🎇 An age of transformation: My chat (+transcript) with techno-futurist Peter Leyden

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

The 1990s and the dawn of the internet were a pivotal time for America and the wider world. The history of human progress is a series of such pivotal moments. As Peter Leyden points out, it seems we’re facing another defining era as society wrestles with three new key technologies: artificial intelligence, clean energy, and bioengineering.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with Leyden about American leadership in emerging technology and the mindset shifts we must undergo to bring about the future we dream of.

Leyden is a futurist and technology expert. He is a speaker, author, and founder of Reinvent Futures. Thirty years ago, he worked with the founders of WIRED magazine, and now authors his latest book project via Substack: The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050.

In This Episode

* Eras of transformation (1:38)

* American risk tolerance (11:15)

* Facing AI pessimism (15:38)

* The bioengineering breakthrough (24:24)

* Demographic pressure (28:52)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Eras of transformation (1:38)

I think we Americans tend to reset the clock in which we get in these dead ends, we get in these old patterns, these old systems, and the things are all falling apart, it's not working. And then there is a kind of a can-do reinvention phase . . .

Pethokoukis: Since World War II, as I see it, we have twice been on the verge of a transformational leap forward, economically and technologically. I would say that was right around 1970 and then right around 2000, and the periods of time after that, I think, certainly relative to the expectations then, was disappointing.

It is my hope, and I know it's your hope as well, that we are at another such moment of transformation. One, do you accept my general premise, and two, why are we going to get it right this time?

If I'm hearing you right, you're kind of making two junctures there. I do believe we're in the beginning of what would be much more thought of as a transformation. I would say the most direct parallel is closer to what happened coming off of World War II. I also think, if you really go back in American history, it's what came off of Civil War and even came off of the Founding Era. I think there's a lot of parallels there I can go into, I've written about in my Substack and it's part of the next book I'm writing, so there's a bigger way that I think about it. I think both those times that you're referring to, it seems to me we were coming off a boom, or what seemed to be an updraft or your “Up Wing” kind of periods that you think of — and then we didn't.

I guess I think of it this way: the ’50s, ’60s, and ’90s were exciting times that made it feel like the best was yet to come — but then that momentum stalled. I’m hopeful we’re entering another such moment now, with so much happening, so much in motion, and I just hope it all comes together.

The way I think about it in a bigger lens, I would just push back a little bit, which is, it's true coming off the ’90s — I was at WIRED magazine in the ’90s. I was watching the early ’90s internet and the Digital Revolution and I sketched out at that time, in my first book but also cover stories in WIRED, trying to rough out what would happen by the year 2020. And it is true that coming off the ’90s there was a Dot Com crash, but temporarily, honestly, that with the Web 2.0 and others, a lot of those trends we were talking about in the ’90s actually just kept picking up.

So depending how big the lens is, I would argue that, coming off the ’90s, the full digital revolution and the full globalization that we were starting to see in the early to mid-’90s in some respects did come to fruition. It didn't play out the way we all wanted it to happen — spreading wealth all through the society and blah, blah, blah, and many of the things that people complain about and react to now — but I would argue that a lot of what we were saying in those ’90s, and had begun in the ’90s with the ’90s boom, continued after a temporary pause, for sure.

The Dot Com boom was just frothy investment. It crashed, but the companies that come out of that crash are literally trillion-dollar companies dominating the global economy now here on the west coast. That was some of the things we could see happening from the mid-’90s. The world did get connected through the internet, and globalization did, from a lens that's beyond America, we took 800 million peasants living on two bucks a day in China and brought them into the global economy. There's all kinds of positive things of what happened in the last 25 years, depending on how big your lens is.

I would say that we've been through a largely successful — clearly some issues, “Oh my gosh, we didn't anticipate social media and that stuff,” but in general, the world that we were actually starting to envision in the ’90s came about, at some level — with some flaws, and some issues, and we could have done better, but I'm saying now I think AI is bigger than the internet. I think the idea that humans are now working side-by-side with intelligent machines and being augmented by intelligent machines is a world historical event that is g