Why 2025 is the single most pivotal year in our lifetime | Peter Leyden

We're living in an extraordinary moment

in history. We are at a moment here in

2025 where we have world historic

gamechanging technologies now starting

to scale. But America and the world

itself are going through huge

contortions.

And there's been three previous

junctures where Americans have found

themselves in this exact place. 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 to you all of a sudden

get an iPhone that goes, "Holy

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 it. I'm Pete

Leiden. I've basically been following

the story of technology and its

evolution and looking ahead into how

it's going to change the world over the

next 25 years.

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Way back way back in the '9s 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. And it was in those

early days that the founders of Wired

picked up on me as someone who 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 people had no idea what was

even going on with the internet and

literally what's email, what's the web.

They had no idea how these goofball

startups with names like Amazon were

ever going to amount to anything. And

the other thing that was going on there

beyond this digital revolution was

essentially the beginning of

globalization. And so myself and my

co-author which was Peter Schwarz wrote

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 trying to

explain what was really coming.

Now those of us who are in technology

and those of us 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. Let's say like Uber, the

idea like, oh my god, instead of a taxi,

it's all on your phone and then all of a

sudden when enough people show how

amazing it is, boom, the entire crew

moves over and the old system of the

taxi system is gone.

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 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, the last time we saw this,

and they tend to come in these 80ear

cycles. But what's amazing about these

things is they have bursts of

unbelievably widespread innovation that

last for 25 years. The last big one was

coming off World War II, 1945.

80 years ago, America was on a very

similar parallels.

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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 and

then there had been a crash and you run

into the great depression of the 1930s.

Now what that was was the old system of

running the economy just wasn't working.

And so what happens is you watch these

junctures in American society. We get

super polarized. For example, there was

an America first movement in the 30s. We

were on the verge of violent conflict in

America. And then you had the FDR and

the kind of New Deal coalition that came

out of the depression and they started

to get traction. But anyhow, we had to

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 so from

1945 to 1970, we watched the great

post-war boom. Many people call it the

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 watched incredible

investment in public infrastructure like

the interstate highway system and

building suburbs. You basically watched

the GI Bill and education, building

institutions for higher education,

expanding it for the boomers. That all

happened in 25 years. was a great

society. The whole thing 25 years and

then we ran in the 70s. It started kind

of getting along in the tooth.

Stagflation, oil shocks. But here's the

point. Old system had to come down.

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 again.

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. And the Civil War

was the most extreme. I mean, we

literally had to have 750,000

Americans died in the Civil War. 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. But in the old

south, we basically had slavery and they

said, "No, we're not going there. We're

not going to give it up. We're not going

to let go of this old system. We're

going to fight to the death on the

thing." And so, this is a good example.

Anyone rooted in the old systems that

are going down are passionately want to

defend that at all cost. Now, the thing

that people do not know about the Civil

War or 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. For example, the

Homestead Act, which is you gave anybody

who went out west

150 acres for free. There was also land

grant universities. All these little

states started building institutes of

higher education to educate average

people but also to be pushing scientific

understanding of agriculture. But here's

the other progress that was going on. It

was technology. It was only after the

war that America blew out like 175,000

miles of rail and essentially stitched

the entire continent together with this

steelbased rails. And essentially we

reinvented America in 25 years. And

here's the even crazier thing though.

You go back another 80 years, we did it

again.

1787 to about 1810, 1815, we had created

what is America. 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.

The Enlightenment is essentially a

fundamental system change from a feudal

society kind of dominated by the

Catholic Church and all that 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. Now the reason

I'm kind of saying that is that had

world historic implications. That was a

building of a civilization that we

essentially invented. We humans but we

Western Europe in basically a space of

120 years. 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 that is what America's role has

been visav the West in every one of

those epics. I'm arguing we have one

more crank of that wheel with the

arrival of three world historic changes

that are happening around us today. And

the most obvious one is the arrival of

artificial intelligence.

Chat GPT. Maybe you've heard of it. If

you haven't, then get ready because this

promises to be the viral sensation that

could completely reset how we do things.

>> The arrival of generative AI. With the

arrival of chat GBT 3.5 in November of

2022, I think we're going to 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

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 gamechanging technology, a

breakthrough, a step change in our

abilities that once you cross that

threshold, you don't go back. We're

going to watch an explosion of

amplification. Our the amplification of

our mental powers with digital computers

and now AI are going to be very similar

to the amplification of our physical

powers that mechanical engines initially

by steam created the prosperity and

wealth of the world that we know now

where we're just going to say, "Holy

we had no idea this is the world

we're in.

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. 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 producing solar

panels, you will come up with about 20%

of a drop in cost.

And this is the point, it's going to

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. That's in lithium

batteries. We're now getting whole

another generations of batteries like

solid state batteries that essentially

will be a next generation. But the point

is the forward motion of costs coming

down on clean energies is just

beginning. And when that happens, you're

going to have what? Abundant clean

energy.

basically right around the time that we

essentially had our earliest

breakthroughs on generative AI which is

about 15 years ago. We also had the big

breakthrough in what they call crisper

which is we figured out a way to cheaply

and easily edit the genome of any living

thing. And you just take one example. We

now know how to take a cell, put it in a

vat, and you can give it 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 would get those same nutrients,

the same amino acids, and essentially

would produce in their muscles, the

meat. That same thing can happen in a

vat to actually grow the 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

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 three billion

dollars and it took 15 years to do it.

The cost of doing that from three

billion had been driven down so far it

was a thousand bucks. It's now at the

point where it's about a hundred bucks

and eventually it's going to keep

driving down to 50 bucks or nothing.

It's not just the same level. It is

twice as fast. We can now essentially

design these things for outcomes that we

want to happen cheaply and easily.

So the technology story of today, AI,

clean energies, even bioengineering is

kind of familiar at some level. The next

several iterations here though, I think,

is putting a bigger lens on what's going

on today. And it gets us back to what we

were describing is what's happening in

America is a once in 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.

And so the next thing up I think from

technologies, you start thinking, okay,

well, what could you build with those

technologies? What kind of an economy

would you want to build? The economic

system that the United States has been

based on that has worked for essentially

the top 10% for sure and certainly for

the top 1% has not been working for 80%.

And it's gotten to the point where they

just have had it. 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 to essentially some

version of a sustainable capitalism.

We're going from a world of

representative democracy, which was a

brilliant move forward, to essentially a

digital democracy. And we're also going

to go from a world of nation states,

which again was a great breakthrough

from empires and colonies of the past,

to some kind of global governance that

coordinates the 10 billion people on

this planet. That's the level of change

I think we're actually heading into.

That's the level of change I think your

kids are going to 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 and the kind

of scala of the invention we're up to,

the the better off we're all going to

be.