Beyond Tomorrow: Navigating Cyber Futures via SAFIRE Scenarios (2028 / 2032)

This welcome Jonathan. How are you doing? I'm alright.
I'm alright. Thank you. So
Jonathan, you are a direct and fellow of Summit Consulting who is a company focusing on anticipating the future. So I be very carefully. So I, 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, I'm afraid not. It's something we, we keep to ourselves that we, we don't, we don't tell anybody else.
Alright. So, so, so can you share with you, you've run some workshops in the morning already? Yeah. Can you share what's your approach? So how do you do it actually?
So the, the basic principle, so 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 offline cars. You'll talk, tell, you'll hear us talking about thoughtful, engaged, collaborative futures efforts.
Now, our mission today is to talk about cybersecurity.
Absolutely.
But of course, before we can talk about cybersecurity, we certainly need to talk about what society, economy, technology, et cetera is going to be do, do in the next couple of years. So, 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. Cybersecurity 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 produce 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 di and innovation directorate.
Can we have the slide please?
The slide,
The
Where I discover he's gonna spring something on me already.
Ah, not, not possible.
There you go.
So perhaps just before we go into the videos, can you explain the, yeah. Let basic
Concept a little bit. Let me just start up right at the bottom here. So the principle of futures and foresight is that you construct ultimate worlds alternate futures and you do it by taking two 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 axis. Axis ranging from this says bowel. 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, you know what bamboo's like. It's, it's vibrant and, and strong and multiple roots. One we've call willow single, strong, flexible, one we've called oak. Beautiful strong breaks in the wind, difficult redwood, tall, beautiful, strong joint 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, when Jonathan first talked to me about these scenarios, he said, oh, I don't have to explain to you. There they are, they are documented. Yeah. And he sent what is 100 pages or whatever,
166 pages. Yeah, 566 discrete references and 44 scenarios. Yeah.
And I thought you,
You didn't, 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 AI 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 he, there's a, there's a story behind that. Yeah, I, when he did it the first time, Victor is Victor. Yeah,
There
You go. Ah, here we go. The first time when he did it, I was not happy with the video. It's like, can we tweak it a little bit? So perhaps we can use a human speaker and all that and say, 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. It's bitches 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.
Jonathan, in 20 seconds, in this future, how does digital life take place? So what, how would you shortly characterize the digital life in
This scenario? This is, this is an intentionally collaborative scenario. It's outward facing, inclusionary you, so you're gonna see transdisciplinary approaches, you're gonna see discip, education, research, digital systems, and I suspect real process or, 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. 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 of between willow and and bamboo?
I think the, the, the tendency towards exclusionary is obviously implying that whilst your national bo borders are, are stronger, your local borders, your local influence is much, much tighter as well. So your local networks, your local development of technology, that sort of stuff makes much more sense.
Alright, moving on to the oak scenario.
The oak scenario. In this future, strong man leaders tighten control after the pandemic, while society grows. Repressive and authoritarian, 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 end game of extractive capitalism.
When I always, when I watch this video, I don't think it's the future.
It's not the future you want and that's a difference. This is a future of borders and they're borders in your head as well as borders in, 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 there are 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, over virtually all aspects of life. But it's specifically digital and regulatory privacy concerns and a shift in innovation focus probably.
Yeah. Now we have now looked at all at these four scenarios, but I guess they also do have several things in common. So things which will come in any, 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 different 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. Please. Thank you. My workshop people, you were great resources, people and goods and the implications of each scenario on those, on those resources and people and goods and social disruptors. There was a real concern that any of these, 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 cybersecurity 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 cybersecurity 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.