all here. We're at the cusp of a potentially a great era of progress. But America and the world itself are going through huge contortions. Old systems of the past are collapsing, and new systems of the future are still to be born. I call this moment the great progression. I'm Pete Leyden. I've been here in San Francisco for 30 years. I've basically been following the story of technology, and its evolution, and looking ahead into how it's gonna change the world over the next 25 years. And my current project right now is looking at the great progression, what I think is gonna be a great era of great progress from now until about the year 2050.

- [Interviewer] So Peter, let's start off with something nice and straightforward. Could you just describe for us what was the Long Boom, and maybe what pulled you into this whole topic of human progress?

- Well, way back in the '90s when the very beginning of this digital revolution and the earliest days of the internet, there was really only one place in the world that was really all over that. And that was Wired Magazine. The founders of Wired picked up on me as a kind of young journalist, as someone who kind of had the same kind of sensibility about the transformative nature of these technologies. And so they wooed me to work with them in the early days of Wired. Now, what's interesting about those days in the early part of that was people had no idea what was even going on with the internet, and literally what's email, what's the web, and there was stuff like that. They had no idea how these goofball startups with names like Amazon were ever gonna amount to anything. There was all these naysayers in the mainstream media and pundits in the government that were saying no one in their right mind is gonna put their credit card on the internet. I mean, we had all these myths from the Wired era of trying to explain what was really coming in the next 25 to 30 years. And so what was interesting is I was working with the founders there, and we thought in the middle of the '90s, there was a point where someone had to breathe life into what is a digital economy, how is it different from previous economies? How could that scale and really make a big difference? How could it supersede the current, you know, conventional 20th century economy? And the other thing that was going on there beyond this, the digital revolution, and the beginnings of the internet was essentially the beginning of globalization. And so those two things that people at the time, the mid '90s had no idea what a big deal that was. And so myself and a co-author, which was Peter Schwartz, who was probably the premier futurist at the time, he and I worked for about a year it took us to really build out what was essentially a famous iconic cover story at Wired 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 there. But we told it like we were historians in the future explaining this amazing era of essentially that what we were going through at the time. Now, not all of it, in the mid '90s, you can't predict everything right. And by the way, we weren't necessarily saying flat out, it's a prediction. We were saying, hey, these technologies, these trends, like globalization have the potential to do many, many positive things. And so The Long Boom was really skewed towards the positive possibilities of these technologies, and this integration of the global economy. And so what we did lay out there, I would argue, is largely came to pass. And in fact there's a lot of ways to measure that. And once we passed 2020, there was all kinds of stories that people kind of checking back on our work. There were many things that were completely nailed. We were saying, hey, the doubling of computer chips was gonna continue under Moore's Law for 25 more years. And it did. When we wrote this, you know, there were 25 million Americans in the mid '90s on the internet. And by 2020, we had, you know, 60% of the world. It's 4 billion people on it. And so anyhow, a lot of the through lines of what we were saying happened. There were some minor things that didn't happen. We actually thought humans would get to Mars by 2020. We thought there was enough energy towards that. We thought there'd be more progress honestly, on climate change than we ended up in the end. But we didn't understand the backlash to that the way we've actually been struggling for the last 20 years. But in general, it was very much a kind of vision that actually people could really see, and it really clicked with people, and it actually energized both the entrepreneurial generation that was building it, like they were inspiring them to fill it out. And then it also kind of helped people outside the Silicon Valley, and outside the Bay Area, and outside California to understand, oh my God, this is possible. And if it's possible, maybe we need to get with the program and come along,

- [Interviewer] This isn't a new story in America and globally. And tell us how often these epoch resets happen.

- Now, to really understand where we are and where we're going, you have to kind of pull back a little bit, and understand, at least from my perspective, how the world works. And I think one of the things that I think people can really underestimate is how foundational new technologies are to kind of creating essentially the context for a new world. Now those of us who are in technology and those of us who have been immersed in it, which I have been for most of my career now, can see clearly these kind of incremental stages of these new technologies, that all successful new technologies go through a technology adoption curve, that essentially starts out with very few innovators trying it, and then some early adopters who kind of use it. Then there's a kind of early majority of people that start to think, oh my god, this is an interesting thing. And then the late majority think, oh my god, my neighbor's doing this way, I'm gonna take on with that, and they grab on. And then you eventually get to the point where you even get the laggards. Everybody in the society has to take on, let's say, a color TV set, because you can't even buy a black and white TV set. Like all technologies have gone through this. So those of us have kind of are in the technology world, have seen this over and over and over again with technology. And the key piece of this is tipping points. When do you go from the slow, slow build of a thing that's kind of clunky and not really working, and these cell phones don't really work, till you all of a sudden get an iPhone that goes, holy shit, this is the most amazing thing in the world, and then everybody needs them. And what I'm trying to tell you now is we are in the middle of three tipping points that are world historic changes that are happening around us today. And the most obvious one is the arrival of artificial intelligence. Literally, this is the biggest technological story I have ever lived through. It's going to go through the roof of exponential growth, and it's going to hit all fields at some level. 'Cause anything people do with intelligence, you're gonna have to rethink, is the machine gonna do this, or is the human gonna do this? And then the other thing about it is, if the machines do enough of it, we're gonna, the humans are gonna take the machines to augment themselves and go to the next level of problems, the next level of jobs, a whole nother thing. Anyhow, that's one tipping point. There's another tipping point which I won't go into the same detail, but around clean energy technologies. That solar, which has been this incremental thing, just like you know, the internet or just like AI, going through these stages of still expensive, kind of clunky, not really taken off, has taken off big time in the last 10 years. And that thing is hitting tipping points around the world, and it is going to exponential growth. And there's some other ways we can talk about later about bioengineering and synthetic biology, which is more complicated and a little bit later than that. But it is getting to the point now where we can see in the next 25 years, we're gonna be able to engineer all living things. And so these are huge shifts in our technology. And so getting back to the bigger picture, what we're talking about is once you give essentially a society, an economy, a society, a people those kind of technological powers, it starts to essentially force a transformation of the economy, society, and just how things work. And so the old system, how we did it all through the 20th century, and how it had worked really well, and how all these people were kind of tied into that are essentially invested in that thing. But that thing is getting dysfunctional, it's getting along in the tooth. And this goes everything from carbon energy technologies, which is causing climate change, to essentially government bureaucracies that can't work like they did, you know, over the last 80 years getting increasingly difficult to work. So you're watching an old system being essentially dismantled or having to come down, at the same time as we're taking off on these new technologies to build the next systems. We're in the middle of that. Right now is smack in the middle of that in our era, but we've also seen this in American history before. There's been other areas where this exact thing has happened. We can kind of learn from them if we look back. There's been three previous junctures where Americans have found themselves in this exact place. Now that's not to say it's common. Like you know, this is 80 years ago last time we saw this. And they tend to come in these 80 year cycles. Many people might think, why 80 years? What happens every 80 years? Now, there's a lot of things going on here. One is there's usually a set of new technologies that are ready to take off that are essentially not under development, but are essentially about to scale up. And that you can go back in history and show how that happened in every one of these 80 year junctures. There's also a kind of economic reason of how essentially economies boom into long booms of technological booms, but also economic booms and then they die out. But the one of the main reasons is essentially that comes up to a essentially a changing the guard of generations. And so there are some lessons you can learn, some patterns you can see there, and some lessons we could learn that'll help us kind of understand what's really going around today and what we need to do going forward. The last big one was coming off World War II, 1945. It is exactly 80 years ago from 2025 where we are here. 80 years ago, America was on a very similar parallels. And there's a bunch of parallels around this. One, we had basically were watching the essentially dismantling of the old world that had been working pretty well, the economy and societies of the west. There had been a wave of new technologies, there had been a boom around that. And then there had been a crash in the great crash of '29, and you would run into the Great Depression of the 1930s. Now what that was was the old system of running the economy just wasn't working. Huge inequalities, all these kind of problems around that. So you were watching essentially the need to fundamentally reinvent the economy. But before we get to the new system, you get to the other pattern of all these junctures. You get extremely high passionate politics. And so what happens is you watch these junctures in American society, we get super polarized around two visions of essentially the way to go forward. One is let's hang on to what we did, or go back and make America great again the way we did. And there's another crew that says, no, we gotta move forward and innovate and be more progressive, and kind of drive another progressive era. And those junctures happen at these times, and it gets extremely conflictual. And to be fair, the 1930s in America, people forget this part of America, but there was an America first movement that really took over the Republican Party. There were essentially American level fascists in the '30s, and we were on the verge of kind of violent conflict in America. And then you had this kind of FDR, and the kind of new deal coalition that was kind of came out of the Depression that was pointing towards a kind of different way to run the economy and the society post-war. And they started to get traction. But anyhow, we had resolve this political tension in America, and frankly it had to do it in the world, because the world also is going through this juncture. And after the war though, we watch the updraft of the next system. And this is important to know, yes, there's conflict, yes, there's this kind of collapse of the old system, but what's amazing about these things is they have bursts of unbelievably widespread innovation that lasts for, what do you know, 25 years. And so from 1945 to 1970, we watched the great post-war boom, many people call it the kind of high point of global capitalism. And you built this crazy economy where you did many things that were completely different than the previous era. Tax the rich at 90%. You watch incredible investment in public infrastructure like the interstate highway system and building suburbs. You basically watch the GI Bill in education, building higher institution for higher education, expanding it for the Boomers, all that kind of stuff. That all happened in 25 years. The Great Society, the whole thing, 25 years, and then we ran in the '70s, it started kind of getting along in the tooth, and it wasn't kind of the boom started running out. Stagflation, oil shocks. But here's the point, that was a good example. Within recent memory of, let's say, my mother who is in that older generation, where we watched a very similar thing. All three of those pieces, old system had to come down, and got, wasn't working, super conflict around it. And ultimately the building of a thing that was dramatically different than before. We've been through that before. And funny enough, like I say, if you go another 80 years back, we did it once a time before that too. So from 1945, you go back exactly 80 years, and it's 1865. What is 1865? It's the end of the American Civil War. Now this is a good example of how passions run very high, and political conflict is extreme at these junctures. In the Civil War, it was the most extreme. I mean we literally had to have 750,000 Americans died in the Civil War. I mean, you talk about, you know, you think, hey, it's a little edgy now, and we're a little worried about political violence breaking out. Yeah, we've been there. I mean we've seen how that happens. Now, what was going on there? This is the probably the most easiest way to understand the old systems failing, because America, since the founding, had been in tension with these two economic systems. One was essentially a system of the early manufacturing economy where you needed free labor in the north essentially to create an economy that's, you know, reminiscent of what we still have now. But in the old South, we basically had slavery. And yes, there was a human rights aspect to that, but really it was an economic thing, which is the powers at be, political people and economic powers of the South were absolutely dependent on slavery. They could not survive together. We had to bring down finally and fully essentially an economy that was essentially based on slave labor. There was immoral reasons for that, but there was an economic reasons for it. We had to stop that. And when we decided to do that, which is in the 1850s, it started getting clear that we're gonna have to do this. One side, the South side essentially seceded. They said, no, we're not going there, we're not gonna give it up. We're not gonna let go of this old system, we're gonna fight to the death on the thing. And they wanted to secede. And then when we wouldn't let 'em secede, they basically, we had the Civil War. And so this is a good example. There's a similar system that has to go down, in our era, I'll just say, and let's just call it, carbon energy. We cannot keep carbon energy going the way we have for the last 250 years of the Industrial Revolution without destroying the planet. And so what you're seeing through the lens of that same kind of system that must be dismantled, you're watching the similar resistance of anyone rooted in the oil economy, whether it's oil petro-states, whether it's regions of the country that are rooted in that in some of the red states in the United States. Whether it's, you know, political platforms of like, you know, trying to kind of deny climate change. The same thing is, it's a similar kind of thing. It isn't quite to Civil War now, but you can see how old systems that have to be dismantled, there's a lot of people invested in that are very resistant to shifting. And so that we saw it in the Civil War. Now the thing that people do not know about the Civil War don't really remember as much about the Civil War is the Civil War after 1865 had an unbelievable explosion of progress that lasted for, what do you know, 25 years. The what they called the the Republican Party, which was the progressive kind of side of that conflict, not the conservative hold the old thing, but move forward. They passed some just unbelievable landmark legislation. For example, the Homestead Act, which is you gave anybody who went out west to 150 acres, for free. If you just went out there, and basically helped tame the west. There was also land grant universities where they essentially all these little states started building institutes of higher education to educate average people beyond the kind of Harvards of the East Coast, but also to be pushing scientific understanding of agriculture growing. So there was a lot of governmental-driven but also economic kind of progress in that. But there was, here's the other progress that was going on. It was technology. The technology of that time was essentially, think of it, one of them is trains. Before the Civil War, we had trains just like, you know, we had computers before the internet boom. There are these beginnings of these technologies, but it was only in the Civil War when we started to realize, holy shit, we could really scale these things. It was only after the war that America blew out like 175,000 miles of rail and essentially stitched the entire continent together across the whole continent,, and stitched every town and everything, cut together with this, you know, steel-based rails. And essentially we rebuilt America, we reinvented America in the next 25 years. And here's the even crazier thing though. You go back another 80 years, we did it again. So you go from 1865, which is the end of the Civil War, and you go back 80 years. The late 1780s, we essentially started a 25 year boom. And when you say boom, it's like a technological boom, it's an economic boom. It's essentially upward swing of a lot of widespread innovation that America went through coming off the Revolutionary War to create the world that by the end of the Founders Era, after Thomas Jefferson had already been a two term President and all that kind of stuff. By the kind of, you know, 1810, 1815, we had created what is America, which kind of was then rolling until the Civil War period. So there was this kind of creation at that side, and then there's another thing about it that people forget is there were loyalists in the fight around the Revolutionary War. There was a significant amount of Americans who were loyalists, who were fighting for the Crown, who were fighting for the British. And that had a lot to lose because they benefited from the colonial situation that essentially had been the system, the old system of that time. And that it was the revolutionary side of the Americans who were trying essentially the progressive side that had to fight in the war. I mean, we had Americans on the British side. I mean, we had real debates on this thing on a fundamental level. And that political debate got settled in the war, and then we basically started the building of America. So it was really one way to understand what was happening in America at that time was it was part of a bigger part of Western Europe, and particularly an extension of Britain, which was going through the enlightenment at the time, that essentially has global implications. It was a fundamental system change from a feudal society, kind of dominated by the Catholic church and all kind of stuff, into essentially what we would now consider the modern world. And they invented six huge things that we still are working within today. One was they invented mechanical engines. I mean, that was essentially, we essentially could amplify human physical power like never before by essentially harnessing steam engines to kind of scale up our powers. That was huge. The second thing we did is we essentially invented large scale carbon energies, mining coal to actually create giant furnaces to kind of create an industrial production. That was a breakthrough, and we've gone on to coal, natural gas since then. Third thing is industrial production. For the first time we were able to scale at unbelievable scale, essentially the production of industrial goods, which has essentially created the prosperity and wealth of the world that we know now. We also invented financial capitalism. Before that time, people couldn't take money, their little gold pieces, and they never, they couldn't trust sending it into somebody in another country that would, you know, protect that thing. There was no financial capitalism until essentially Great Britain invented it. And you had a trustworthy system that investors could actually put their money due to the scale of the Industrial Revolution. The final two things were the nation state. You know, before that, we had empires and colonial things, but we didn't, colonies, we didn't have the nation state system which they created. And the final one was representative democracy, which we've mentioned how the United States did that. Now the reason I'm kind of saying that is that had world historic kind of implications. That was a building of a civilization, that was an integrated civilization that the world had never seen before, that we essentially invented, we humans, but we, western Europe in basically a space of 120 years. America took the mantle at the end of that, the late 18th century, 1776 and 1780s, kind of rolling into the 19th century. The forward motion of innovation, essentially from the west was coming with those crazy ass Americans, who had this wide open continent to spread it to, and had this crazy opportunity to just do whatever the hell they wanted to do. They didn't have a aristocracy, they didn't have the whole place owned by the old rich that have been in for centuries. They had a lot of open space to just create and innovate and create new things. And that is what America's role has been vis-a-vis the West in every one of those epics. Then Europe followed and kind of emulated and had their own welfare states and various things, and they did, you know, enough innovation. I don't want to say it was all America, but America was the 800 pound gorilla in driving innovation going forward. I'm arguing, we're, we have one more crank of that wheel. And I think the place to look right now for this next big innovation, this next reinvention, not just of America, but potentially civilizational scale invention is gonna basically come out of America. Again, it's not 100% true, there's a lot of drama and difficulty right now, but I would say if you had to compare us to China or others, I think what you're gonna see is America going through one more level of that scale of change.

- [Interviewer] That actually drives us right into this next sort of second part. Let's get into the future that we are sort of currently living in, whether everyone realizes or not, let's start with the one that we are seeing and hearing about constantly, which is AI.

- We are in the middle of three tipping points that are world historic changes that are happening around us today. And the most obvious one is the arrival of artificial intelligence. The arrival of generative AI with the arrival of ChatGPT 3.5 in November of 2022. I think we're gonna see that as a world historic moment. I think people will look back on that is the starting gun of what will be understood as the age of AI. And I use age in a very, you know, explicit way, which is when you talk about a different age that humans enter, like, oh, the humans, you know, entered the Bronze Age or the Iron Age. I mean you're talking about essentially a fundamental game changing technology, a breakthrough, a step change in our abilities that once you cross that threshold, you don't go back. You're always going to incorporate and always gonna use these technologies, and it's going to essentially fundamentally change the world. AI is essentially the culmination, I would argue, of the entire digital revolution that goes back to mainframe computers in World War II actually, it's really the start of computing, mainframe computing. AI is now the cherry on the top. It's like the last thing we really needed to do was to harness all that technology, harness all the digitization, everything, harness the cloud, harness all the things we did over those years, laying fiber optic cables, and wireless networks, and everything, to kind of come to the point where now the computers can actually think, they can interact with us via voice, and they can do things that we could never do on our own. So anyhow, that is a big deal. I just wanna say, and I think if you, once you kind of grok that or really get it, you realize, oh my god, we could start applying intelligence to everything. And we are gonna start this crazy sorting process between humans and machines now. That boring stuff or things that are essentially humans are, you know, really don't wanna do, are gonna be done by machines. And we're gonna take it and invent new jobs that are gonna use that capability to augment us to kind of do new things that we didn't think we could do, and scientific breakthroughs we never thought we'd see. Anyhow, there's a bunch of sorting going on here, I don't wanna go into those details, but the point is, it's a huge deal that we're crossing here. And I think because of that, we have to be thinking extremely expansively of what's possible now. And one of the things I think that's gonna, we're gonna talk about in a recurring fashion is this idea of abundance. One thing you can say about AI is it is a technology with the potential to create incredible abundance. And I can explain why in many respects, but let's just, I'll give you one example. Every knowledge worker and basically every person is essentially gonna have a digital assistant, essentially like an executive assistant who's virtual, essentially AI. Now, you could say, well rich people or wealthy people, or you know, CEOs have always had executive assistants. In fact, I've had three startups myself, the first person I hire as an executive assistant to kind of solve all the stuff I don't want to do, and scheduling, and all this stuff you have to solve. But you give it to everybody and you say, oh my god, we're all gonna do this, it'll cost you 20 bucks a month or something like that. But here's the thing that's interesting about that. It's like that's allowing average people, everybody to get the same thing that the people at the top, the kind of elite scarce kind of commodity, essentially used to be a human executive assistant. You had to come up with, you know, about 150 grand or 100 grand essentially to get someone to do that every year, as opposed to 20 bucks a month. So it's essentially creating an abundant system of executive assistants. Same thing with tutoring. You know, those same executive assistants are gonna be essentially tutors for everybody. Everybody, every kid. Now you say, well you know, human, you know, rich people have always had, you know, tutors for their kids, you know? You need extra help on SAT scores or whatever, you get a tutor. What you're paying them through the nose, but you know, if you have money, you have money. If you get a digital tutor, for every kid starting from scratch, even it costs 20 bucks a month, essentially you've opened up tutoring to everybody. I mean, there are so many positive things about AI potentially happening. Let me just give one of them that's already happening is simultaneous language translation. American English has become essentially the lingua franca of the 20th century in the modern world. But still you needed a business class college-educated strata from all these different societies to actually learn the language and be able to talk that language of kind of English that connect around the kind global economy. But that leaves off a unbelievable amount of people who can't learn English, or don't learn English, or aren't educated, or can't go to college, or whatever it is. Until now. 'Cause now, as you've seen, everybody, you know, the AI's talking to you in English if you're speaking English, but it's talking, you know, Chinese to the Chinese, it's talking, you know, Hindi to the Indians. I mean, it's basically doing it all, and it's doing it about 90, 95% accuracy now. We'll be able to have earbuds, you go traveling with earbuds, you're just gonna have an earbud on, and whatever that person and street vendor says, you're gonna understand it. You're gonna be asked to talk to them about their family, you're gonna go home with them, see their kids. I mean, that's the level of integration in the world here. So instead of a power of Babel, we're gonna have this cross connection of all those cultures, all those kind of societies, and it's just gonna be a wild time. Now, it's also gonna throw a lot of unintended consequences and who knows what. Yeah, I know for a lot of people, particularly Americans are scared of AI. In fact, weirdly, Americans are more scared of AI than other countries. Like Chinese, for example, have huge majority, like 60% or more are very positive about AI. In the United States, the positive people of AI are something like 35%. It's about a third of Americans think it's a good thing. Third of Americans think it's a horrible thing, and about a third in the middle just don't really know yet. But the point being is there is a lot of fear, and there's a lot, and partly I think it's around a misunderstanding of what's going on. The second thing at why is this happening is the media, I think, is very reactive. It's very fear mongering, it's, you know, freaking people out by these distortions of these risks and things that are essentially are solvable but essentially make 'em unsolvable. So there's a lot of fear and worry about what's going on here. But I think one of the things that needs to happen, and I'm trying to do, but there's a lot of people increasingly are gonna do, is show the unbelievable positive potential of this stuff. And I will say, every introduction of every world changing general purpose technology. And fire, you know, electricity, all of them come with risk. I mean, when we first invented electricity, you know, wow, it lit up a house, it lit up the street, and you know, it's like, wow, power's this thing called a radio. It's like, this is awesome, but if you touch the wire, you're dead. And so there were people like, oh, can't do electricity, that's gonna screw us up. And so there's always been these risks, but we always kind of figure out how to innovate to contain the risk, and then institutionalize it to the point where like every room on the planet now has electricity, and we don't even think about it. It's not even thought of as dangerous because we have codes, and we have all kinds of ways we do this. Let me just create another parallel here, which is when we, why do we call it the enlightenment? When you go back in the past there, that enlightenment, the enlightenment is essentially was an opening up of the lens of what we understood about the world. Because we had array of new tools, everything from microscopes, to telescopes, and all kinds of things that opened up the world. So we said, oh my god, we actually, you know, are kind of, this is how blood cells work, or this is, I mean there was all that kind of level of fundamental expansion and enlightenment of what do we understand about the world, which kind of drove this crazy explosion of innovation and enlightenment. So here we are in our era, and you got AI. I mean, AI is going to not just supercharge innovation, it is going to dramatically expand what we understand about the world. It's already happening. In fact, you can kind of see these various examples of how just in the last year essentially, we applied AI to one of the most difficult scientific problems of how do we understand the protein folding where from a genetic code, how does it get expressed in three dimensional proteins? Humans have been trying to wrap their head around that for 50 years and been completely stumped. And we put our AI on the task and essentially blew open, it took every gene and explained every dimension of every protein that's possible. There's like 250,000 of them just overnight. I mean, so that's just one scientific advance that just has already happened in this early crude form of AI that essentially is just a taste of things to come. We are gonna understand our world in ways that we absolutely were just, we will be boggled by like, holy shit, how did we not know that? Or all the kind of things that's gonna happen. And so there is a sense of essentially creating a new kind of enlightenment. Maybe the new new, our new enlightenment is one way to think about it. And I think AI's gonna be one of the players. But there'll be other examples of this. But essentially we're gonna watch an explosion of amplification. The amplification of our mental powers with digital computers, and now AI, are gonna be very similar to the amplification of our physical powers, that mechanical engines initially by steam essentially amplified our physical powers, we're now amplifying our mental powers. And that's gonna create another one of these enlightenment situations where we're just gonna say, holy shit, we had no idea this is the world we're in. So there's another world historic breakthrough in technology that we're in right now. And I think I want to just drive home, how world historic this is, and is tipping point time. And that's clean energy technology. And I think what people underestimate, they hear of clean energy technology, and they hear of renewable energy, and they hear of solar, and they kind of understand electric cars, and they kind of get the gist of what that is, but I don't think they understand how revolutionary this is. This is the first time we have an energy source that is a technology, 100% a technology, not a commodity. We don't have to dig it up as coal, we don't have to tap into it as oil. We don't have to get plutonium and put it in a kind of thing to kind of create nuclear energy. Those are using commodities that you have to keep shoveling in for the whole life of these kind of plants. And that also has, and we've seen it particularly around carbon energy has a lot of secondary consequences. It basically kind of, it releases carbon, and is changing the climate of the planet, which is unambiguous now, it's happening. But now we've got solar, which is 100% a technology. It doesn't need anything else once you create it, and it becomes, and you can create energy for the lifetime of that solar panel, which is at least 30 years, sometimes up to 50 years. Why is that important? Because once it's a technology, you can consistently drive down the cost. And there's a kind of a rule of thumb in manufacturing, which if you double the number of essentially anything, really, but let's just take it in terms of solar panels. If you double the number of producing solar panels, you will come up with about 20% of a drop in cost, because you'll understand through that manufacturing process and the level of scaling, and the kind of incremental kind of improvements, you essentially can keep driving the cost down. And so what we've watched is over the last 40 years, basically since the '70s, we've watched essentially this initiative was dramatic drops and it's just consistently going down. Here's the point, it's not stopping. It's gonna keep getting cheaper, and cheaper, and cheaper. It is already by far, if you create right now an electric power station on solar compared to coal, the solar is half as expensive, half as expensive now, which is why nobody in their right mind in the United States is building a coal plant, or in the entire developed world, frankly, is because it's cheaper now to do solar. It's just surpassed getting cheaper than natural gas. Particularly, I mean in certain parts of the country, particularly California, Texas, all kind of with a lot of sunshine. And this is the point, it's not gonna, it's gonna keep getting cheaper. And the same thing, flipping around, the same thing with electric cars. People think, well electric cars are still expensive and whatever. You're not thinking this through, because battery technology is the same thing. It's essentially a technology. And we have watched in the last 30 years, we've watched 100% of the cost of batteries go down in the last 30 years from the '90s. It basically, it's 100% down, and it's going cheaper, and it's, that's in lithium batteries, we're now getting whole nother generations of batteries like solid state batteries that essentially will be a next generation batteries. Well and also a point about this electric thing, the reason we have these tariffs on Chinese cars right now is Chinese cars, electric cars, you can get 'em, kick ass cars for like 20,000 bucks now. They're already cheaper than internal combustion engine. 50% of new cars in China are being sold right now are fully electric. In California, we got about 25% fully electric statewide. And in San Francisco and places like that, it's about 50%. So there are parts of America that are trying to play the game that China is, but the rest of America is laggard, and now you got Trump and others that are kind of dismantling the whole thing. That's just kind of nutty. But the point is the market, the forward motion of costs coming down on clean energy is just beginning. And when that happens, you're gonna have what? Abundant clean energy. And so we are in entering the next 25 years, we will be able to create energy at scales we couldn't expect before with no impact on the environment, or very little, certainly on carbon energy. And we'll be able to do things like desalinate ocean water, which is extremely energy heavy. And up until now, the trade off of like doing that with carbon energy was not useful. It was too big a trade off. But if you had a lot of cheap abundant energy, it was kind of trade-offs are are kind of different. And with climate change and others, you know, maybe if we start running out of, you know, California's running out of water from the rains coming off the Sierras, maybe we actually just shift to desalination using this kind of new clean energy technology. So anyhow, there's a different way of thinking about the next 25 years. Abundant clean energy. So there's our two big abundants there. So the average person's earliest exposure to what you would call bioengineering essentially has come through initially GMOs, genetically modified foods. And there was a big backlash to that for a while in the United States, and particularly in Europe honestly, because we were, we could understand how to deliberately engineer, manipulate the genomes of crops to get more nutrition in them, or to make them more resistant to drought and things like that. But there was essentially a backlash, an initial backlash by the environmental movement, which I would say, was misplaced. And that essentially is we're gonna be overridden as the problems of climate change amount. But essentially, people have already seen a version of this that we could do. But I think what's gonna happen very shortly is the pressures of climate change are gonna be such that it is going to be imperative that we rely on genetic engineering for our crops. It is going to need to withstand way different kind of changes in temperature. We're gonna have to shift all kinds of climate changes, things that react to, it's gonna have to be more robust, it's gonna have to be, maybe won't be able to scale as much farmland, and you're gonna have to have things much more nutritious or more packed with more vitamins, or all kinds of things that you could do. And we can do. Let's go back to what I mentioned in the enlightenment, that there were six big meta inventions that we're still living within today. One of 'em was industrial production. And many, many positive things came out of that. That essentially is the reason we have the modern world we have today in many respects is dependent on industrial production at scale. But the problem with industrial production, just like the problem with clean energy, you know, carbon energies screw up the climate. Industrial production screws up the environment. And you just take one example. You know, plastics. You know, plastics are an industrial production. It's basically rooted in petrochemicals too, but essentially the creation of plastic bottles. Well, you know, anyone who's got even mildly open to watching the news is talking. We're just overrun by plastic bottles, you know? The rivers in the third world are chock full of 'em, the oceans are full of 'em. We've got microplastics now breaking down, and you know, kind of in all our food and all kinds of, it's like that is a fricking disaster. Industrial production, that's just plastics. I mean, there's a million other industrial productions that essentially create incredible toxic waste, and all kinds of stuff over the planet. So industrial production is going to be generally superseded by biological production. And this is the kind of shift here. So industrial production was essentially based on engineering, inert dead materials. We dug up materials, we, you know, various ways that we essentially manipulated, designed and engineered products. Biological engineering is essentially engineering living things. We essentially grow materials, we grow new products. We essentially have a bottle instead of a plastic bottle, you design and you essentially create a bottle that is biologic, which is based on living processes of biodegradable materials. So you create a material that can hold your Pepsi cola or something, for the, you know, sitting in the store. But if that thing gets thrown in the ocean, and it's exposed to salt water, it essentially dissolved within two weeks. Or if it's exposed, thrown out of a window of a car, you know, going through the desert, and it's exposed to UV light for two weeks straight, it'll essentially start to decompose. I mean, this is the way nature works. This is where, you know, this is how the planet works. And we are on the verge now of understanding those processes deeply to the point where we can, humans can engineer these processes and at scale. Second thing is a good example that people have already heard a little bit maybe about is what they call cultured meat. Because our understanding of biology, and because of essentially synthetic biology of how do we artificially do things that nature does, we now know how to take a cell out of a cow, or a pig, or a fish, or whatever living animal we want to eat. You can take that cell and you can put it in a vat, and you can give it the same amount, the same amino acids and the same kind of nutrients, and the same things that a cow roaming around a field for like years chewing on grass for, you know, ever, would get those same nutrients, those same amino acids, and essentially would produce in their muscles, the meat. That same thing can happen in a vat with just energy, and those same materials at a much more efficient, dramatically more efficient, like 70% more efficient way of doing this to actually grow these same cow cell into actual meat. Not like kind of meat, not like plant-based meat that's kind of like meat. It's meat, it's the same cell, it tastes exactly the same. And we are, it's actually, the breakthroughs have already happened. It's still quite expensive like many technologies, but it's happening particularly around chicken now. You can actually get, even in the United States now, there's actually a few places you can start to get these kind of cultured meat. Now one of the reasons that this is important is this also has a big climate component, because cows are horrible, beef is really bad for the environment. They kind of release an incredible amount of methane. It's an incredibly inefficient way to create meat, to scale meat up. It takes a lot of time, it, you know, ruins a lot of environment. I mean, anyway, there's people that you can kind of get in the weeds on that kind of thing. But the point being is as we see climate change mount, and as we see, by the way, the wealth of the global population build, people are gonna want to eat meat. And so I am the projections, I've seen that by 2040, you could see a good section, maybe 30% of the world's meat will be cultured meat. And it doesn't mean you're gonna get a, you know, there'll still be a way to get, the elite to get an nice slice of beef or from a cow, a real cow. But essentially, it'll be all McDonald's hamburgers will be that. Any of the kind of just day-to-day meat that goes into spaghetti sauce or something is gonna be cultured meat. It'll taste the same. So this is a huge breakthrough. Again, this is based on the technology. You gotta get grounded in technology. And what's happened, we've only 25 years ago, it's like 2003 was the first time humans had ever cracked or understood the human genome. Took $3 billion, and it took 15 years to do it. But it happened by, I think it was 2003 when it finally happened. The cost of doing that from 3 billion have now, by 2020, had been driven down so far, it was 1,00 bucks. It is now at about, this is 2020, it's now at the point where it's about 100 bucks. And eventually it's gonna keep driving down to 50 bucks or nothing. That drop in price from 3 billion, to 1,000 bucks, to 100 bucks, to, you know, to today essentially, is twice as fast as the cost reductions that came from Moore's Law in terms of the drops of the price of computer chips, which drove the digital revolution, I just, we went through, The Long Boom. And that is essentially what's happening now. It's dramatically faster. There's a bunch of reasons for that, but just know it's not just the same level, it is twice as fast. Here's the other thing that's going on. Basically right around the time that we essentially had our earliest breakthroughs on this most recent AI, essentially generative AI, which is about 15 years ago, we also had the big breakthrough in what they call CRISPR, which is essentially genetic engineering, which is we figured out a way to cheaply and easily edit the genome of any living thing. And here we are, that now it's being used all the time to kind of edit and change the genomes of plants, of animals. And if we wanted to, it could be humans. So there is essentially, we're on the cusp of a situation where we can now design living things. Now, there's a lot of moral issues around that. Gotta freaks people out. And there's a lot of people are gonna have a hard time with this. But we have the ability to do that now. We have the tools, we have the knowledge, we understand how to do this. This is where the word, synthetic biology comes did. Synthetic meaning humans create a fake, essentially a human-driven biology. We are now, because we know the how the genes work, we understand not just that, but we understand proteins, we understand all kinds of things about the cell we didn't know just decades back. We can now essentially design these things for outcomes that we want to happen to, let's say, make a tree that is super strong, and could replace steel in certain buildings. Or to kind of, you know, a super fire resistant essentially so that, you know, we don't have to worry about wildfires around cities or something. You can engineer viruses or bacteria to kind of create new kinds of synthetic fuels to kind of power planes. I mean, that would not be carbon, and wouldn't actually have the same kind of release of carbon into the atmosphere. Anyhow, there's a bunch of new frontiers in what they call synthetic biology, or just I call in general bioengineering that essentially are now opening up in this century here. In the next 25 years, we're gonna watch a plethora of these things expand. Now here's the one thing about it, it's a little bit slower than these other two. AI is here and going fast, clean energy has already had a great decade of starting to scale, and it's just unstoppable now. And this one is a little bit later, but I think in the space of 25 years, it's worth really wrapping your head around, what could we do with that? How could we reinvent healthcare? How could we do all kinds of things, that would be, again, a more abundant future. If you knew everyone's genome, and you had AI that can monitor every individual all time, you could potentially dramatically drop the cost of healthcare. And so everybody in real time essentially be monitored and have a daily doctor check in a way that as opposed to once a year, you can do that, and when you do, it's cost you an arm and a leg. So we are on the verge of these technologies could bring a society and an economy of abundance, and it's just really underappreciated by the general people out there.

- [Interviewer] All right, so final question on the topic here, and this, really, I think you could think of as your kind of conclusion statement, which is, you know, what are people from the future gonna say, looking back at this era?

- So the technology story of today, 2025, that I laid out to you about AI, clean energies, even bioengineering, is kind of familiar at some level. You can kind of get that, whether you fully understand the forward motion or not, it's understandable. The next several iterations here though, I think is a putting a bigger lens on what's going on today. And it gets us back to what we were describing as what's happening in America, is a once in an 80 year reinvention. And in fact it's even possible that what's going on here is essentially the early days of building a 21st century civilization. And so when you think about that, you go beyond the technology, that's like the foundation, that's the groundwork, that's like, okay, that's the tools we have to work with. And so the next thing up, I think, from the technologies, you start thinking, okay, well what could you build with those technologies? What kind of an economy would you wanna build? And again, it's not obvious or inevitable that these technologies end up with any particular economy. The economy is built by human beings coming together, and fashioning essentially a system that works for the largest number of people, if that's your kind of values, or works for kind of driving more kind of progress. Anyhow, that's a value-laden kind of system building exercise. And I think what's going on now in the world, if you look around us is we're in one of those reinventions now. And let's just keep the, kind of keep the lens on America for right now. The system, the economic system that the United States has been based on, neoliberal, or however you wanna frame it, that has worked for essentially the top 10% for sure, and certainly for the top 1%, has not been working for 80%, or you know, of the Americans. And it's gotten to the point where they just have had it. And the thing is, this isn't just America, it's happening in the west. You got right wing kind of movements in every one of the major countries. There is at least at 40%, and push it towards the majority sometimes. And so something has to change. I think we have to reinvent, I mean, I guess you could call something like sustainable capitalism, sustainable not just in the externalities of climate change and pollution, which I've talked about how our technologies can do that. But essentially the externalities, a sustainable system of work, the average people feel invested in the system that's working for them, that they're not gonna scream bloody murder, and kind of revolt at, you know, at the first sign of kind of agony. And that there's a system that works well for everybody over the long haul. And so as crazy as it sounds, we could be at a point in the world right now in 2025 where we are watching the beginnings of a shift from financial capitalism born and raised out of the enlightenment, more than 250, 300 years ago, to essentially some version of a sustainable capitalism that I kind of did the rough outline there. We're going from a world of representative democracy, which was a brilliant move forward from a civilizational perspective, from a human being section 250 years ago, to essentially a different kind of what I would term probably something called digital democracy, or something along those lines, which I can explain later. What I would say we're facing now is that system is so out of whack, is so un-up to the scale of kind of the challenges that our country faces at this time. That it is actually gonna increasingly dawn on people, that essentially are gonna have to invent or reinvent at an even more fundamental level than most people are thinking. And I put it this way, if the founders were coming today, sitting in 2025, and they basically were looking around at the tools they had at that time, including AI, do you think they would've come up with a system what they did 250 years ago, where they didn't understand even what electricity was? I mean, you know, Ben Franklin's out there with a kind of kite trying to figure out, is lightning, you know, what is it? It's electricity. They had no idea what electricity was, let alone electronics, let alone computers, let alone AI, let alone kind of an interconnected planet of internet. I mean, essentially you'd be insane not to take advantage of those tools if you are really trying to build a democracy that kind of taps into the world of the majority and protects the minority, keeps the pluralistic society, and makes sure a tyrant can't take control of it. That's the same agenda, that's the same building blocks. Okay, how do we do that now? I think that's actually gonna be something that people are gonna increasingly have to think about. And I think what's happening now with Trump, and what's happening in the country right now is we're getting a constitutional crisis. Oh, those guys didn't really think through what happens if a President won't kind of listen to the, you know, courts or what happened. You know, the courts don't have any leverage to kind of push back. What happens if you get a kind of a Congress captured by these interests that, you know, don't seem to be listening to what average people need. Anyhow, there's much ways you can talk about it, and I don't want to get into partisan politics, but the point is, our system is so gummed up now that essentially it's going to increasingly show that we need some kind of invention. And so when I say digital democracy, this isn't some '90s version of digital democracy. I'm just saying, there will probably be some way to figure this out and tap into the world of the majority, and execute efficiently and effectively for governance going forward that'll be rooted in some kind of digital technologies. Because it is just such a game changing thing, and which means essentially AI is gonna be involved in this. Now, there's dangers and issues and limits, and we're gonna figure that out. It's a long conversation, but I'm saying we're at that stage. The same thing I would just say about governance, global governance. Again, if you would've talked about this 50 years ago, people would think of, oh, you know, United Nations is gonna run the world. No, this is a different way to think about it. But here's the problem is you are in a planet of 10 billion people, which by the way, is dramatically more numbers of people that we had at post World War II. Second, dramatically more people, we're in climate change. There is incredible pressures. We're gonna see mass migrations almost inevitably. You might see sea levels rising. Stuff is going to happen this century that is going to really require coordination at a global place. You can't just crapshoot with, oh, maybe 200 different nations will come somewhat aligned, and maybe we can strong arm here and there. I think that's just not gonna happen. And so I think what you're gonna see coming is some kind of break. It's not gonna mean we're all gonna turn over government to five people at the top of the planet, but it means some kind of sophisticated coordination between all these entities, maybe between cities, between different layers of government, between different peoples, between different population centers, whatever it's gonna be. I don't know the beginnings of exactly how that would work, but if I had to guess, it's gonna be leveraging these new technologies, particularly AI, and that it'll be something that'll be better than the system we have now, which by the way, our international system that basically created the climate accords is a complete fail. You know, it's at the point now where Trump has pulled out a second time, and you know, we're kind of at this place where we're back to square one of coordinating all these crazy ass nation states. So I'm just saying, that's the level of change I think we're actually heading into. That's the level of change I think your kids are gonna be wrestling with. And that's the level of change I think America is going through now. And the quicker we start to wrap our heads around that challenge, and the kind of scale of the invention we're up to, the better off we're all gonna be.

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