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Title: Decoupling: disengagement by any other name
Approx. Reading Time: 12 minutes
Author: George Magnus

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Decoupling: disengagement by any other name

Evidence of decoupling is still partial because it is a process and not a binary phenomenon. China wants to de-Americanise its supply chains and dependencies, but its economic stability depends on selling into the US and European markets. The United States wants to decouple where it must and preserve interdependence where it can. Europe seems to want to follow the American example, but with less ‘must’ and more ‘can’. Such limited or soft decoupling is unlikely to be the end state. George Magnus argues that geopolitics and national security, centred around the US-China relationship, will increasingly frame business and financial relationships, and the movement of both investment and portfolio capital.

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Title: The Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence
Approx. Reading Time: 16 minutes
Author: Peter Kingsley

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The Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence

Emerging AI services such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT represent a new chapter in the crisis of governance that began with the rise of social media and inter-state cyberwar. Peter Kingsley explores how policymakers failed to anticipate the strategic, inter-systemic, networked and cascading risks, driven by machine-driven misinformation and deepfakes. We now risk being governed by algorithms that create an illusion of reality, yet are the product of an alien world. In worst-case scenarios, AIs will impose their own de facto alternate realities that even their designers cannot understand, shaping political and cultural systems, and threatening everything from social stability to military security.

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Title: Inter-Systemic Risk: resilience and the grand challenge
Approx. Reading Time: 15 minutes
Author: Peter Kingsley

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Inter-Systemic Risk: resilience and the grand challenge

Tipping points, cascading events, runaway climate change: just some of the language that attempts to grasp the realities of a chaotic, radically uncertain future. Peter Kingsley explores how catastrophic inter-systemic events will dominate the landscape, and why cultural transformation and breakthrough invention will be key to countering them. The grand challenge is how to navigate a path when no assumptions are safe and historical models are irrelevant. Time for predictive modelling that reflects the real world.

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Long Read Overview

Title: Renaissance: towards 2050
Approx. Reading Time: 32 minutes
Author: Peter Kingsley, Simon Tilford

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Renaissance: towards 2050

Picture this: January 2050. The time to look back—to 2025, to the time when after years of crisis, the focus on recovery and regeneration of the natural world gained momentum. To a time that marked the beginning of mass-scale global action to reverse the decades of industrial destruction and the ecological disasters that followed. In just one generation, the world’s geostrategic and environmental landscape is now transformed.

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Briefing

Speed and Time

Almost two years ago we published a short essay on ‘speed and time’, exploring how seemingly ‘long-term’ threats became clear, present and extreme dangers. Since then, the governance failures surrounding the geostrategic world order, climate change and artificial intelligence suggest that little has changed. Unless and until state, corporate and financial leaders reinvent how they think about the future, escape endemic short-termism and find some imagination, the world faces cascading, runaway crises.

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Briefing

The US Debt Ceiling: different this time?

The US is highly unlikely to default. Even if the Republicans and Democrats fail to reach a deal, the latter can find a way around the country’s self-imposed debt limit without reneging on debt or slashing spending. However, recourse to any of these ‘workarounds’ promises to exacerbate the country’s deeply polarised politics and increase the chances of a second Trump presidency. This, in turn, would further aggravate environmental and geopolitical stress.

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Cascades: the impact of Europe’s growing water scarcity

Europe’s climate is changing rapidly, with 2023 shaping up to be the hottest year on record. This will worsen an already protracted drought, and the cascading effects could be far-reaching: food shortages and power outages may disrupt industrial production, pushing up inflation and making it harder for central banks to cut interest rates. This, in turn, could start to focus investor attention on the sustainability of various sectors, and even the future of vulnerable population centres.

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Protect to Enable: strategy for climate and ecological chaos

Policymakers are finally moving away from a simplistic cost-benefit approach to tackling the climate and ecological crisis, but even with decarbonisation and nature restoration, rapid change is now unavoidable and will have far-reaching consequences. Societies must become more robust. Adaptation and resilience should be seen as an enabler of sustainability.

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Long Read Overview

Title: Walled Gardens: towards 2050
Approx. Reading Time: 39 minutes

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Walled Gardens: towards 2050

January 2050. Time to look back. Survey a world of patchwork, environmentally secure post-industrial walled gardens. Secure borders for some, mass-migration and survival conditions for others. The climate and biosphere crises had global causes, but hyper-local solutions. The long political backlash against globalisation shaped the emergence of isolationism, protectionism and state power. What remains of trade is in ideas: digital, virtual, fragmented.

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Long Read Overview

Title: Dark Ages: towards 2050
Approx. Reading Time: 39 minutes
Author: Simon Tilford, Peter Kingsley

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Dark Ages: towards 2050

Scenarios are models. They describe alternative possible futures. At their best, they explore extremes, because history tells us one thing: failure of imagination is a primary source of risk and catastrophic failure. In this update of Dark Ages, one of our reference scenarios, we explore a descent into chaos, a story of climate and biosphere collapse, state failures, mass migration, and perpetual wars. Too little, too late. Like Orwell’s 1984, it serves as a warning, not a prediction. This story has momentum. Is this the world we want?

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Title: A New Age of Financial Repression?
Approx. Reading Time: 8 minutes
Author: George Magnus

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A New Age of Financial Repression?

Could a new wave of austerity open the way for political populism, as in the 1920s? George Magnus argues the risk lies elsewhere. Rising pressures on public spending combined with a drive to reassert national control over production means governments are more likely to opt for financial repression than risk the fallout from renewed austerity. In such an environment, returns or claims on real assets—that is, equities—would exceed those on government bonds or corporate credit.

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Long Read Overview

Title: The Invention Gap
Approx. Reading Time: 10 minutes
Author: Peter Kingsley

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The Invention Gap

A little over a year ago we published The Invention Gap to our subscribers. Since then, we have seen the Russian invasion of Ukraine, rising inflation, and a growing sense of urgency about the climate and biosphere crises. As we put it originally, The Invention Gap is systemic and strategic, cutting across all industry sectors and spanning global governance, policy, regulation, economics and corporate stewardship. The gap is not shrinking.

To mark the launch of Baker McKenzie’s ‘Closing the Invention Gap: Reinventing the practice of law at the edge of chaos’, written with Ben Allgrove, Chief Innovation Officer of Baker McKenzie, Jae Um, Founder and Director at Six Parsecs and Mary O’Carroll, Chief Community Officer at Ironclad, here is the original essay.

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Briefing

Conspiracy Ideology: a growing security threat?

While people in the past may have subscribed to individual conspiracy theories, such as believing the moon landings were faked or that 9/11 was “an inside job”, many now seem to hold a clear and specific worldview that that can accommodate multiple and highly varied conspiracy theories. This ideology can move and adapt to whatever new grievance piques its interest. It’s highly likely that the years leading up to 2030 will provide plenty of material.

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Why talk of the US dollar’s demise is much exaggerated

A slight fall in its share of official global reserves, combined with moves by big emerging economies to do more trade in their own currencies, has renewed speculation over a challenge to the US dollar. While the current dominance is ultimately unsustainable, this is less because of the risk others will lose confidence in the US currency than the constraints it places on the US’s attempts to rebalance its own economy.

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The Risky Reliance on Central Banks

The conflict between financial stability and inflation, and the failure to account for the link between excessive corporate profits and inflation, both highlight the risks of over-dependence on monetary policy to steer the economy. Interest rates cannot achieve this when governments fail to prevent special interests, such as commercial banks, from gaming the system to socialise losses, or firms from being able to inflate margins.

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Briefing

A Major US-China Conflict is Looking More Likely

War between the US and China appears increasingly inevitable. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has increased the standing of hawks in Washington who frame the debate as a contest between authoritarians and democracy, while Taiwan is pushing for full independence. China increasingly feels backed into a corner. A conflict would have devastating military and economic consequences.

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Briefing

Can ChatGPT invent and be creative?

ChatGPT exhibits no creative capability or conception of invention—it is unable to make novel associations, so can’t come up with unique ideas. However, were it programmed to widen its search rather than simply searching “probabilistically” for a close match, it could be genuinely creative. Whether or not it could then become an inventor will undoubtedly be subject to fierce debate and in all likelihood end up before the Supreme Court.

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The Profound Implications of Tipping Points

It is now clear that climate tipping points—abrupt, potentially catastrophic changes in natural systems—could be triggered at just 1.5C of global heating. Immediate action is needed to improve resilience to potential tipping point events, protecting populations as well as ensuring emissions reductions and nature restoration can be sustained through the chaotic consequences.

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Briefing

What is ‘Protectionist’?

If the headlines are to be believed, rising US protectionism threatens the international trading system. This highlights how muddled our understanding of what constitutes protectionism has become. The structural mercantilism of Germany and China, among others, poses a far bigger threat to open and efficient trade than US industrial policy does. Restricting capital flows might ultimately be the only way to combat it.

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Crisis in the UK: the power of narrative

The UK faces a serious economic and social crisis that will deepen without big shifts in policy. Yet there is little sense of this among the country’s elite, not least its politicians. The power of narrative helps explain this risky disconnect. When the gap between dominant narrative and reality for the median citizen widens to breaking point, a country’s politics loses legitimacy.

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Gene Drive Technologies: worth the risk?

Malaria still infects over 200 million people a year worldwide and kills more than half a million. With an effective vaccine remaining elusive, researchers are exploring the use of genetically modified malaria-transmitting mosquitoes. While such gene drive technologies hold potential, they pose serious risks to the health of ecosystems.

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The Ukraine War and Future of Russia

Almost a year after Putin launched his disastrous invasion of Ukraine it seems that Russia cannot win the war, but neither can Ukraine. In the eyes of the US and most NATO countries, avoiding escalation is paramount, raising the prospect of the conflict becoming ‘frozen’. Irrespective of what the future holds for Russia—wartime regime, progressive disintegration or something in between—its future is bleak.

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A New Age of Social Unrest

Governments are increasingly unable to address rising domestic frustration while simultaneously dealing with complex global risks such as climate change. Overwhelmed by the complexity of the problems they face, politicians are becoming ever more reliant upon reactive, short-term modes of governance. The question is whether they will attempt to re-cast globalisation and share the current burden of risks, or retreat further behind borders.

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Briefing

Narratives: imagination, art, science

For good and ill, we are immersed in narratives and stories, from news about breakthroughs in fusion energy to contested election results and undetectable, machine-driven disinformation. From the ‘The Big Lie’ and ‘special operation’ to reporting of court judgments, the media environment is saturated in stories—both true and false. Adapting to the new realities is less about fact than simulation, intelligence assessment and early warning systems.

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The Militarisation of Climate Policy Failure

Longstanding concerns over the ‘securitisation’ of the climate crisis’s effects assume militaries have sophisticated plans to navigate a hotter, more chaotic world. While militaries are responding to mitigation and adaptation priorities, the deepening crisis is not yet a primary determinant of their strategic planning. However, the worsening consequences will inevitably become national security concerns and contingency plans need to ensure this response is not militarised.

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Grand strategy and the environmental crisis

China and Russia are striving to profit from the geo-political and economic opportunities resulting from the environmental crisis. Instead of seeing this moment through a narrow lens of competition, developed countries should pursue a model of grand strategy that recognises how failing to ensure global ecological integrity will beggar all nations.

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Briefing

Termination Shock

Strategic failure is when all options are bad. To some, solar geoengineering is the only hedge against policy failures and rising global temperatures. To others, there should be an internationally binding moratorium on research and experimentation. Either way, the need for radical innovation in everything from policy and governance to the roll-out of green technology has never been greater.

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Briefing

COP27: relative progress in a world of absolute failure

International climate diplomacy has presided over an absolute failure: global emissions have risen each year since the first UN conference in 1995. Yet relative progress has been made, with projected temperature rises by 2100 having halved. In a world of fracturing cooperation, the UN approach is a powerful inducement for ‘piecemeal cooperation’. The question is whether it can remain effective in the face of worsening climate crisis.

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