North Star Summit keynote speaker on the AI threshold already crossed, and what’s still coming

The world is on the brink of a new era of extraordinary progress in technology, despite today’s political and economic turbulence, technology expert and futurist Peter Leyden said Tuesday.

Leyden, who kicked off the Minnesota Star Tribune’s inaugural ideas festival, said this moment — defined by key advances in AI, clean energy and bioengineering — is a hinge point in U.S. history comparable to the aftermath of World War II, the Civil War and the founding of the United States, and will rival or surpass the impact of the Industrial Revolution.

“We are watching the old system going down, the new system being built,” Leyden said at the North Star Summit, held at Walker Art Center. “We basically have to figure out how we’re going to make it through this and reinvent America for the next 25 years.”

Leyden, a Minnesota native, terms 2025 to 2050 as the “great progression.”

“Up until now, basically anything to do with intelligence … had to have a human being around it,” he said. “Now, machines can do that, and this is the dumbest they’re ever going to be.”

A former Wired editor who once reported for the Star Tribune, Leyden has spent three decades helping audiences understand the forces reshaping technology and society. He now leads Reinvent Futures, a firm that advises corporate and civic leaders on navigating change.

Leyden drew a direct line from today’s AI moment to the dawn of the internet in the early 1990s: the digital revolution needed decades to build out infrastructure; AI is arriving atop that foundation and is ready to scale now.

That’s because, just as the internet opened up informational sources to everyone, generative AI is accessible to everyone.

The implications, he said, go beyond productivity. For example, AI tutors could personalize educational instruction and close achievement gaps no matter the household wealth of students’ families.

“Don’t think of this just as empowering the rich; it is essentially empowering everybody,” he said.

Neel Kashkari, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said in another summit session that he views the AI boom as similar to the automation of agriculture.

“People forecast the end of labor,” Kashkari said. “Labor changed. People went from working on farms to in factories, and the nature of work changed. So I do believe that the nature of jobs is going to change. The way we’re going to use these tools is going to change, and people are going to be forced, either willingly or unwillingly, to take on more productive jobs where their skills are better utilized.”

At the same time generative AI is booming, energy sources are transitioning from commodities to technologies — and that is causing steep declines in cost.

Solar, Leyden said, is already cheaper to build than coal or gas plants, and electric-vehicle adoption is accelerating worldwide, buoyed by plunging battery prices. In major Chinese cities, roughly half of new cars are electric, he said.

“We’ve got to wake up,” Leyden said of the risk that the United States falls behind.

Adding to generative AI and energy shifts is a boom in bioengineering technology where Minnesota’s medical and life sciences sectors could lead, he said.

Sequencing a human genome once cost billions; today it’s under $100, he said, unlocking advances in synthetic biology from lab-grown meat to engineered crops and new therapies.