Podcast: Three Historic Tech Booms Shaping Our Times, With Peter Leyden

There are techniques for thoroughly thinking through how technologies will be adopted, what their implications will be, how they will spur growth, and how they will create new industries. Rob and Jackie sat down with futurist and tech expert Peter Leyden, who hosts Civilization Salons at The Long Now Foundation, to discuss how digital technologies are shaping the future for the economy, the work force, manufacturing, and more.

Mentioned

• Jason Feifer, “Wearing A Walkman Was Illegal,” Building For Change podcast (formerly Pessimists Archive), September 12, 2016.

Related

• Robert D. Atkinson, “The Task Ahead of Us: Transforming the Global Economy With Connectivity, Automation, and Intelligence” (ITIF, January 2019).

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Rob Atkinson: Welcome to The Innovation Files. I'm Rob Atkinson, founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

Jackie Whisman: And I'm Jackie Whisman. I head development at ITIF, which I'm proud to say is the world's top ranked think tank for science and technology policy.

Rob Atkinson: This podcast is about the kinds of issues we cover at ITIF, from the broad economics of innovation, to specific policy and regulatory questions about new technology. And today we're going to talk about innovations of the future and what are the kind of major transformations we can expect in technology over the next decade? It's always risky to think about the future. As I think Yogi Berra once said, what was Yogi Berra's quote there? It was hard to predict the future, which is why I don't do it. But anyway, we have a guest who's a lot better than Yogi Berra, going to be great at helping us think through these questions. So over to you, Jackie.

Jackie Whisman: Our guest is Peter Leyden, a futurist and tech expert, who is currently host of the Civilization Salons at The Long Now Foundation. He advises a number of corporations on the future of technology and innovation, and is a prolific public speaker on these issues. Welcome, Peter. Thanks for being here.

Peter Leyden: It's great to be with you, and to see Rob again here.

Rob Atkinson: Yeah. We've known each other like 20 years minimum.

Peter Leyden: Exactly.

Rob Atkinson: You were really early on, and I know people don't even like that term anymore, but it still was a real term. The new economy, the tech driven economy, the more global, more entrepreneurial, you were really doing a lot of pioneering work back then in the nineties, late nineties. And you're still at it now with this kind of next wave.

Peter Leyden: Yeah, absolutely. I was at the early Wired magazine, worked with the founders of Wired. I was not technically a founder, but among the earliest journalists there, and really was there in the heyday running it. And then did do a famous cover story at the time called The Long Boom, which was the first to really lay out what might be coming in the next 25 years from 95ish onward, till 2020, actually, in a time when people didn't really understand what these little goofball startups were going to do, they didn't really appreciate the interconnectedness, how fast the internet was going to grow. They didn't understand how powerful these computers would go, and they didn't understand how that would drive economic growth.

And that combined with globalization essentially was a story that when we started trumpeting it, it later went into a book and a bunch of stuff, did a lot of speaking around that, we got a ton of pushback. The mainstream media was like, you've got to be kidding. These things are never going to be whatever it is. And here we are looking back at 2020, and these companies are trillion dollar companies dominating the global economy, and 60% of the planet is on the internet, and all the issues we know.

So it does show you, you can look ahead and see through. There are techniques to really think through how technology will get adopted, what their implications will be, how they will spur growth, create new industries. And that's the business I've been in for the last 25 years. And we're still at it again today.

Rob Atkinson: I was struck, listening or reading a Reed Hastings interview, the founder and CEO of Netflix, where he said they were mailing out DVDs. I think you remember that.

Peter Leyden: Totally.

Rob Atkinson: You'd get your DVD and send it back at the post office. But all he did is he said, okay, this is what's been happening to broadband speeds, to download speeds. And if they keep going at that pace they've been going for the last five years, in three years, you're going to be able to download a movie. So I better do it now. That's pretty simple forecasting, but nobody else was doing it. And that's what let them really make that transition.

Peter Leyden: There's a whole, well, literally crew, including myself here, that spends a lot of time looking at technology adoption curves, and looking backwards, you can see how all these technologies go through these very similar patterns of early experimentation, early adoption, early majority, all the kind ... There's a whole way people think it out.

The key thing is where is the tipping point, and really figuring out when is it going to tip from this thing that could be successful, it is slowly growing, to essentially breakout. And basically all the successful technologies hit this. And so the question is where it's coming. And I think what's relevant today is we can look back, what's nice about it now, talking about these things now, is you can look back and say, hey folks, here's what happened in the last 25 years and how it took off and transformed our world with the digital technologies, at least the first generation of digital technologies.

And now you can really point ahead and really with some certainty lay out how this is going to play out in the next generation of IT, information tech, but also how it's happening with clean tech now and how it's basically happening with biotech too. So biotech's a little more complicated because it's a little more regulated, but in general, we've got three, not one, not two, but three what I would call world historic tech booms happening now, and they're going to play out over the next 25, 30 years.

And I think it's something that policymakers and people in general just do not really fully appreciate how these are tipping in the same way, what's happening with solar energy, what's happening with electric cars, what's happening ... I mean, these things are hitting those same kind of inflection points. And the thing to do is not to kind of well hum and drum, and well, maybe what'll happen, and maybe it won't work, is just to really start thinking quickly about the kind of big bold moves you have to make to either sustain that or take advantage of it, or also just make the best you can off these things, because they're inexorably happening.

I mean, what I call them, I call them, these things, inexorables. Some things about the future are very much critical uncertainties. You don't know, could go one way or the other. And that takes a lot of subtle and nuanced analysis of what could happen. Some things I call them just the inexorables. No matter what you do under almost any scenario, these things are going to happen. And the question is, how early do you want to move to them and try to shape them? They're not going away. And I think there's a bunch of them to do. And in fact, that's a lot of what I do, is help people understand those trajectories and how you plan strategy around them or essentially adjust policy around them too.

Jackie Whisman: You've talked about trends like universal connectivity, ubiquitous AI, accelerated innovation, clean energies, synthetic biology, and genetic engineering. And there's a lot to unpack, but maybe we could first talk about the innovations, technologies, and transformations you anticipate over the next decade in terms of disrupting ICTs in particular.

Peter Leyden: Sure. I mean, I'll give you some just basic ones. I mean, for example, people think, okay, there's a digital revolution, okay, we've been through it. It's all this big deal. And now we're here. Totally not true. I mean, honestly we're in a whole nother way. For example, even though we have 60% of the planet on the internet, we still have another three billion people to come on the internet. I mean, literally this decade, it is inevitable or inexorable, however you want to think about it. Every human on the planet will essentially be able to be reached by high bandwidth connections. I mean, Starlink, all these kind of look, satellite systems, we've got all kinds of 5G that's now going over. There're already talking 6G.

And the cheapness of these devices are going to be just almost given away to people who can't afford them. And so really, except for some extremely remote places and some dire poverty in some pockets someplace, every human being on the planet's going to be connected to this thing in the next 10 years. And I think if you're already online and you already have a business or already have some nascent global strategy, the idea that you have three billion more customers potentially or three billion more people to tap into for ideas and things, it is just, people totally underestimate this. And that's an inexorable. That's just happening. I mean, you just plan it, right? So that's a huge thing that people don't know.

So we're going to have eight billion people, or going on nine, that are going to be connected to stuff like this. Like you say, universal connectivity is going to just happen. On top of that, you're going to have essentially cheap accessible AI, which AI is so hard for average people to wrap their head around, what they really mean by it. So one thing I can just be really concrete, one thing that AI is actually going to do in this decade for sure is going to get to pretty natural simultaneous language translation. It's already getting pretty damn good.

I mean, every Siri that talks to us in English is talking to someone in India in Hindi and is talking to, it's like, these are all going into this relatively crude communication with us, but all it's going to do is take one more notch, which they're getting to now, to connect those streams so that what I say to the person in Hindi is going to be translated natural there, and what the Chinese Mandarin is going to be speaking to me is going to come through to me. And we're going to actually open up these channels of communication that has literally been world historic. We've never had that kind of instantaneous communication between elites.

Now, as of the last 25, 40 years, there has been English as the lingual franca of business, but there's only about 500, about 500 million, half a billion native English speakers in the planet. And everyone else has had to figure it out if they want to play business. What happens when all eight to nine billion people can actually pretty much seamlessly connect, and at all levels of social graphing? The working class guy, the guy sitting there on a stool in India, giving you fish tacos or something.

The point is, people underestimate that kind of just impact of daily infusion of the AI capabilities that are totally happening. That's the next, I mean, that's not like, oh someday we'll figure this out. No, that's happening. So anyhow, there's a lot of, you're the innovation crew. One thing you can start thinking about is one thing about innovation is innovation is about cross fertilization of ideas, different perspectives, diverse perspectives. We kind of know that in general. What happens when you open the funnel of all kinds of new ideas, peoples, strata, society, cultures that can actually much more seamlessly connect like that? Something's going to happen, bound to come of that.

So there's a bunch of things coming out of IT that's just within reach here that I think are going to have a huge impact on all kinds of things going on in the world, for good and bad. I mean, we're still going to have their social media. That was one we hadn't really thought through fully, but that said, is there's going to be a lot of positive things coming out of this too.

Rob Atkinson: Peter, in the last couple of months, I've had some delegations from some foreign countries come by, digital ministers and the like from, I don't want to say who it is, but they're from smaller countries with maybe a language population of 10 or 20 million. And one of the things that they're concerned about is they can't talk to Alexa or Siri, because it hasn't gotten down to their number of people yet. But I think what you're saying is not only is it going to get better, but we hopefully could do many more languages, I think.

Peter Leyden: Totally. You'd be surprised at how many languages it does do, though. A lot of these companies, I mean these companies, you'd just be astounded at how far they go. And what's interesting about it is, I don't know, I've lived abroad. I've been to about 50 different countries. I was a foreign correspondent before my tech days for Newsweek out in Asia, and spent a lot of time in China and Japan, South Korea, I was based as a young guy. But I always had to drag around this interpreter with me. And so literally 95% of the people I came in contact with, I couldn't talk to. This is, again, back earlier in the days so there wasn't quite the universal or thorough adoption of English, but English still does not permeate 90% of most of these cultures.

And when you can just with an earbud go in and be able to communicate like that, with that kind of subtlety, just think of the impact one, in innovation, I think is one, the way you guys think, but also just understanding, empathy, connection, all kinds of things that I think we're underestimating what could come out of this in a way, in positives. I mean, I'm generally an optimist. I just [inaudible 00:11:40] naturally kind of wired that way. So it drives my wife nuts, kind of.

But basically, I do think people do not, they tend to underestimate and discount the positive implications, a lot of these developments, and they're very quick to get freaked out about the potential negative things. And I just think that is out of balance in our culture and in our media. And so I spend a lot of my time trying to emphasize the positive stuff that's going to come out of this, not to deny that there are going to be negative implications on some of this stuff. But in general, it is being able to communicate with people all over the world simultaneously in real time, up and down the social scale and across cultures, I think is just a good thing for human beings. And we're going to find out, basically this decade.

Rob Atkinson: No, absolutely. Absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more. And frankly, it's hard for me to even think of a technology I don't like and don't think is positive. Maybe there's one or two out there, but.

Peter Leyden: Yeah, totally.

Rob Atkinson: I was in, a few years ago, there was an event in Europe where the little round table dinner, and it was one of those discussion topics. They asked me to lead it on VR, virtual reality, augmented reality. So we had some goggles, we were passing them around, and I was like, wow, this is going to be the greatest thing. You have no idea what's going to happen with this. Training workers, education, healthcare.

And the response from probably 75% of the people there who were continental Europeans was, well, what about this problem? What about that problem? What about that problem? This is a glass half empty thing or a glass half full. Ultimately, you've got to be glass half full and then address the issues, rather than worry about it from the beginning.

Peter Leyden: Completely agree with that. And here's the one I do think. And again, you guys sitting in DC and the policymakers, so we've already just touched on information technology, IT, infotech, however you want to frame it. The one that I think is going to be really critical, I don't know how much you guys do this, but I think biotech, life sciences, genetic engineering, synthetic biology, I think we're in an earlier stage of that. What I've, again, going to be a world historic tech boom, it's already happening, but it's just, let's say, 20 years behind where the IT thing is.

But in general, that one is going to be the hardest one, I think, to get people to wrap around because it's quite easy to think of if you're genetically engineering plants and animals, what could go wrong there. But also, I think it's also, it's something that really needs a lot of focus on the positive implications of this, particularly in light of climate change and others, we're going to need that.

Put it this way. We have the ability now to understand the genetic coding of all living things, including us, and we actually have the ability now to actually genetically engineer quite cheaply, effectively, and easily, those same kind of genetic codings for all these different implications, many of which can be super positive, particularly when you're trying to grow food in a changing climate and all kinds of stuff, or build materials more sustainably, that's actually kind of sucking carbon out of the air rather than digging it up out of the ground, and all kinds of stuff.

I mean, there's so many implications of synthetic biology that are very positive, sustainable, good, integrated with nature, more whatever, that we're going to have to get over a sum of this hesitancy that is already just around GMO foods and all kinds of stuff. I mean, this is, again, me coming ... This is controversial, even out here in the west coast.

Although the tech people are usually pretty [inaudible], seeing that this is a technology that's going to happen. We have to get ahead of it. It's controllable and understandable. It's doable. We can't just pull back from it, put our heads in the sand, stop it, particularly in a global context. It's going, happening. So let's get on it and do it right.

Again, I'm not sure if you guys do that kind of biotech stuff, but that to me would be the one that I'm most concerned about political policy backlash kind of hindering what I think is the potential there in those technologies, positive potential that frankly we're going to need in the next several decades, let alone the whole century here.

Rob Atkinson: Yeah, absolutely. We've done a lot on gene editing and the like. In fact, we did a really fascinating report on the critical need for gene editing for crops. You need to get heat resistant, drought resistant. Hopefully we can solve climate change, but it's going to take a while to get there.

And in the interim, we're going to have to really re-engineer crops to make it so that people can have the food they want. We'll always do well in the US because we're rich. There'll be enough food to feed us. But the question is, is there enough food to feed poor people? And the idea that somehow you wouldn't want to do that kind of genetic editing to make sure that the crops in Africa grow well, it's just astounding to me that people even think that.

Peter Leyden: Yeah, no, that's a big one, but the real promise also of synthetic biology, which again, is just starting to dawn on people, the general public, is to really be able to create new materials in new ways. I mean, we've had a whole 250 years of industrial production and that whole world we understand, but with all the environmental destruction and all that goes with it, but there is a future where we could really grow like the equivalents of biodegradable plastics or the equivalent of steel strength building materials that are grown.

There's a big thing, actually, I'm doing some work with a construction company out here, advising them on the next 10 years of how to push the edge of sustainable building. The construction industry, by the way, is completely, it's been in a time warp since the 1940s. It really hasn't had any productivity gains, which is why everything's so expensive to build, but we're on the verge of a ton of new developments in construction, not only construction techniques, robotics, and all that kind of stuff, but basically which will make things much cheaper, modular, all kinds of ways to bring the cost down.

But the main thing is in material substitutes for concrete, very bad on CO2, substitutes for steel, very bad on CO2. And there's a whole thing on mass timber. I don't know if you've heard about this, but new techniques of kind of fusing together timber in ways that you can actually have the same strength and ability to span gaps that steel and concrete can. Still nascent early, but it's starting to scale.

So anyhow, there's a bunch of new techniques, I think, that are going to hit all kinds of industries. It's not just going to be the food or even health, with biotech. It's going to be about materials in our built world too. So it's going to be something to watch, very positive things, but there is also going to be some, it's going to freak people out, too, a little bit.

Jackie Whisman: What are some of the most important steps policymakers should be undertaking to shape these transformations and really guide them in a constructive direction?

Peter Leyden: Well, one thing I would do, and this is someone who spent my life in this space, but a lot of this stuff, you take some time to really understand and appreciate them. And how would I explain this? So there's kind of like a juncture. This is that one other way I would think about it from a policymaker's point of view. The last 40 years, we've essentially had a system which is made up of a bunch of little systems like carbon energy and internal combustion engine, affecting foreign policy and worries about the Middle East and terrorism.

And our politics have been stabilized in a more conservative kind of era here. And anyhow, there's a bunch of things that we just got used to in politics, in business, about how the economy works, what people wanted, culturally, all this kind of stuff. I would argue we are in a relatively rare juncture between eras and that this decade of the 2020s is one of these fundamental juncture decades that we saw coming off World War II, or we've seen it ... There's been historically these kind of junctures, and there is a whole new set of systems that are emerging on the other side.

And the easiest way to understand it is clean energy is going to supersede carbon energy. Electric mobility is going to supersede internal combustion. And you just go round the wheel of all these different things. Our foreign policy is going to have to shift more to the big challenge is going to be climate change rather than terrorism or whatever, or the Cold War. Anyhow, there's these system changes that are all happening. And I have a way of explaining this when I give my talks and stuff. And we're in this kind of weird decade where the old system's still hanging on and still operating, and people kind of got their heads in that world, but then they're really not appreciating, understanding this whole next system and all those interconnected, how that meta system starts working.

But there's enough there that it's happening, and money's starting to shift there, and young people are going there. And anyhow, there's this shift going on. And so we just happen to be in that decade. And I would really argue that for our policymakers, our people in government in general, have got to move their brains into the future and come to terms with this world that is already emerging and out of the box. It's not going back. We're not going to go back to make America great in the old way that we used to make it, but we could still make it great, but we have to make it in this next thing.

And to make that next thing, it takes courage. It takes imagination. It takes curiosity to kind of, I'm interested in that. How would we grow food differently? How would we basically reorganize cities around electric mobility and autonomous vehicles? Wow, that could be great. We could claim back a third of all cities is parking decks and parking lots. Wow. Maybe we could fill it with housing and bring the cost of housing down. I mean, these are really exciting possibilities from public policy point of view, but you have to get your head into them and realize that it's going to be very different than the situations that we got used to the last 40 years, let alone the kind of 20th century versions.

And I think that is what's stuck about American politics in my opinion right now, and it's really stuck with one party that is literally to me, I don't know where the hell they're going, but even the Democrats now don't have that, they haven't made that full leap. There are some people that are making that leap and do see that way, but not enough. And I think it's a system change mentality that we've got to wrap our heads around more.

And part of what I do is trying to help people understand what is that next thing coming? How does it work? How do all the subsystems connect, why it's better, why you want to move now. And so I spend a lot of time with senior execs and C-suites, but also government people, trying to point out how making that, it's like a paradigm shift of thinking. It's essentially a system change mentality. And the earlier you move to it, the more in the long run, the better off you're going to be. And I don't think that's fully appreciated in Washington, and it really should be because it's the only way forward.

And by the way, they do think like that in China, they do think like that in certain other places. I mean, as bad as their authoritarian politics there, and they've got their own problems with the authoritarian government and one guy running everything, but at least they're thinking strategically about the future and about the next systems that are emerging, and they're investing in them and they're moving stuff and they're building stuff and they're making shit happen. And that's what we've got to do in this country today.

Rob Atkinson: So yeah, we need to wrap up, but I want to come back to China in a bit, but it reminds me, this morning, I don't know when this morning, it was basically when we released the paper, or the podcast, but this morning there was an article, I think in the Wall Street Journal or the Post. The World Bank warns we may be headed back for a stagnation based upon the 1970s. And I was just like, are you kidding me?

Peter Leyden: Yeah, yeah, totally.

Rob Atkinson: Yeah, of course we have a little stagnation now, little hiccups, but it is just that, to me, complete inability to think about where we are from this opportunity set and just thinking, oh, here we are, we've got problems and they're just going to continue. And they can't see beyond the horizon where there's this stuff that's sort of bubbling up. If you could climb up in a tower, 150 feet, you could, oh, look at that, look at that, and that's really what you're trying to do, Pete, is you're trying to climb the tower or be in the tower and point things out that people don't see.

Peter Leyden: Yeah, and it's absolutely, totally right. But also, here's the thing. I mean, anytime you do fundamental change like this, of course it's going to be disruptive. Of course it's going to cause things like you're worried about, a little inflation here or there, or you're worried about ... On one level we can't get workers enough. Now, that's [inaudible] mentality. That's like, there's no workers. We can't get enough. Everyone's screaming for, well, we all want to move. It's like, okay, that's a problem of growth. That's a problem of [inaudible] at some level. So we're trying to figure that.

And you're looking at inflation, well, okay, yeah. Well, because we just had a global pandemic. We shut down the entire supply chain. It's possible we might have to rebuild the global supply chain, because China's going to be kind of more of a foe than a friend. I mean, these are world historic things in motion that we're trying to readjust. Of course it's going to be a little nutty and a little kind of turbulent, but that doesn't mean we're going back to the 1970s. And it's like, give me a break. It's like, dude, I just went and said, we're going to have every human being on the planet connected with full bandwidth things, holding supercomputers in their hands that is going to talk to anyone in the planet in this decade.

It's like, that isn't the seventies, man. We barely had, Walkmans were the coolest thing. And it's like, they were tapes. It's like you had eight tracks. It's like, okay, we're not in that world anymore, dude. And so people that do that are just stuck, and we need to get them, that's what I mean, forward.

Rob Atkinson: Absolutely. There's a great podcast. It is called Pessimist Archive, and it's Jason Feifer, who he's an editor, I think of Entrepreneur magazine or whatever, but he has these great examples of how when these new technologies came out, you mentioned Walkman. There were actually laws that cities passed, making Walkman illegal. But the point being, though, and we probably should close on this, is the way you describe this I think is absolutely right. If you get to inflection points or ports on the S curve or tipping points, however you want to describe that, something goes very quickly from one phase or stage to the other.

I see the Chinese as you do, that they're really trying to take advantage of that. I mean, you could imagine, and I'm not saying it will happen, that the Chinese in the next 10 years dominate the electric car industry in the world because they're way ahead of us in terms of charging stations, in terms of incentives to adopt. And once you get behind in that, it's super hard to catch up.

And so I just, I couldn't agree with you more, Peter, that the whole, we've got to get back to the sort of core American values, which is the future's going to be great, and we have to embrace it and we've got to embrace it before anybody else does. Because I think if we don't do that, we're going to look back and go, what the heck were we doing?

Peter Leyden: Yeah, completely agree. I will just say, as a west coast guy sitting here in California, I mean, California in general basically has a lot more of that than a lot of other parts of the country. And I think that's a good thing, and even though we get chided for it a bunch of times. I will say this, though, in a positive way, I mean, I've also spent a lot of time in China. I've been in, I was in a Chinese jail in Tibet under martial law basically, after Tiananmen Square. I mean, I've also seen the other side of China too. And what they've done in Hong Kong is just horrific, just recently here.

And the thing about America is I do believe in the long term, the democracies will triumph over the authoritarian, let alone totalitarian regimes. It's just, humans are going to need, you need the churn of new ideas. You need the churn of new leadership. You need the kind of openness of examining real things. I mean, we have our issues on news and stuff, but as opposed to what's happening in China right now is just nuts. I mean, they've just got one guy making calls and he is not really as sharp. And they've done away with their tenure transition into leadership. That's a disaster. That's a disaster for Russia. When Putin did away with that leadership transition, disaster. They're just in a death spiral over there.

And so as much as we complain about our democracy and all the issues around craziness in America, I think that basic platform is going to triumph in the 21st century over time. And I think there's no better place to lead it than America. I think we just need to get our shit together and really focus on the future and move forward. And I think we could pull a 60% majority of this country forward in a positive way and do big things again. That's just my hope, and I think it's doable. So let's try to make that happen.

Rob Atkinson: That's great. Thank you, Peter. So I agree with you. Some people say this, and you're not. It's sort of like, well, look, America's great. We are great. We're a fantastic country. And therefore, it's just going to magically happen.

Peter Leyden: No, it won't magically happen.

Rob Atkinson: We've got to work at it. We've got all these core advantages. Our operating system is a great operating system, but it has some bugs in it. We've got to work it out. Peter, that was great. Thank you so much. We should do this again because there's a lot more to talk about. So thank you.

Peter Leyden: Happy to do that. And good luck with fighting the good fight there in DC. Happy to help do what I can because we need to move, and move fast.

Jackie Whisman: And that's it for this week. If you liked it, please be sure to rate us and subscribe. Feel free to email show ideas or questions to [email protected]. You can find the show notes and sign up for our weekly email newsletter on our website, itif.org, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn at @ITIFDC.

Rob Atkinson: We have more episodes and great guests lined up. New episodes drop every other Monday, so we hope you'll continue to tune in.