Title: AI Futures, Peace and War
Approx. Reading Time: 15 minutes
Author: Peter Kingsley, Dame Wendy Hall
The next generation of strategic risk management must deliver a better understanding of systems, how events crystallise and propogate, and how imagined futures shape human responses. The grand challenge is to reinvent governance to match the demands of a potentially chaotic world dominated by the cascading impacts of poorly understood, fast-moving events that threaten fragmentation and breakdowns in trust. In other terms, the challenge is to shift from short-term reactive policy to foresight-driven, agenda-setting and pre-emptive action. Peter Kingsley and Dame Wendy Hall show that nowhere is the challenge as acute or urgent as in the deeply interconnected worlds of AI, peace and war.
Read EssayThe last 18 months have seen extraordinary temperature increases that have taken climate scientists by surprise, with 2024 set to break 2023’s record as the hottest year on record. Scientists had predicted this extreme outcome was a possibility, but not that it would manifest this soon or severely. This should act as a salutary lesson to focus our understanding of climate threats on what could be most extreme, rather than what might currently seem most likely. There would then be no surprises.
Europe is falling behind the United States and lacks the political will to do much about it. The direction of travel across the EU is towards more national control—that is, less integration of markets and pooling of debt, even if doing the latter would make all member-states wealthier. This makes it less likely that Europe will take its own defence more seriously, leaving it increasingly exposed to geopolitical risk.
Three eastern German states are now voting for far-right parties in record numbers. Despite “firewalls” against forming coalitions with them, the country’s mainstream politicians appear to still be bending to populists’ policy demands. This could help create a moral vacuum in the EU just as the US—depending on the result of November’s election—could be retreating from the region.
Contrary to IMF data, global trade imbalances are growing once again. Addressing them will primarily require action on the part of the countries running trade surpluses, not least China. Unless this happens, global economic growth will remain sluggish and protectionist pressures will build, ultimately rebounding on every economy.
Title: Climate Change and the UK’s National Security Rethink
Approx. Reading Time: 7 minutes
The new UK government is undertaking a major rethink of national security and resilience policies. This is partly in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which showed severe threats to security can come without malicious intent. Another non-malicious threat—climate change—should be at the heart of these new plans. However, writes Laurie Laybourn, government assessments do not adequately recognise the greatest security threats posed by climate change, particularly cascading risks and tipping points. As things stand, the UK is not resilient to even the most benign climate change impact scenarios. The government must remedy this.
Read EssayTitle: Hypermedia Politics
Approx. Reading Time: 9 minutes
Author: Peter Kingsley
In outtakes from the Nixon Tapes made by broadcaster David Frost, President Richard Nixon—who coined the term ‘the media’—said in effect that media owners often had more power than presidents. Media and politics have always been deeply intertwined. Contests over power to influence public opinion and emotion are nothing new. Peter Kingsley writes that what is new is that media power has crystallised at the intersection of populist autocrats, artificial intelligence (AI), deepfakes and social media at a critical moment for democracy and, above all, the United States.
Read EssayTitle: Economists are Vastly Underestimating the Cost of Climate Change
Approx. Reading Time: 12 minutes
Author: Laurie Laybourn
Analyses of the economic impacts of climate change play an important role in determining how governments and companies understand climate risk. Laurie Laybourn argues these analyses have been developed by academic economists using assumptions that are unrealistic, and therefore produce results that show little to no economic impact. They are dangerously misleading, yet they dominate mainstream conceptions of the climate threat.
Read EssayTitle: On Simulation and Hedging
Approx. Reading Time: 13 minutes
Author: Peter Kingsley
The gap between the complexity, uncertainty and speed of the political, security, economic, financial, and technological worlds on the one hand and leaders’ ability to understand and navigate them continues to widen. As a result, Peter Kingsley argues, world leaders appear to be sleepwalking, unaware of the consequences of their actions. In chaotic times, the grand challenge is to reimagine strategy and focus not just on risk, but uncertainty—to simulate and hedge against even the most extreme possible futures.
Read EssayThe 10 percent fall in the S&P over the three weeks to early August set off alarm bells in global markets. By mid-month, a sense of calm had returned but market expectations have shifted, with the cyclical outlook for the world economy very much in the balance. More significantly, a whole spectrum of economic policymaking is playing out, with significant implications for asset markets and, hence, investors.
Just a few weeks ago, many authoritative analysts held out little hope for the future of US democracy. Fear stalked the world. Suddenly, the atmosphere is positive again. Amongst the many explanations for the transformation created by Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz, the most important are language, frames and mood. They are also predictive.
Record-breaking floods in Brazil’s far south are the product of overly intensive agriculture but also deforestation in the country’s far north—particularly in the Amazon—which is altering weather patterns across the whole region. While preparations to keep people safe when the next extreme weather event arrives are key, thinking about how to prevent these disasters from getting worse is just as important.
Back in 2018 we explored the central role of imagined futures and narrative in shaping present-day cultural realities and decision-making. Six years on, we are re-publishing one of the defining essays on a theme that casts a light on everything from the US Presidential Election in November and in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, to the role of ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI) in describing the future of artificial intelligence.
Thanks to rapid advances in—and falling prices of—renewables and battery storage, the world could be on the cusp of an era of cheap, ubiquitous energy. This would reduce production costs and boost household incomes, driving stronger economic growth. It would also lead to a far more decentralised energy system, undercutting producer leverage and, with it, stoking geopolitical tensions. The flipside is that the coming stranded asset problem could be much bigger than previously thought.
The future is all too often seen as only the province of science. The uncertainty of tomorrow is managed with backward-looking analysis, models and graphs projected forward to produce probabilities. In contrast, pre-Capitalist societies shaped their vision of the future through art and storytelling. If we want to create the future we need—one that is sustainable, equitable and peaceful—we should take the creative arts more seriously than we do.
Picture this: the bubble surrounding generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) begins to deflate. The hype turns to retrenchment. Investors turn to caution. Another variation of an ‘AI winter’ looms. This may seem an unlikely scenario, but the signs are there. There is momentum: in everything from concerns about security, to questions about ‘product’ performance, to the ethics and intentions of Big Tech.
Can a Labour government improve the UK’s poor economic performance? As things stand, probably not by that much—not least because Labour continues to rule out rejoining the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union. However, faced with a poor economic inheritance, the new government might come to calculate that the risks of not rejoining—weaker growth, higher taxes, growing disillusionment among younger voters—outweigh those of reopening the issue.
The expression ‘hybrid threats’, or ‘hybrid war’, goes back decades. During this time, the security and military landscape has been transformed by waves of inventions by states, defence contractors and technology companies. The barriers to entry for developing lethal systems for non-state actors, terrorists and criminals continue to drop. So-called ‘dual use’ systems are pervasive, blurring boundaries between Big Tech and governments. Artificial intelligence and autonomous lethal weapons increase the risks of civilian casualties and miscalculation.
During the Cold War, government risk assessment inferred that nuclear conflict would be devastating but manageable. By the mid-eighties, improved analysis contributed to an understanding across society that nuclear war would indeed be catastrophic. Today, official risk assessments of climate change infer that even severe temperature rises could be manageable. A similar analytical fightback could give urgency to climate action.
Western institutions that have dominated the global economy and international relations since World War Two face an unprecedented challenge. However, if the West does crumble, it will not be because of the power and appeal of China and Russia, but because of the decisions made—or rather not made—by Western governments. The West remains economically dominant, rich and with strong technology. Collectively, it also has huge military clout. It could fend off the challenge relatively easily. That does not mean it will.
Beneath the surface of political rhetoric lays an age-old set of principles: emotion and tribalism beat policy. Combine unregulated social media, ‘open’ artificial intelligence and short-term emotional manipulation, and we have the recipe for persistent domestic division, inter-state conflict and fragmentation. Yet as the public mood shifts, political visions that stretch into the future and convey a sense of direction and hope may emerge.
It appears increasingly likely that we will see a protectionist backlash, driven by huge and rising overcapacity in China on the one hand and growing determination in the West to maintain domestic industrial capacity on the other. The risk is that this backlash will extend far beyond an understandable (or even necessary) drive to hit back at Chinese mercantilism.
The era of relatively equitable trade relations with China is over. The country’s overcapacity problem is systemic, and represents an attempt to make up for the weakness of domestic demand by taking an ever-larger share of global manufacturing production and exports. At a time of weak global growth and rising indebtedness, the patience of the country’s trade partners is wearing thin.
Climate change has caused extreme heatwaves, droughts, rainfall and floods to increase in severity and regularity around the world, creating ideal conditions for what mosquitoes—responsible for 1 million deaths and 700 million disease infections each year—like to do most: breed and bite.
Low birth rates have exploded from a fringe issue to one at the centre of the culture wars. The left has called for more socialist-inspired policies to support young families, such as free childcare and help with housing, and even a shift to “de-growth” economics. The far-right has taken aim at women’s advancement and the “breakdown” of the traditional family. One thing is clear: Just like the climate crisis, the population crisis will force us to have tough conversations on what we want our society to look like.
