The Great Inflection and the Harmogenic Age

In Harmogenics:A Practical Guide To Constant Becoming, I state: "We are living through what is perhaps the most exciting period in human history. We are literally witnessing the transformation of human consciousness." This is something I truly perceive. Despite all the challenges we face, we have never had so much transformational potential within our grasp as a species.

When I recently watched Peter Leyden's Big Think presentation “The Great Inflection 2025,” I felt an immediate affinity with his vision. Here was someone describing, from a completely different angle, exactly what I'd been writing about. His argument is simple, sweeping, and surprisingly hopeful: that 2025 marks the beginning of a new 25-year period of reinvention—a period as transformative as the American founding, the post-Civil War industrial explosion, or the post-World War II boom. He calls it a world-historic inflection, driven by three simultaneous “tipping points”: artificial intelligence, clean energy, and bioengineering.

What strikes me about Leyden's vision is how clearly it maps onto what I call Constant Becoming—the condition of living in perpetual acceleration, where the future shapes the present more powerfully than the past does. Leyden is describing the external machinery of that transformation: the physical systems being rebuilt, the economic foundations shifting, the material abundance becoming possible. His three tipping points are interlocking forces that amplify one another. AI needs abundant cheap energy to truly unleash its potential. Bioengineering needs AI to model complexity and accelerate discovery. Clean energy depends on AI-driven optimization to keep dropping costs. Together, they form what I see as an obvious harmogenic system: separate forces feeding each other until they create something none of them could produce alone.

Recognizing these patterns—seeing how they connect and where they're heading—is what I call prescient readiness (Chapter 34). Without prophecy, you can develop your capacity to read convergence and prepare for transformation rather than resist it. Leyden's talk is a master class in that kind of anticipation.

Leyden opens with a sense of urgency and wonder: "We are at a moment here in 2025 where we have world historic, game-changing technologies now starting to scale." He's been watching technology evolve for decades. He introduces himself plainly enough: "I'm Pete Leyden. 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." Back in the 1990s, he was wooed to Wired magazine in its early days, when "people had no idea what was even going on with the internet." He and co-author Peter Schwarz wrote what he calls "a famous iconic cover story at Wired that was called ‘The Long Boom,’" a speculative history stretching from 1980 to 2020, trying to map what was really coming. It was surprisingly on target. So he's got form—someone who's made a career out of connecting dots before most people can see the pattern.

His model is cyclical. Every 80 years or so, America hits a breaking point where the old order collapses and something radically new takes its place. He says it's happened three times before, and we're living through the fourth. (Actually, it has happened many times before but this is only the fourth time since there was an America.) The rhythm is always the same: polarization, crisis, collapse, then a 25-year burst of reinvention. "There's been three previous junctures where Americans have found themselves in this exact place," he says. Then he walks us through them.

The first was the founding era, roughly 1787 to 1815. He frames it as part of the Enlightenment, "a fundamental system change from a feudal society kind of dominated by the Catholic Church… into essentially what we would now consider the modern world." Western Europe invented modernity—secular governance, reason, science, democracy—and then "those crazy ass Americans" had a continent to spread it across. The American experiment wasn't just political, it was civilizational. It was the beta test for a new way of organizing human life, and for 25 years it built the scaffolding of what became the modern West.

Jump ahead 80 years and you hit 1865, the end of the Civil War. "Anyone rooted in the old systems that are going down are passionately want to defend that at all cost," he says, and the South did exactly that—fought to the death for an economic order built on slavery. When that system finally collapsed, the aftermath was explosive. "The Civil War after 1865 had an unbelievable explosion of progress that lasted for what do you know, 25 years." He lists the Homestead Act, land-grant universities, and especially the railroads: "175,000 miles of rail… stitched the entire continent together." That's the period when America became industrial, when it reinvented itself as a continental power. It took a war to clear the ground, but once the old order was gone, the new one rose fast.

Another 80 years forward brings us to 1945, the end of World War II. Before that, the 1930s were brutal—economic collapse, political extremism, social fracture. "There was an America First movement in the 30s. We were on the verge of violent conflict in America," Leyden says. The old economic model wasn't working, and the country came apart. But then FDR and the New Deal coalition "started to get traction," and after the war, everything changed. "From 1945 to 1970, we watched the great post-war boom. Many people call it the high point of global capitalism." The next 25 years saw tax rates on the rich at 90 percent, massive public investment in highways and suburbs, the GI Bill, higher education expansion. "The whole thing 25 years and then we ran into the 70s," when inflation and stagnation signaled the end of that cycle.

Now, by Leyden's clock, it's our turn. The 80-year rhythm puts us right at the breaking point, and the signs are everywhere: political polarization, institutional decay, economic inequality, climate instability. The old order is cracking. But at the same time, he says, "we are in the middle of three tipping points that are world historic changes." He defines tipping points as the moment when something clunky and experimental becomes inevitable. "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.'" That instant of recognition—when everyone suddenly gets it—that's the tipping point.

The first and most visible is AI. "With the arrival of ChatGPT 3.5 in November of 2022, I think we're going to see that as a world historic moment—the starting gun of what will be understood as the age of AI." He's not shy about the comparison. He calls it "a fundamental game-changing technology, a step change in our abilities that once you cross that threshold, you don't go back." Like the Bronze Age or the Iron Age—eras defined by new capacities that permanently expanded what humans could do. The analogy he likes best is industrial: mechanical engines amplified our muscles, and now "the amplification of our mental powers with digital computers and now AI" is doing the same for our minds. We're watching intelligence itself become scalable, reproducible, and eventually ubiquitous.

AI is hungry. Every layer of advancement—training larger models, running more inference, building smarter systems—requires exponentially more computation, and computation means electricity. Data centers already consume as much power as entire countries. If AI keeps scaling at this pace without a corresponding energy breakthrough, the whole system hits a wall. The age of AI, in other words, depends entirely on what comes next.

That's where the second tipping point—clean energy—comes in, and this is where I think Leyden's vision becomes most compelling. "This is the first time we have an energy source that is a technology, not a commodity," he says. Once you can manufacture energy instead of extract it, the cost curve behaves like Moore's Law. "Double the number of solar panels, you get about a 20% drop in cost." He calls that dynamic unstoppable, "the forward motion of costs coming down on clean energies is just beginning." When that happens, he says, we'll have "abundant clean energy."

I think he's absolutely right, and this might be the most revolutionary development of all. Abundant, inexpensive clean energy won't stop climate change, but it will finally minimize the human footprint on the planet and it removes the constraint on everything else. AI can scale without limit. Bioengineering can run the massive computational models needed for precision medicine and synthetic biology. Manufacturing becomes trivially cheap. Desalination becomes viable. 

The entire economy shifts from scarcity-based to abundance-based. Without cheap energy, AI hits a wall. With it, you get a planetary-scale feedback loop where AI optimizes energy systems, making them cheaper and more efficient, which enables more AI, which accelerates bioengineering, which discovers better materials for solar and storage, which drops costs further. It's not linear progression. It's exponential, self-reinforcing. Pure harmogenics in action.

The third tipping point is bioengineering, and here's where the harmogenic interplay becomes most visible. "We figured out a way to cheaply and easily edit the genome of any living thing," he says, referring to CRISPR and related gene-editing technologies. His example is simple—lab-grown meat—but the implications stretch far beyond that. What he's describing is the ability to design life itself, to reprogram biology the way we once reprogrammed silicon.

The cost collapse tells the story: sequencing the human genome dropped from three billion dollars in 2003 to "about a hundred bucks" today, and Leyden says it's heading toward fifty or less. When something gets that cheap, that fast, it stops being a specialized tool and becomes infrastructure. What does that infrastructure enable? Gene therapies that correct inherited diseases. Personalized cancer treatments. Vaccines designed for your specific immune system. Crops engineered for drought resistance and enhanced nutrition. Microbes that manufacture pharmaceuticals, plastics, fuels—living factories programmed to produce whatever we need.

Bioengineering at this scale requires massive computational power. Modeling cellular systems, predicting protein folding, designing genetic circuits—all of that depends on AI. And you can't run those models without abundant, cheap energy. So bioengineering isn't a standalone revolution. It's the third element in a self-reinforcing loop. AI accelerates biological discovery faster than we could ever manage alone. Clean energy powers the computation. Bioengineering potentially produces breakthrough materials that improve solar efficiency and battery storage. Each enables the others. That's not just synergy—it's emergence. It's three forces creating a fourth thing that none of them could produce independently.

Leyden ends his talk on an even grander note, suggesting that what's coming isn't just technological but civilizational. "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… to essentially some version of a sustainable capitalism." He also predicts a move from "representative democracy" to "digital democracy," and from "nation states" to "some kind of global governance that coordinates the 10 billion people on this planet." Whether that sounds utopian or dystopian probably depends on your caffeine level, but he's not wrong that the scale of change will be global. The only question is whether we evolve fast enough to manage it.

What Leyden has done in this talk is give us a map of the external transformation—the physical systems, the economic foundations, the material infrastructure of the next civilization. What he's less focused on is the internal adaptation required to live sanely within that transformation. That's where the concept of Constant Becoming comes in: the recognition that we're living in perpetual acceleration, where the future now shapes the present more than the past does. His three tipping points are the visible machinery of that process. The psychological turbulence, the cultural confusion, the disorientation and creativity we see all around us—those are the inner consequences. The outer inflection and the inner becoming are two sides of the same event.

Recognizing these convergences before they fully manifest—seeing how AI, energy, and bioengineering interlock and reinforce one another—is how prescient readiness works. Not prophecy or prediction, but the cultivated capacity to read patterns, anticipate transformation, and position yourself to navigate change rather than be overwhelmed by it. Leyden embodies that quality. He's not just describing technologies; he's showing us how to think about the next 25 years as a coherent system rather than a chaotic jumble of disruptions.

So yes, Leyden might be a little breathless, a little optimistic about how smoothly this will unfold. But his core insight is sound. We've crossed a threshold. The future isn't arriving in separate pieces anymore—it's compounding, overlapping, feeding back on itself. AI, clean energy, and bioengineering aren't just three advances happening at once. They're three forces creating a fourth phenomenon: a self-amplifying system of transformation. The Great Inflection isn't just a moment when technologies mature. It's the moment when they fuse into something that operates by its own logic, at its own accelerating pace.

What does it feel like to live through that? Probably a lot like it feels right now: exciting, disorienting, fragile, and a little terrifying. The old world hasn't collapsed yet, but you can feel it cracking. The new one hasn't fully formed, but you can see its outline. And somewhere in that in-between space, we're trying to figure out what comes next. 

That's the real question Leyden's talk leaves in my mind. If this is the great inflection—if we're really standing at the threshold of a new 25-year surge of reinvention—then what are we building it toward? Abundance, yes. Intelligence, yes. Longer lives, cleaner energy, programmable biology, sure. But to what end? The inflection point isn't just technical. It's human, or whatever humanity becomes because of all this change. We have no control over change, we can only choose how it impacts us.

(Assisted by AI.)