Technological Foresight: A Critical Policymaking Tool for the 21st Century

The 7th paper of the Digital Revolution and New Social Contract research project by André Loesekrug-Pietri explores technological foresight and offers recommendations to make it a key pillar in policymaking.

Technology has become an essential part of our economies, societies and democracies, with a central role in every societal and geopolitical issue. Emerging technologies are disrupting every sector. They are proving to be double-edged swords: they have an immensely beneficial potential, while some technologies can severely disrupt the way our world and societies work. Technologies open up new opportunities, uncover new risks, and reshuffle the cards at a global level. This is a major battleground in big power competition and allows authoritarian states, rogue states, global platforms, and terrorist groups to achieve strategic relevance and project their respective power and values. 

Anticipation is of paramount importance to leading strategically, though the acceleration of technological advancement makes this increasingly challenging. The pace of technological evolution and, even more importantly, the interconnections between different technologies make it even more difficult for leaders to understand new, disruptive technologies and their consequences. Misunderstandings of key enabling technologies can lead to strategic surprise, political confusion, and tensions.

The major crises of the 2020s thus far (health crisis, energy crisis, demographic transition, defense of democracies, etc.) have demonstrated the crucial importance of long-term thinking and the importance of science and technology in our societies. Public policies focused on individual branches or industries, and short-term thinking due to electoral considerations, increasingly fail to grasp the profoundly cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary origin of disruptions and breakthroughs. Leaders and societies without a long-term, agile, and holistic vision are increasingly reacting to unfolding events instead of shaping them around their own values and strategic goals. This is extremely costly both financially and politically.

Technology foresight is therefore a major political and societal endeavor for our democracies.

With this paper we urge democratic societies to have an agile and powerful foresight capability so that the State can fulfill its primary mission: to defend the general interest of its people and not be left at a disadvantage vis-à-vis authoritarian systems.

Further, we demonstrate the relevance of technology foresight through six breakthrough technologies and their potential economic, societal and geopolitical impacts: cognitive manipulation, nuclear fusion, immersive technologies, Quantum Positioning Systems (QPS), nanotechnologies, hypersonics and neuromorphic computing.

Based on our experience, our key recommendation for policymakers is to make foresight and technology foresight in particular a key pillar of their policymaking exercises. 

Societies need to be actively (rather than reactively) involved in shaping their own future. Thus, foresight capabilities should be incorporated into the state architecture and properly articulated.  Foresight knowledge should not be static, but constantly reviewed and updated. For foresight to be effective, it should be coordinated throughout the administrative levels, institutions and organizations that produce it. It is important that there is an independent entity in charge of articulating the foresight knowledge that is disseminated across institutions, who can leverage those insights for proper policy design and decision making.

André Loesekrug-Pietri,  Joint European Disruptive Initiative (JEDI)

To read more about the topic and download the full paper, click here.