Welcome, Jonathan. How are you doing? I'm all right, thank you.
Jonathan, you are director and fellow of SAMI Consulting, who is a company focusing on anticipating the future. So I think with anticipating the future, it's not meant that you can tell me the stock price in three months from now. I'm afraid not. It's something we keep to ourselves. We don't tell anybody else. All right. So can you share, you run some workshops in the morning already, can you share, what's your approach? So how do you do it actually? So the basic principle, I run a futures and foresight company.
Foresight is looking into the future in a structured, robust, organized and methodologically sound fashion. So you won't find me talking about going to Mars or flying cars. You'll hear us talking about thoughtful, engaged, collaborative futures efforts.
Now, our mission today is to talk about cyber security. Absolutely. But of course, before we can talk about cyber security, we certainly need to talk about what society, economy, technology, et cetera, is going to do in the next couple of years.
So how, what's the approach? How do we do that?
Well, all future happens in the context. You don't live outside of a context. Cyber security doesn't exist outside of a context. So the workshops we did this morning and the videos we're about to see use a set of scenarios we produced for the European Commission called Sapphire. That's because the title is incredibly long, so we use the initials. And that is four global scenarios and 40 regional scenarios around the world, which we produced for the Commission's Research and Innovation Directorate. Can we have the slide, please? Which slide?
Where I discover he's going to spring something on me already. Not possible? There you go. So perhaps, just before we go into the videos, can you explain the basic concept?
Yeah, let me just start right at the bottom here. So the principle of future and foresight is that you construct ultimate worlds, ultimate futures. And you do it by taking two axes of axes of uncertainty and you oppose them against each other. We have two axes here. One is the political axis ranging from inclusionary to exclusionary political structures. And one is an economic access axis ranging from this says bow. We've never had trouble with this before until we came to Germany.
It means business as usual, resisting change, economic business as usual, to demanding change, new economic models. That gives you four opposing worlds. It gives you one we've called bamboo, which is what bamboo is like. It's vibrant and strong and multiple roots. One we've called willow, single, strong, flexible. One we've called oak, beautiful, strong, breaks in the wind, difficult.
Redwood, tall, beautiful, strong, joined together at the base. It's a colonial plant, but also can be buffeted by the winds. And we take that, for instance, bamboo is both inclusionary and demanding change. And the other worlds have the same, have the characteristics identified by the intersection.
Thanks, Jonathan. And when Jonathan first talked to me about these scenarios, he said, oh, I don't have to explain to you. They are documented. And he said, what is 100 pages?
166 pages, 566 discreet references and 44 scenarios. And I thought, you really didn't read them, did you? Not really.
No, I thought not. And I thought, how can I make the audience understand these scenarios without having to read 160 pages? And in the age of AI, what we did, I just fed the 160 pages into HI and asked to produce little nice video clips. And here we go with the first one. To be fair, your AI is called Victor. I've met him. But there's a story behind that. When he did it the first time, Victor, where is Victor? Yeah. There you go. Here we go. The first time when he did it, I was not happy with the video. Can we tweak it a little bit so perhaps we can use a human speaker and all that?
And he said, no, no, no. Then it's not AI anymore. So we have to make AI improve. And that's what he achieved. Which explains why he's got the most outrageous American accent. So let's look at the first video, which is about the bamboo scenario. Bamboo scenario. I warned you. The COVID pandemic of 2020 spurs new models of international cooperation and problem solving. Research becomes collaborative across borders and disciplines. Open access and data sharing enable rapid innovation to address pressing issues like public health, inequality and climate change.
By 2040, economic power is more dispersed. Social equity has increased and research helps find creative solutions to sustainability challenges. Though far from perfect, this world shows the power of working together for the global good. In 20 seconds, in this future, how does digital life take place? How would you shortly characterize the digital scenario? This is an intensely collaborative scenario. It's outward facing, inclusionary. So you're going to see transdisciplinary approaches.
You're going to see education, research, digital systems, and I suspect real process or progress on things like open access and stuff like that. Thank you. Now let's move on to the second one, which is the willow.
Obviously, here you see less inclusive, more national. The willow scenario.
Here, the pandemic leads nations to turn inward. Thus, research and innovation stay local, focusing primarily on self-reliance. Unique solutions emerge from different cultures, but duplication hampers progress.
Gradually, centers of excellence form across the globe. Countries nurture local resilience and circular economies. Countries nurture local resilience and circular economies, though with tight border controls. The world fragments, mercantilism rises, and the climate crisis accelerates. Yet local communities bond together. If the walls between nations can be brought down, this future holds hope. So what is the main difference between willow and bamboo?
I think the tendency towards exclusionary is obviously implying that whilst your national borders are stronger, your local borders, your local influence is much tighter as well. So your local networks, your local development of technology, that sort of stuff makes much more sense.
All right, moving on to the oak scenario. The oak scenario. In this future, strongman leaders tighten control after the pandemic while society grows repressive and authoritarian. Mass surveillance expands in the name of public health and research is dictated by ideology, not science. Corporate partnerships benefit regime allies. Closed borders worsen climate impacts and resource conflicts. Innovation suffers under secrecy and fear. Human potential is squandered for power. This future is enacting the tragedy of the commons.
Climate crisis impacts are accelerating, paradoxically reinforcing the policies and the ideologies of many regimes, which only make these impacts worse. This future sees the endgame of extractive capitalism. Always when I watch this video, I don't think it's the future. It's not the future you want, and that's the difference. This is a future of borders, and they're borders in your head as well as borders in the real world. They are about power. They are about business as usual, in other words, capitalism plus, and exclusionary political structures.
So they may not be the future that you want, but they're a future some countries are already living in. The fire scenario is Redwood. The Redwood scenario.
Here, huge corporations emerge even stronger after the pandemic, aligning with governments. Society is unequal, but innovation flourishes for those who can pay. Climate change becomes a profit center. Individual privacy disappears in a surveillance economy driven by the stock market. While genius and productivity are rewarded, humanity and ethics lag behind.
By 2040, the global economy is more than ever a stockholder society, with world-spanning corporations directing flows of resources, whether ideas, raw materials, automated systems and software, or people. Society has become even more unequal and more fragmented as national power wanes. The climate crisis worsens day by day. System constraints are about to have the last word. What are the main characteristics of Redwood, from a digital perspective?
I think, from a digital perspective, increased surveillance. There is digital inequality, corporate control, significant corporate control over virtually all aspects of life, but specifically digital and regulatory. Privacy concerns and a shift in innovation focus.
Now, we have looked at these four scenarios, but I guess they also do have several things in common, so things which will come in any case, in any of these scenarios. I thought you'd ask this question, so I wrote it down.
So, yes, because one of the important points about scenarios is that no future comes true. We don't do it because we're saying a future will come true. We're saying aspects of all of these futures will come true, and what we focus on is the shared aspects.
So, giving you five. Increased importance of digital platforms in all of the scenarios, just used differently. Data privacy and security concerns. Digital inequality is a real issue in at least three. Adaptation of education, research, innovation in all of them, and the influence of big data and predictive analytics is very much there. I would like to add a couple that came in at the workshops this morning.
Thank you, my workshop people, you were great. Resources, people and goods, and the implications of each scenario on those resources and people and goods, and social disruptors. There was a real concern that all of these societies shared people who were disaffected by the society, and the social disruptors, black hats, cyber disruption, is very clearly evident and potential in all of those societies. We also wanted to start a research project on the way money flows within cyber security and cyber defense, but that was out of this morning's workshop.
All right, thank you. Now, I think now it's time to really talk about cyber security and the consequences for it, and since we shouldn't do that on our own, we have invited two super experts to help us out.
