Analytical summary of how the world may change by 2050

Executive Summary

Over the next 25 years, the world is likely to undergo a structural transformation driven by the convergence of three general‑purpose technologies: artificial intelligence, clean energy, and bioengineering.

Peter Leyden’s “Great Progression” thesis frames 2025–2050 as a pivotal reconstruction era analogous to earlier American reinvention cycles after the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and World War II, each followed by roughly 25‑year innovation booms.

AI’s breakthrough in solving the long‑standing protein folding problem and mapping hundreds of thousands of proteins signals its emerging role as a core engine of scientific discovery and economic productivity, while rapidly falling costs for solar power and batteries indicate a decisive shift toward cheaper, cleaner energy that can reconfigure industrial systems and geoeconomic advantage.

Bioengineering, accelerated by AI, promises major advances in medicine, agriculture, and materials, effectively turning biology into a programmable domain.

The strategic significance of this period lies less in the technologies themselves than in how societies govern and distribute their effects under conditions of climate stress and geopolitical rivalry.

These capabilities can support a more abundant and resilient order—higher productivity, decarbonization, and health gains—or, if poorly managed, intensify inequality, surveillance, information disorder, and biosecurity risks. Public attitudes and institutional responses already diverge, with Americans more skeptical of AI than Chinese citizens, implying different adoption and regulatory trajectories.

The outcome hinges on political choices: how states regulate AI and bioengineering, manage the clean‑energy transition, share productivity gains, and coordinate across rival blocs on systemic risks.

In this sense, 2025–2050 is best understood as a hinge window in which the emerging socio‑technical infrastructure is set, and with it the contours of global order for the rest of the century.

Forward

The core claim is that the period from roughly 2025 to 2050 is likely to function as a hinge era in which three general‑purpose technologies—

(1) artificial intelligence

(2) clean energy

(3) bioengineering—reorganize production, power and social structures.

Peter Leyden’s “Great Progression” concept captures one optimistic trajectory: after a period of crisis and institutional breakdown, these technologies could underwrite a new regime of abundance and reconstruction, analogous to prior US historical cycles after the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and Second World War.

The usefulness of this framework lies less in its precise timing than in its identification of the key levers—compute, energy, and programmable biology—and the political settlements that form around them.

Artificial intelligence

From the perspective of artificial intelligence, the most salient analytic point is that AI is transitioning from a discrete tool to a pervasive infrastructure.

Over the next 25 years, AI systems are likely to automate or transform large swaths of routine cognitive work, raising productivity but also exerting downward pressure on mid‑skill professional occupations.

AI‑enhanced research and development could substantially accelerate discovery in fields ranging from pharmaceuticals to materials and logistics.

The macroeconomic potential is considerable, but the distributional consequences are uncertain and heavily mediated by policy: in the absence of deliberate intervention, a larger share of value is likely to accrue to owners of capital, data, and frontier models rather than to labor.

At the same time, synthetic media, personalized persuasion, and cognitive offloading reshape information ecosystems and human capabilities, making governance of AI—through regulation, compute controls, and evaluation regimes—a central axis of both domestic politics and great‑power competition.

Divergent societal attitudes toward AI, such as higher trust and enthusiasm in China relative to the United States and parts of Europe, further imply differentiated adoption and governance paths.

Clean-energy

The clean‑energy transition is analytically important because it changes the cost structure of the physical economy and reconfigures geoeconomic relationships.

Technological and cost trends in solar, wind, and batteries point toward structurally cheaper electricity over the medium term, even in the context of rising demand from electrified transport, industry, and compute. Power systems are likely to shift from fossil‑dominated baseload to architectures centered on variable renewables, storage, more flexible demand, and firm low‑carbon sources.

This undermines the long‑run strategic centrality of oil and, to a lesser extent, gas, while elevating new choke points around critical minerals, advanced manufacturing, and grid technologies.

Countries capable of mobilizing capital and governance to build out clean energy and associated infrastructure stand to gain relative advantage.

However, the climate system will continue to warm; a 2–3°C world by 2100 is more plausible than 1.5°C, implying that climate impacts—extreme weather, sea‑level rise, water stress, and crop volatility—will be a persistent structural force shaping migration, insurance, and security policy.

Adaptation industries and debates over carbon removal and possible geoengineering become central features of the global political economy.

Bioengineering

Bioengineering, empowered by AI‑driven advances such as protein‑structure prediction, effectively turns biology into a more designable substrate and creates a third general‑purpose platform.

Over the next 25 years this likely produces faster therapeutic discovery, more personalized and preventive medicine, and incremental gains in healthy lifespan rather than radical life extension.

It also has significant implications for food systems, where engineered crops, microbes, and alternative proteins could alter agricultural productivity, environmental impacts, and supply chains.

At the same time, the diffusion of powerful biological tools increases biosecurity risks, including both accidental releases and deliberate misuse.

This necessitates new forms of international governance, such as norms and controls over high‑risk research, DNA synthesis, and AI‑bio interfaces.

As with AI and energy, the distribution of benefits and risks is structurally unequal, both between and within countries.

At the geopolitical level, these technological shifts reinforce a trend toward clustered multipolarity rather than stable unipolarity or simple bipolarity.

The United States and its allies retain major strengths in frontier AI, biotechnology, finance, and military power, but face internal political fragmentation.

China remains a central pole, particularly in manufacturing, applied AI, and segments of green technology, even as it confronts demographic and financial headwinds.

The European Union, India, and key middle powers gain leverage as swing actors in critical materials, markets, and standard‑setting.

Regulatory and normative fragmentation around data, AI, trade, and climate produces overlapping blocs rather than a unified rules‑based order.

Domestically, many societies experience intensified distributional conflict fueled by automation, regional decline, climate shocks, and migration, with experiments in new governance forms coexisting with increased surveillance and control, especially in more authoritarian systems.

At the level of everyday life and social structure, the interaction of these forces points to a world in which AI agents are routinely embedded in work, education, and home environments; services such as health triage, legal guidance, and tutoring become AI‑first for most people in advanced and many middle‑income economies.

Work becomes more polarized and fluid, with new categories of AI‑orchestration, care, and creative roles emerging alongside the erosion or transformation of many traditional middle‑skill jobs.

The key issue is not the absolute quantity of work but the management of transitions and the design of social contracts around more varied work‑leisure patterns and non‑linear life courses.

Urbanization continues, with resilient city‑regions acting as primary nodes of economic and political power, while climate and security pressures drive large‑scale migration. Inequality within countries likely remains high or rises without strong countervailing policy, even if the cost of some material goods and services falls due to cheap energy and automation.

Cultural dynamics, including identity politics, status competition, and new forms of meaning‑making, evolve under conditions of ubiquitous metrics, algorithmic curation, and AI‑generated culture.

The overarching analytic conclusion is that technological trajectories alone do not determine whether the 2025–2050 period becomes a “Great Progression” in Leyden’s optimistic sense.

The same underlying platforms—AI, clean energy, and bioengineering—are compatible with very different social outcomes: broadly shared prosperity and institutional renewal, or heightened inequality, brittle authoritarianism, and intensified conflict.

The decisive variables are governance capacity, the distributional settlements societies reach around ownership and rewards, and the extent of international coordination on systemic risks. For strategic analysis and forecasting,

Leyden’s framework is best used as a scenario scaffold: tracking cost and capability curves, mapping ownership and control of key infrastructures, and analyzing institutional and political responses offers a structured way to understand how this hinge period is unfolding and which paths remain open.

Conclusion

Over the next 25 years, the decisive fact is not that artificial intelligence, clean energy, and bioengineering will advance—they already are—but that these three general‑purpose technologies are converging into a new socio‑technical infrastructure under conditions of climate stress and geopolitical rivalry.

This convergence makes 2025–2050 a genuine hinge period in which underlying material constraints ease for some societies (through cheaper computation, power, and biological design), while institutional and political constraints tighten (through intensified distributional conflict, legitimacy crises, and security risks).

The central analytic conclusion is that outcomes will be governed far more by political economy than by technology per se. The same cost curves and capabilities can support sharply divergent futures.

In a high‑capacity, high‑coordination trajectory, states and coalitions use these technologies to raise productivity, decarbonize, accelerate health gains, and then deliberately socialize a substantial share of the resulting surplus—through taxation, public investment, new ownership structures, and upgraded welfare regimes.

In such a world, Leyden’s “Great Progression” narrative is plausible: the crisis period of the 2020s is followed by a contested but ultimately constructive reconstruction that yields a more abundant, if still unequal, order.

In a low‑capacity, low‑coordination trajectory, institutional decay, elite capture, and geopolitical fragmentation dominate.

AI and bioengineering deepen informational disorder, surveillance, and bio‑risk; clean energy and critical materials become new axes of coercion and conflict rather than broadly enabling infrastructure; productivity gains are narrowly captured, sustaining high inequality and periodic instability.

In that world, the same technological foundations produce a more brittle and polarized system, not a progression.

Several levers emerge as analytically pivotal for distinguishing between these paths.

First, governance of key infrastructures—compute, data, grids, fabs, platforms, and high‑end bio‑labs—becomes the practical terrain on which both domestic and international politics play out.

Regulatory regimes for AI and bioengineering, industrial policy for energy and semiconductors, and security architectures around data and supply chains are no longer technocratic fringes; they are core state functions that structure who can do what, at what scale, and under whose rules.

Second, distributional settlements around technology determine whether the promised abundance translates into widely felt security or remains concentrated as “islands of plenty.”

This includes the design of tax and transfer systems; the evolution (or erosion) of labor institutions in an AI‑saturated economy; the handling of intellectual property, data ownership, and platform rents; and the willingness to deploy new forms of public or shared ownership in foundational infrastructure.

Without credible mechanisms of distribution and risk‑sharing, even very high growth and innovation rates are compatible with chronic political instability.

Third, international coordination on tail risks—AI misuse and loss of control, advanced bio‑threats, and climate tipping points—becomes a minimal condition for avoiding catastrophic downside scenarios.

The likely geopolitical configuration is a clustered multipolarity rather than a hegemonic order, which implies that effective regimes will have to be robust to rivalry and partial non‑compliance rather than assuming universal alignment.

The analytical task here is to identify the smallest sets of states and institutions that can credibly enforce red lines and safety norms on the global system’s most dangerous capabilities.

Fourth, institutional adaptiveness in education, health, law, and democratic practice will strongly condition long‑run legitimacy. Systems that can integrate AI and bio‑tools to improve core services, while preserving or even enhancing accountability and human agency, are more likely to maintain cohesion in the face of automation, demographic shifts, and migration.

Systems that fail to adapt will see widening gaps between technological possibilities and lived experience, fueling cynicism and populist or authoritarian reactions.

Finally, the analytical framing of Leyden’s cycle thesis is most useful when stripped of determinism and treated as a scenario architecture rather than a prediction. The historical analogy—that US‑anchored orders have repeatedly gone through crisis, reconstruction, and innovation booms—highlights the structural possibility of a constructive settlement after the current turbulence.

But whether 2025–2050 becomes a “Great Progression” depends on contingent choices: how coalitions form around AI and energy policy, which social contracts are renegotiated or abandoned, how much institutional learning occurs from early failures in AI and bio‑governance, and whether enough cross‑bloc coordination can be sustained to manage shared existential risks.

In practical terms for analysis and strategy, the priority is to track and interpret three interacting layers: the hard metrics of capability and cost (in AI, energy, and bio), the evolving control map of critical infrastructures and supply chains, and the shifting coalitions and norms that govern them.

The direction of change—toward deeper technological integration and greater systemic interdependence—is clear.

The quality of that change—toward inclusive resilience or fragile stratification—remains fundamentally open and will be decided less by what is technically possible than by how societies structure power and responsibility around those possibilities.