2025: Entering the Next American Epoch

A new way to look at the American project as we move into the age of AI

According to technologist Peter Leyden, history progresses as a series of epochs that occur on a consistent timeline: Every 80 years, we enter an era of rapid innovation, which lasts roughly 25 years. Most recently, the post WWII-epoch brought about globalization. This period lasted from 1945 to 1970. Following Leyden’s theory, the next epoch begins right now, in 2025.

When I encountered Leyden’s view, I felt a sense of relief. For years now, I’ve been obsessed with commentators proclaiming that our current way of life is unsustainable. There’s Peter Zeihan, arguing that globalization is breaking down. There’s Morris Berman, who observes that the core of our society, which is nothing more than “a collective adrenaline rush,” is profoundly broken at its core. There’s Peter Turchin, claiming that elite overproduction will cause massive civil unrest this decade. And of course there are the economists who warn that economic growth will inevitably end as populations begin to decline in the near future.

Leyden’s framing of the present moment pushes all of this aside. In 1944, no one could have predicted how radically the Bretton Woods system would transform the world, opening the door to globalization. That’s where we stand today: No one has any exact idea of how radically AI, clean energy, and bioengineering will shake things up. All the doomers are operating within the parameters of the outgoing system. The moment the new system kicks into gear, their gloomy analyses will be buried under piles of dust.

Notably, the new system doesn’t promise to be an automatic utopia by any stretch. Leyden’s headline prediction is that AI will lead us to surveillance-saturated one-world government. No doubt there are ways in which this could be a good thing, but it’s easier to imagine all the ways this could turn into a nightmare scenario.

Then there are the AI doomsday scenarios. I’m particularly thinking of this prediction described by AI 2027: “AI companies create expert-human-level AI systems in early 2027, which automate AI research, leading to ASI by the end of 2027. … Millions of ASIs will rapidly execute tasks beyond human comprehension. Because they’re so useful, they’ll be widely deployed. With superhuman strategy, hacking, weapons development, and more, the goals of these AIs will determine the future.”

A number of the specific scenarios envisioned by the authors of AI 2027 include the end of all human life. So, that’s not great.

Nonetheless, I remain optimistic about the new epoch we’re entering. To me, the worst-case scenario for humanity is that we get stuck. We are currently getting close to curing aging, achieving clean energy abundance, becoming interplanetary, etc. Imagine how tragic it would be, just at this moment, to plateau as a species and begin a painful spiral of deceleration that we never recover from.

It's perfectly reasonable to fear AI and the possible futures it will unlock. But it’s crazy to not also fear the alternative of no AI, no miracle cures for aging, no space settlements, no clean energy abundance.

In the spirit of maintaining optimism, it’s worth considering the best-case scenarios for the next 25 years. One such scenario is spelled out by Aaron Bastani in his book Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Bastani argues that, once technology helps us achieve resource abundance, and once we can fully automate the economy so work is minimized, the principles of communism can be deployed to ensure everyone benefits from the new wealth.

As Bastani wrote in the New York Times, “Asteroid mining. Gene editing. Synthetic meat. We could provide for the needs of everyone, in style. It just takes some imagination.”

If communism is too distasteful of a word (as it is for me, frankly), the essential elements of Bastani’s vision are also championed in Zoltan Istvan’s concept of the Automated Abundance Economy:

The basic idea is straightforward: once machines can do most jobs—like farming, construction, healthcare, education—the essentials of life can be produced in abundance, with very little human labor. In that world, wealth stops being the reward for work and becomes a shared outcome of automation.

I recently interviewed Zoltan about the Automated Abundance Economy. As I mentioned during the interview, it’s kind of amazing AI and other radical technologies have come along to help us reconfigure our economic system just at the moment in history when the pillars of our current economic system are breaking down. This was before I saw Leyden’s timeline of epochs.

It's almost as if there’s a divine hand guiding history. More likely, humans seem to have a collective determination to beat the odds and keep progression going. Hopefully this is true, because even if we make it through this epoch, no doubt the next set of challenges will be even more extraordinary.