Speaking on AI, New Tech & the Future
Peter Leyden is a tech expert and thought leader in artificial intelligence, transformative technologies and the future ever since coming to San Francisco to work with the founders of WIRED magazine at the start of the Digital Revolution.
His book The Long Boom inspired a generation of entrepreneurs in The Digital Age in Silicon Valley much like his current work on his next book The Great Progression is doing for The AI Age in San Francisco.
Leyden hosted The AI Age Begins, one of the premier event series held in San Francisco in the two years after Generative AI burst onto the scene. He drew off his extensive experience in the region to regularly convene an extraordinary network of top technologists and entrepreneurs, innovators and experts to come up with answers to key questions surrounding the arrival of this world-historic general purpose tool.
(All the videos on this page are full length keynotes that you can watch in their entirety or skim through various parts. If you want to watch many of the best parts of his talks in short clips go to Talk Clips on this website.)
A Gifted Storyteller with Stunning Presentations
Leyden is a gifted storyteller who can take what he is constantly learning about what’s coming next in new technologies and trends, and clearly explain to a wide range of audiences the near-term implications and eventual impact of these developments.
He uses dramatic images and compelling infographics in presentations that are both highly informative and entertaining. His fast-paced performances and optimistic spirit leaves people energized and inspired.
In addition to being a thought leader of big ideas, Leyden also is a serial entrepreneur who understands the challenges of business. He is founder of Reinvent Futures, a strategic foresight firm advising senior leaders on four key questions that he communicates through his talks as well:
What’s really going on today? What’s probably coming in the next decade? What’s possible to achieve in the next 25 years? And what should we do now?
An Optimist Envisioning a More Positive Future
Since running WIRED as Managing Editor in the heyday of the 1990s, Leyden has founded two startups that helped pioneer the use of the new medium of YouTube, and the early days of interactive video like Zoom.
Leyden currently is the creator of The Great Progression, a series of essays and interviews leading to his next book, making the case that in the next 25 years we have an incredible opportunity to harness AI and other transformative technologies like clean energy to drive progress, reinvent America and make a much better world.
A Real Pro with 25 Years of Experience
Leyden has been represented by the speaking agents of Keppler Speakers in Washington D.C. for 25 years. He has given hundreds of keynote talks to business and general audiences throughout the United States during that time. You can trust him to impress any audience.
You can contact Leyden through this website or Keppler Speakers through their website for more Information.
Leyden’s Six Current Talks Below
Leyden constantly evolves his talks to the changes in the world around him, and he tailors his material to best fit each audience. He creates his talks in modules and can give broader overviews of many topics or go deeper into one topic depending on the interest.
He has developed six keynote talks over the last few years with highly designed slides and many up-to-date infographics that can fit the needs of a wide range of audiences. Scroll below to see all six.
The Great Progression: The Positive Story of America to 2050
The Great Progression makes the compelling case that America and the world are heading into a new era of great progress that will go a long way towards solving the many challenges of our time like climate change.
This transformation will be partly driven by three world-historic tech booms in artificial intelligence, clean energy technologies and bioengineering. The next 10 years will be the critical time of transition as many systems that defined the 20th century break down and fade away, while new systems better suited to the 21st century emerge and then scale.
This is Peter Leyden’s signature talk that tells the comprehensive story of our times and the next 25 years based on his ongoing work on his next book The Great Progression, 2025 to 2050. This generally positive narrative goes well beyond explaining new technologies and weaves together megatrends from demographics to economics to geopolitics that will transform our world in fundamental ways too.
Far from a gloom and doom future, Leyden argues that these inexorable developments are heading towards a reinvention of America and the possibility of a much better world.
The AI Age Begins: What You Need to Know Starting Now
The arrival of Generative AI marked the beginning of a new age of artificial intelligence—one of the most extraordinary stories of our time. Humans are making a step change in our capabilities that eventually will be seen as comparable to only a handful of other general purpose technologies that have fundamentally changed the world like electricity.
This new super-tool has the potential to transform fields from business (virtual assistants for all workers) to education (individual tutors for all kids) to healthcare (personalized medicine for everyone). Intelligent machines could augment human intelligence in ways that could boost productivity and drive economic growth as well as help solve our most complex challenges—like climate change. But this extraordinary tool in the wrong hands could also bring risks.
Few are better positioned than Peter Leyden to help us understand the full implications of AI because for the two years after ChatGPT burst on the scene he hosted one of the premier event series about AI at ground zero in San Francisco that convened many of the leading AI experts in the world.
In this hour-long keynote, Leyden synthesizes all that he’s learned and lays out what everyone needs to know to make the most of this game-changing technology and responsibly move forward.
The Climate Solution: Tracking Clean Technologies & Megatrends
Humans can and ultimately will solve climate change. Peter Leyden argues that the solution to slowing global warming is closer than many think due to technological breakthroughs and inexorable global trends.
He lays out the latest data on the dramatic scaling of clean energy technologies like solar and electric vehicles, explains how the new field of bioengineering could lead to much more sustainable alternatives to conventional materials that release carbon dioxide, and talks about the promise of fusion energy on the horizon.
He also shows how many surprisingly fortuitous megatrends like urbanization, the rise of the global middle class, and shrinking populations in the developed world are on track to help turn the corner on warming in time.
His can-do take on this daunting challenge will leave audiences more hopeful that a better future for their children is still very much within reach.
The Global Grand Strategy: The Tech & Trends Inexorably Coming
Peter Leyden explains both the new technologies and the megatrends that are all-but inevitable in the next 25 years—what he calls “The Inexorables.”
Leyden lays out the next waves of tech changes inexorably coming with ubiquitous artificial intelligence, clean energy technologies (like renewable energy and electric transportation) and bioengineering (in healthcare and synthetic biology) that will add up to an economic long boom that could drive prosperity and shift us from a mindset of scarcity to one of abundance..
He also explains the key generational shifts and demographic changes in America and the West, as well as important global trends, like urbanization and the rise of the global middle class, that he believes will shape our future in profound and mostly positive ways.
The Positive Reframe of America & the World Today
We are surrounded by doom and gloom stories that say our world today is getting worse and the future will be a dystopian disaster. Peter Leyden makes the opposite case that actually living in our modern world today is unquestionably better than any previous period and we’re on the cusp of life in America and the world getting much better.
He lays out a wealth of data showing progress over many decades if not centuries, and explains how new technologies will scale and megatrends roll out in the next 25 years that should continue to make things better still. His positive reframe of the story of our times and the near future is a can-do narrative that leaves audiences more optimistic and inspired.
The Transformation of Our Civilization to 2100
The visionary futurist Peter Leyden tells the sweeping story of our entire era from 1980 to 2100 in the context of all human history. He starts the story with the dawn of the digital revolution in 1980, tells the essential developments of the last 40 years, before explaining what we can expect to happen through the rest of the 21st century—including humans getting a handle on climate change and making great progress on many fronts.
Leyden makes the case that people centuries from now will look back on the 21st century the way we look back on The Enlightenment in the 18th century and the founders of America, among other key moments of civilizational change.