Sunday, December 28, 2025
Please tell me what you think about Peter Leyden’s project, The Great Progression: 2025 - 2050. Thanks. (ChatGPT, 2025-12-28)
Here’s a clear, up-to-date picture of Peter Leyden’s project The Great Progression: 2025–2050 and what it aims to be — along with some sense of its strengths and limits.
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What the Project Is
The Great Progression: 2025–2050 is an ongoing intellectual and grand narrative project launched by Peter Leyden, a longtime futurist, writer, and tech commentator. It currently exists as:
🧠 1. A
Substack essay series
Leyden publishes weekly or monthly essays and interviews exploring big-picture ideas about the next 25 years (2025–2050). The aim is to reframe current global transitions in a positive, opportunity-focused way rather than as chaos and decline.
📚 2. A
forthcoming book
HarperCollins contracted Leyden to turn this series into a book, scheduled for release around January 2027, with the goal of influencing public discourse leading into the U.S. 2028 election. The book intends to weave together technology, politics, economics, and culture into a “grand narrative” of progress.
🗣 3. A
conversation and event series
Leyden organizes virtual and in-person gatherings (in Silicon Valley and via Substack) to engage thinkers, innovators, and readers in shaping and expanding the framework.
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Core Themes of the Project
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Historical turning point
Leyden argues that 2025 stands at a pivotal hinge between the dying systems of the 20th century and the emerging systems of the 21st. Humans are transitioning out of an old era defined by fossil energy, industrial hierarchies, and centralized governance into something new.
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Transformative technologies as drivers
The narrative centrally positions three “civilizational” technologies as engines of change:
- Artificial Intelligence — seen as the most powerful general-purpose technology ever.
- Clean energy technologies (e.g., solar and electric vehicles).
- Bioengineering technologies (e.g., gene editing like CRISPR).
Leyden sees these not just as tools but as catalysts that could reshape economics, society, and geopolitics.
🔹
Positive reframing
Instead of depicting the present as mere decline (“chaos and trauma”), Leyden frames it as:
A rare moment of structural collapse and simultaneous world-historical birth — and something humanity can shape for the better.
This is a pro-progress narrative — not a neutral forecast designed to predict what will happen, but a persuasive argument about what could happen if people consciously embrace it.
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Focus on America’s role
In Leyden’s narrative, the United States — and especially its innovation ecosystems — is positioned as central in building new 21st-century systems, much as it did in the mid-20th century after World War II (e.g., the postwar boom).
This has both intellectual and strategic dimensions: the book is being timed to influence public and policy thinking in the upcoming U.S. election cycle.
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What Makes It Interesting
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A big-picture story
The project is trying to articulate a civilizational narrative for the next 25 years — something more expansive than short-term forecasts or tech hype. That kind of narrative can help people orient themselves in moments of disruption.
🤖
Constructive optimism
At a historical moment when many sources focus on risk, dystopia, and breakdown, Leyden’s emphasis on possibility and progress offers a counterweight.
🧩
Interdisciplinary approach
The project brings together technology, history, policy, economics, and culture rather than reducing the future to any single domain.
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Caveats & Limitations
⚠️
Not a neutral analysis
It’s fundamentally a normative narrative, not a strict empirical forecast. Its optimism depends on human agency and political choices, not inevitability.
⚠️
Tech-centric and U.S.-centered
While global in language, the narrative leans heavily on American innovation and institutions as key drivers (which some may see as a partial perspective).
⚠️
Narrative over critique
The project emphasizes shaping systems rather than deeply critiquing underlying power imbalances, extraction economies, or structural injustices — fields where many futurists also work.
🧠 A Thoughtful Distillation
If I were to distill Leyden’s project into one sentence:
The Great Progression is an attempt to craft a grand historical narrative that views the period 2025–2050 as humanity’s opportunity to harness transformative technologies and systemic reinvention — especially through AI, clean energy, and bioengineering — to drive a new era of progress.
🧭 Reflection for Your Context
From your own themes — especially a sensitivity to how meaning, world-construction, and human agency unfold — Leyden’s project can be seen as:
- A hopeful meta-story about progress and meaningful possibility in a time of rupture.
- A call to intentionality rather than passive forecasting.
- A techno-historic framing that invites collective agency but may underplay non-technological interdependencies (e.g., ethical, ecological, and existential dimensions).
If you want, I can help you compare Leyden’s narrative with other grand narrative frameworks (e.g., world historic time theories, civilizational frameworks beyond tech, or post-progress critiques).
Would you like that?
