Agenda-Setting Foresight

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.