From Seer to King – Success with Strategic Foresight and Warning

(Art design: Jean-Dominique Lavoix-Carli)

Have you ever heard about Cassandra’s brother, who shared his sister’s gift of prophecy but not her curse?

Could this legend, as other ancient myths, facts and histories, give us some clues to make our delivery and communication of strategic foresight and early warning products more efficient? Could it tell us something about improving the fate of strategic foresight and early warning practitioners and risk managers?

After telling the story of Helenus, we highlight the lessons we can learn from the tale.

The Tale of Helenus

The story of Helenus comes from weaving together the texts of different Greek and Roman authors, each bringing light to a part of our hero’s life. We use here:

  • Homeric poems possibly created in the 8th century BC (between 8th and 6th century for their written form). English translation as in the text. Traduction française (FR) par Charles-René-Marie Leconte de L’Isle.
  • Virgil: Roman poet, 70 BC – 19 BC. English translation as in the text. Traduction française (FR) Anne-Marie Boxus et Jacques Poucet, 2009.
  • Conon: Greek grammarian and mythographer, 63 BC – 14 AD/CE.
  • Dictys Cretensis: fictitious account probably created in Greek around the 1st or 2nd century CE (e.g. “Dictys Cretensis“, Luwian Studies, 2005?).
  • (Pseudo-)Apollodorius, Library (or Bibliotheca): a compendium of Greek myths and legends: 1st, 2nd or 3rd century CE (e.g. Stefano Acerbo, “Anonymous: Apollodorus Bibliotheca [The Library of Apollodorus]. The Literary Encyclopedia“, January 2019, Researchgate).
  • Pausanias: Greek geographer, 110 AD/CE – c. 180 AD/CE.

Helenus was a Trojan Prince, the son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba and the twin-brother of Cassandra. One day, the two children fell asleep in the temple of Apollo Thymbraeus and were found in the morning with serpents at their side licking their ears. From then on they could see and tell the future, as they had received the gift of prophecy (Apollodorus, Library, Sir James George Frazer, Ed, 9.fn 20 Scholiast on Hom. Il. vii.44; Tzetzes, Scholiast on Lycophron, Introd. vol. i. pp. 266ff., ed. C. G. Müller).

Helenus became “far the best of augurs” (Homer, Iliad, vi. 76).

As Troy was attacked by the Greeks and the battle raged, during the first years of the war, Helenus went to Aeanas, a second cousin, son of goddess Aphrodite and favoured by Apollo, and to Hector, his eldest brother, and foretold them in detail how they could turn the tide in the battle and obtain a victory. His prophecy included seeing Hector advising the Queen their Mother that she should lead the offerings of the Trojan wives to “flashing-eyed Athene” so that the goddess would remove the feared most valiant Greek warrior Diomedes from the battle. The Goddess had to be won to the Trojans’ side as she was siding with the Greeks. Hector was wise enough to carefully listen to his brother and do as advised. As a result,

“… and they [the enemy] deemed that one of the immortals had come down from starry heaven to bear aid to the Trojans, that they rallied thus. [110] And Hector shouted aloud and called to the Trojans:
“Ye Trojans, high of heart, and far-famed allies, be men, my friends, and bethink you of furious valour, the while I go to Ilios* and bid the elders that give counsel, and our wives [115] to make prayer to the gods, and promise them hecatombs.”

Homer, Iliad, vi. 76

Some time later, as “flashing-eyed”, “daughter of great Zeus” Athene wanted to act to favour the Greeks and stop too many Trojan victories, Apollo, supporter of Troy, rushed to meet her. The god “king Apollo, son of Zeus” had to find a way to stop her meddling, thus preserving Troy, yet to also satisfy her. The gods finally agreed on a plan contenting them both and postponing a costly battle for singular combats against the most valiant Hector,

“… And Helenus, the dear son of Priam, understood in spirit [45] this plan that had found pleasure with the gods in council; and he came and stood by Hector’s side, and spake to him, saying: “Hector, son of Priam, peer of Zeus in counsel, wouldst thou now in anywise hearken unto me? for I am thy brother. Make the Trojans to sit down, and all the Achaeans, [50] and do thou challenge whoso is best of the Achaeans to do battle with thee man to man in dread combat. Not yet is it thy fate to die and meet thy doom; for thus have I heard the voice of the gods that are for ever.” So spake he and Hector rejoiced greatly when he heard his words… “

Homer, Iliad, vii. 44

Helenus was also an accomplished warrior and he fought against the Greek besides his brothers (e.g. Homer, Iliad, xii. 94).

As time went on, the heroes, both Greek and Trojan, were slain one after the other, the death of one leading to grief, retribution and the death of another. Patrocles, Hector, Achilles, and then Paris were killed. The gods were not in rest and fully battled and argued among themselves for their favoured side.

As Paris had died, Helenus sought to marry his widow, Helene. Alas, his younger brother Deiphobus was preferred through manipulations and “by the favour & faction of the Great” (Conon, Narrationes, 34).

In different and posterior version of the tale, Helenus and Aeneas were outraged to see sacrilege behaviour taking place in Troy, as Alexander, a son of Priam had tricked Achilles and wounded him in the temple of Apollo (Dictys Cretensis iv. 18).

In these two accounts, Helenus decided to leave Troy and take refuge on Mount Ida.

“…He [Helenus] feared not death but the gods, whose shrines Alexander had desecrated, a crime which neither Aeneas nor himself was able to bear. As for Aeneas, he, fearing our anger, had stayed behind with Antenor and old Anchises,…
… During the same time, the sons of Antimachus (whom we have mentioned above) came to Helenus as representatives of Priam. But he refused to do as they begged, that is, to return to his people; and so they departed. 

Dictys Cretensis iv. 18

The Greeks learning about Helenus retreat then either made him prisoner and forced him to speak, or enticed him in doing so.

While [Helenus] was living there quietly, Calchas persuaded the Greeks to set up an ambush for him, and to make him a prisoner of war, in which they succeeded. Helenus, intimidated, prayed to, caressed, and driven also by his resentment, revealed to the Greeks the secret of the state; that the fate of Troy was that it could only be taken by means of a wooden horse, & that it was necessary moreover to remove a statue fallen from Heaven, called the Palladium,[146] which of all the statues preserved in the citadel, was the smallest. “

Conon, Narrationes, 34 – Note: The Palladium is a wooden statue of Pallas Athena, “Athene the wise“.

And thus the fate of Troy was sealed. Troy fell.

Helenus destiny was now linked to the Greeks. He foretold Pyrrhus the elder that he would settle in Epirus, which Pyrrhus did. Pyrrhus granted Helenus the kingdom of Chaonians. Thus, Helenus became king. Helenus married Andromach, Hector’s then Pyrrhus’ widow (Pausanias, Description de la Grèce, Tome premier, l’Attique, i. 11, ii. 23, fn 139 and 140). Aenas, fleeing from the twice fallen Troy as the gods had ordered him, his father Anchises on his back, discovered thus described the surprising situation:

[294] “Here the rumour of a tale beyond belief fills our ears, that Priam’s son Helenus, is reigning over Greek cities, having won the wife and kingdom of Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, and that Andromache has again passed to a husband of her own race.

Virgil, Aeneid, iii. 294-490

King Helenus welcomed his cousin as he arrived. Then, Aenas, worried about his trip and his destiny, took the opportunity to seek the prophecy of the great seer.

[356] “… ‘O son of Troy, interpreter of the gods, who know the will of Phoebus, the tripod and laurel of the Clarian, the stars, and tongues of birds and omens of the flying wing, come, tell me – for every sign from heaven has uttered favourable words to me about my journey, and all the gods in their oracles have counseled me to make for Italy and explore lands remote; only Celaeno the Harpy prophesies a startling portent, horrible to tell of, and threatens baleful wrath and foul famine – what perils am I first to shun? And by what course may I surmount such suffering?

Virgil, Aeneid, iii. 356.

As during the beginning of the Trojan war, Helenus offered a foresight that was detailed and full of advice, even though incomplete as mortals cannot know all and the gods always hide some of their designs.

Then Helenus, first sacrificing steers in due form, craves the grace of heaven and unbinds the fillets of his hallowed brow; with his own hand he leads me to your gates, Phoebus, thrilled with your full presence, and then with a priest’s inspired lips thus prophesies:

[374] “’Goddess-born, since there is clear proof that under higher auspices you journey over the sea – for thus the king of the gods allots the destinies and rolls the wheel of change, and such is the circling course – a few things out of many I will unfold to you in speech, that so more safely you may traverse the seas of your sojourn, and find rest in Ausonia’s haven; for the Fates forbid Helenus to know more and Saturnian Juno stays her utterance…. Moreover, if Helenus has any foresight, if the seer may claim any faith, if Apollo fills his soul with truths, this one thing, Goddess-born, this one in lieu of all I will foretell, and again and again repeat the warning: mighty Juno’s power honour first with prayer; to Juno joyfully chant vows, and win over the mighty mistress with suppliant gifts….These are the warnings that you are permitted to hear from my voice. Go, then, and by your deeds exalt Troy in greatness unto heaven!’…”

Virgil, Aeneid, iii. 356-374

Aenas listened to Helenus and founded Rome. Helenus went on ruling wisely and with foresight over the kingdom of the Chaonians in Epirus.

What can we learn from Helenus?

Successful foresight is precise and actionable

In the tale of Helenus we find most of the elements usually stressed as key in terms of foresight, which thus stresses their timeless importance.

First of all, Helenus’s foresights are each time very detailed and precise.

Those who receive them can thus use these foresights very practically for action. We are not in the realm of generalities nor of vagueness, on the contrary.

Obviously and relatedly, the Trojan seer’s foresight is fundamentally actionable. Actually, it is more than actionable.

Foresight means advice for successful action

Helenus prophecies are concrete advice on what to do to obtain a desired aim in harmony with the forces at work.

Advice and not neutrality

On the contrary from the option chosen by intelligence services, where foresight and policy recommendations are separated (see From Cassandra’s Curse to the Pythia’s Success), with Helenus we are definitely in the realm of advice for the future.

Save if we are working for intelligence then, and still treading carefully not to create resentment, we may have to abandon the idea of separating foresight from policy recommendations. On the contrary, we may have to fully accept that we must also provide policy advice.

Indeed, Homer also shows that if people listen to Helenus and do as prophesied then success follows.

As a result, even though as strategic foresight and warning practitioners we must envision all possible scenarios, probabilize and monitor them, what we must give to policy-makers and decision-makers are advice for a victorious or winning response. Warning is necessary, but might be better received if it is accompanied by or transformed in “foresight and warning for success”.

Accessorily, nowadays, considering the propensity to be anxious and fearful when faced with reality and the wish for a happy end and “positivity”, such approach may save the strategic foresight and warning practitioner from many unpleasant situations.

However, being able to not only do exploratory foresight, as well as warning, but also to transform them in normative foresight for successful policy demands almost twice as much work. Thus, it remains to be seen if decision-makers and various actors are ready to give the resources necessary and pay the price to achieve this result (of course here I do not consider suboptimal and botched analysis and work).

Foresight and the gods

Very interestingly, and in a way that is related to what we saw with the Pythia (see Helene Lavoix, “From Cassandra’s Curse to the Pythia’s Success“, The Red Team Analysis Society, May 2021), the tale of Helenus tells us that successful foresight cannot be separated from listening to and then enlisting specific gods. How can we interpret this aspect in the 21st century?

Re-enchanting foresight

Helenus, as all the characters of the Iliad, is first and foremost living in a place that has not yet been victim of the disenchantment of the world brought about by modernity, as Max Weber (1917) explained. Their behaviour, including their foresight, cannot be comprehended if we do not try to understand their interactions with the gods and with a world where the gods play an all powerful part.

Transposing the tale and its wisdom in our age and century does not mean simply transforming a past sacredness and reverence for the gods by a present blind enslavement to science and technology believed to be free and laic.

To “re-enchant foresight” properly, we must use an understanding of the symbol and essence of the archetypes the gods of Homer and Virgil embody, following Jung (Man and His Symbols, 1964). As a result, we shall fully benefit from Helenus’ tale.

Bowing to the interweaving of greater forces

The foresight Helenus gives stems from comprehending evolving complex situations resulting from forces most often unseen and triggered by both humans and the gods. The gods indeed are an embodiment of these forces.

This corresponds to considering the interplay and interweaving of various dynamics – the “forces” – at work in the world. To understand this interplay, we must thus pay attention to and understand the underlying processes out of which phenomena result. This is what I would call true classical proper foresight analysis, which leads us to develop a model for each issue (see Course 1 on Analytical Modeling).

It is vital here to highlight that such understanding can in no way be obtained by a juxtaposition of multiple disconnected trends, as we often find nowadays (e.g. for some of the dangers and inadequacy of such approaches H. Lavoix, The Key Technologies of the Future (1), The Red Team Analysis Society, June 2021). The inability to create hierarchical taxonomies that is displayed by many in our field and more broadly increasingly in society is puzzling at best, dangerous at worst. Similarly the inability of individuals to understand transitivity in factors (if A implies B and B implies C, then A implies C) is as worrying.

What could result from such approaches, at best, is a patchy outlook completely unsuited for successful action.

To explain the spread of such unsatisfying perspectives, we may have, among other factors the Dunning Kruger effect (“Unskilled and Unaware of It… 1999, see Course 1 on Analytical Modeling, Course 3 on Mitigating biases). Worse still, we may worry that a general lowering of intelligence – measured through IQ scores – in developed countries – starts manifesting here (Evan Horowitz, “IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries and that doesn’t bode well for humanity“, Think, May 2019; Peter Dockrill, “IQ Scores Are Falling in “Worrying” Reversal of 20th Century Intelligence Boom“, Sciencealert, 13 June, 2018). Should such research be correct, then the drop would possibly be of 7 fewer IQ score points per generation starting after 1975, with variations according to various variables. Of course we can also break the thermometer but this would be a very destructive attitude.

If the spread of unsatisfying approaches, unable to consider complex interplays, were an established trend, then we would have to find ways to compensate and to convince people to use these ways.

Indeed, Helenus’ tale tells us that foresight must consider the forces, even unseen, that are at work and that it is a necessary condition for success.

It is however not enough.

The gods to honour

The story of Helenus also shows that human beings must accept and bow to these forces, which are greater than them.

In that condition, those listening to proper foresight will be successful.

In turn, this means that foresight must also include advice related to the best behaviour to adopt to be successful considering these forces greater than us.

For example, in the context of war, Helenus explains to Hector what must be done to cajole and please Athene. This is all the more important that Athene sides normally with the Greeks. Nonetheless Helenus’ foresight is right and the Trojans succeed. In other words, the qualities that Trojans had then to seek in war was wisdom as Athene is the goddess of wisdom and war strategy, the second being impossible without the first. They listen to Helenus and win.

In the third prophecy given to Aeanas, the goddess who must be please is Juno, Zeus consort. Juno, however, was the enemy of Trojans in general and of Aenas in particular. A straightforward transposition to our century is more difficult. We may hypothesise that Helenus’ advice was related to the need for Aenas to pay particular attention to those people still obeying to the great-goddess, which Juno may represent. The advice may also suggest that Aenas had not to marry until he had reached the end of his journey. In any case, what matters for us is the type and scope of advice Helenus gives.

To summarise, the lessons learned for us is thus to not only consider carefully those forces at work, but also the best way to address them.

The Seer and the Just Heroes

Helenus as a seer cannot be separated from those who seek his prophecies, listen carefully to him and then apply scrupulously his recommendations.

The two main heroes who listen to Helenus are not any character. They are Hector, the most valiant Trojan prince, meant to succeed King Priam, and then Aenas, half god, considered as very valiant and of high moral standard and then the founder of Rome. Despite their status and qualities, both listen to Helenus, as the seer is, at the end of the day, merely the one who unveils part of the gods’ plans. They are not interacting though narcissism, competition, and will to dominate another but at a higher level, which is to act together in a just way to achieve a greater goal.

Thus what we must retain here is the importance of cultivating as much as possible a primacy given to the objective and the world in both the strategic foresight practitioner and the user of foresight.

Then and exactly as we saw previously in the story of Tigranes, the disappearance of the heroes also somehow goes hand in hand with the absence of foresight that is delivered (Helene Lavoix, “Why the Messenger Got Shot and how to Avoid this Fate“, The Red Team Analysis Society, April 2021).

Furthermore, according to later accounts, the adverse attitude of Trojans themselves is stressed. It is this very attitude that causes Helenus to withdraw on Mount Ida.

It would thus appear, as we had deduced from Plutarch (Why the Messenger got shot, ibid.), that when a society or civilization decays, then both heroes and foresight disappear. It could be that only heroes can listen to foresight. If heroes are nowhere to be found anymore, then people practicing foresight have no other choice than to withdraw.

However, here, thanks to Roman Virgil and Greek Pausanias, there is an interesting twist to the story that brings us beyond Plutarch’s understanding.

Ultimate reward

When a civilization or a society decays, then, so far in humanity history, others take over, would it be only temporarily. This is exemplified in our tale by Troy as the decaying power and the Greek cities as the ascending one.

Once the ascending power has achieved supremacy, then it can use anew the foresight of those seers who have withdrawn, as did Pyrrhus. Showing wisdom, as one cannot win without it, they then reward the seer. This is how Helenus became King.

The later accounts try to further involve Helenus in playing a role in the fall of Troy. According to them, as the ascending power as it is still competing for supremacy, it then starts looking for the advice of those seers who have had to withdraw from their own societies. Getting these advice gives the ascending power the final elements necessary to usher a new age.

In these stories, at the end, the foresight practitioner is a winner, because the line of conduct s/he followed was to be true to greater forces, to the just values and wisdom that animated Troy until the fall of the heroes and not to the shell of what Troy became.

Then, and this can be found throughout the accounts, with more or less stress, by refusing to accept the decay of their own civilisation, not only Helenus but also Aenas, and even Hector, through his widow Andromach, the true representatives of Troy continue to exist and to thrive. Helenus not only rules over a kingdom but also thanks to his foresight, helps a Trojan found the next power, Rome.

Thus, the tale of Helenus ends on a twin message of hope for strategic foresight and warning practitioners. If they truly consider the forces at work, if they obey the spirit of these forces, of foresight and the values of their society, then, at the end, not only will they be personally rewarded but also contribute to see a better and more powerful civilization built.

To conclude I shall leave you with a question to ponder: why did our societies choose to remember Cassandra, her curse and tragic fate rather than Helenus, his benediction and glorious destiny?

Note

*Ilios and Troy were traditionally considered as synonymous in Homer Iliad (see María Del Valle Muñoyerro, “Troy and Ilios in Homer: Region and City”, Glotta, 74. Bd., 3./4. H. (1997/1998), pp. 213-226.

Further bibliography

Homer, The Iliad with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, Ph.D. in two volumes. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Man and His Symbols, 1964.

Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments“, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 77, no 6, p 1121-1134, American Psychological Association (1999).

Weber, Max, “Science as Vocation” 1917.

Antarctic China (2) – China’s Planetary Game

(Art design: Jean-Dominique Lavoix-Carli)

A planetary Go game:

Most Western geopolitical observers seem to be unable to see the planetary scale strategy that China deploys in the Antarctic (Alexander B. Gray, “China’s Next Geopolitical Goal: Dominate Antarctica”, The National Interest, 20 March 2021). The roots of this “very Great Game” run deep in Chinese history and strategic culture. They do as well in the current Chinese development strategy (Jean-Michel Valantin, “China and the New Silk Road, from Oil Wells to the Moon… and Beyond”, The Red Team Analysis Society, July 6, 2015).

A Go Game from Pole to Pole

In order to understand the scale of this mammoth geopolitical undertaking, we have to keep in mind that China’s strategic style is deeply different from the Western one. As Scott Boorman establishes in 1971 and David Lai in 2002, the main principle of China’s strategy is not domination through the direct exercise of force (Scott Boorman, The Protracted Game – A Wei’Chi interpretation of the Maoist Revolutionary Strategy, 1969, David Lai, « Learning from the Stones: A Go Approach to Mastering China’s Strategic Concept Shi’ », 2004, GlobalSecurity.org). Indeed, force is combined with indirect mastery and a “surround and conquer” approach.

This approach is combined with “shih”. That notion encapsulates the meaning of “organizing” the strategic configuration of “circumstances”. It therefore aims to create an order of “circumstances” more favorable and advantageous to Chinese interests.

From a strategic point of view, “organizing circumstances” does not mean fixing parameters. It tries to “canalize” the flows of events as they deploy in the continuity of space and time.

As it happens, the development of the Chinese presence in the Antarctic is both a signal and a vector of the way China deploys a worldwide strategy of influence. This strategy extends from pole to pole (Jean-Michel Valantin, “Antarctic China-1: Strategies for a Very Cold Place” 31 May, 2021, and “Jean-Michel Valantin, “Towards a US-China War? (1) and (2): Military Tensions in the Arctic”, The Red Team Analysis Society, September 16, 2019 ».

The Invisible strategy

As we have seen in Antarctic China (1), Beijing drives the building of a fifth ground station. In the same time, it adds the Beidou satellite positioning systems to existing stations. Meanwhile, the Chinese fishing fleet is more and more active in the Antarctic Ocean (Anne-Mary Brady, “China, Russia Push GPS Rival in Antarctica”, The Australian, September 6, 2018).

Chinese strategy IS Chinese

If, from a Western point of view, these developing capabilities appear as a strategy in itself, they also have another dimension, anchored in Chinese philosophical and strategic thought (Valantin, “China and the New Silk Road: the Pakistani strategy”, The Red Team Analysis, May 18, 2015).

That dimension is grounded in an understanding of the spatial dimension of China, in the geographic sense. Space is not only conceived as a support to spread Chinese influence and power to the “outside”, but also to allow the Middle Kingdom to “aspirate” what it needs from the “outside” to the “inside”  (Quynh Delaunay, Naissance de la Chine moderne, L’Empire du Milieu dans la globalisation, 2014).

This is why we qualify some spaces as being “useful” to the deployment of the Chinese strategy. It is also why each “useful space” is related, and “useful”, to other “useful spaces”. In the same dynamic, the different countries involved in the deployment of the Chinese strategy are “useful spaces” for China. 

This philosophy of space and time as flows is the basic material of the Chinese strategic tradition. As Scott Boorman, Arthur Waldron and David Lai, among others, establish quite clearly, this tradition expresses itself especially well through the “Go game”. This very ancient game emphasizes the importance not to control, but to master the space of the adversary (Arthur Waldron, “China’s Military Classics”, Joint Forces Quarterly, Spring 1994). The strategy is to “convert” that space into one’s own. To do so, one has to “surround and conquer” the pieces, i.e. the space of the adversary.

The strategy of useful spaces

In order to turn the game into a victorious tendency, the main goal is to attack the strategy of the adversary and not “only” its space. This strategic philosophy suffuses some of the most important Chinese strategic works, such as Sun Zi’s The Art of War. It drove some of the major strategic developments during the twentieth century.

It is true, for example, of Mao’s “revolutionary warfare” against Japan and the nationalist military (Scott Boorman, ibid). As we have seen in The Red Team Analysis Society, it also drives the mammoth “Belt & Road initiative” (Jean-Michel Valantin, “China and the Belt and Road Initiative” section, The Red Team Analysis Society).

Hence, in this strategic context and tradition, the question arises of the “usefulness” of Antarctica. This “usefulness” appears in the context of the worldwide deployment of Chinese influence (David Lai, ibid). In other words, how is Beijing elaborating “shih”, the strategic configuration of favorable circumstances by installing capabilities in Antarctica?

From the Antarctic to a worldwide encirclement

The recent and rapid developments of the Chinese presence in the Arctic and in the Antarctic follow the same timelines. In other terms, we hypothesise that Beijing plays a worldwide “Go game” at a planetary scale.

Surround and Conquer

Within the framework of Go, China becomes the “Middle Kingdom” between the Arctic and the Antarctic. While it becomes a “near Arctic nation”, China “surrounds” the whole Indo-Pacific region between geographical China and the Antarctic  as a “useful space”. The same is true for the Atlantic Ocean, from the South Pole to the North pole ((Jean-Michel Valantin, “Is the West Losing the Warming Arctic?”, The Red Team Analysis Society, December 7, 2020).

This means that China uses its growing presence in the Arctic and in the Antarctic to increase its global influence. This happens through a subtle and multiscale Go and its strategy of “surround and conquer”. This game extends from one hemisphere to the other and joins the multiple continental and maritime “useful spaces”.

Encircling Australia

For example, the heightening Chinese presence in Antarctica “completes” the “encirclement” of Australia by the “useful Antarctic” at its south, while mainland China “occupies” its north. In other words, Australia is “under siege” in an immense “useful” Indo-Pacific ocean (Anne-Marie Brady, China as a Polar Great Power, 2017).

Australia is also directly useful to China, because of its coal and agricultural resources. Moreover, “surrounding’” it also means diminishing the “living space” of Japan and of the U.S. in the Pacific, i.e. some of the most powerful competitors of China in the Indo-Pacific region (Bonny Lin et alii, Regional Responses to U.S-China Competition in the Indo-Pacific Region, Rand Corporation, 2020)

Last Chinese standing

It is interesting to note that the Chinese strategic approach is located in a long game perspective. Furthermore, this relation to strategic time is embedded within the biological and climate change crisis. This mammoth crisis has deep consequences in the Indo-Pacific and Antarctic region.

A planetary crisis

The destabilization of different parts of the Antarctic glaciers is already accelerating and may soon reach an irreversible tipping point. This process is bringing massive quantities of water under the form of ice platforms. Then, those platforms literally crawl into the sea at a heightening rhythm and scale. During the 21st century, the breaking of the Antarctic ice sheet may add dozens of centimetres to the ocean global rise (Julie Brigham-Grette, Andrea Dutton, “Antarctica is Headed for a Climate Tipping Point by 2060, with Catastrophic Melting if Emissions Aren’t Cut Quickly”, The Conversation, 17 May 2021).

From a biological point of view, the current biodiversity crisis devastates the Indo-Pacific region, especially in its marine dimension. As a matter of fact, the quickly heightening levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases, among them CO2, which have triggered climate change, are also acidifying the seawater (“Climate change indicators: Ocean Acidity“, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2016).

This process combines with the chemical and biological impacts of land, industrial, and agricultural pollution. It endangers the fisheries, essential components of the food resources of entire maritime facades. These changes have direct geopolitical consequences, because they impact the most basic geophysical equilibrium upon which human societies and international relations depend ( Lincoln Paine, The Sea and Civilization, a Maritime History of the World, 2013).

Dead zones

The chemical and biological situation of the Indian Ocean keeps deteriorating because of the multiplication of two other giant dead zones in the Indian Ocean (Harry Pettit, ‘The ocean is suffocating’: Fish-killing dead zone is found growing in the Arabian Sea – and it is already bigger than SCOTLAND”, Mail on Line, 27 April 2017. One giant “dead zone” is also developing in the Gulf of Oman. It thus threatens marine life and fisheries in this part of the Arabian Sea.

Another giant “dead zone” spans at last 60.000 square km and grows in the Bay of Bengal. It, threatens the food resources of the 200 million people living on the littoral of the eight countries that surround the Bay (Amitav Gosh and Aaron Savion Lobo, “Bay of Bengal: depleted fish stocks and huge dead zone signal tipping point”, The Guardian, 31 January 2017). In other terms, climate and ocean change are directly threatening the food security of hundreds of millions of people in Africa, in the Arabian Sea area and in South Asia.

The Middle Kingdom and Survival

In other words, China deploys its planetary scale great strategy, while the current massive bioclimatic crisis unfolds and suffuses everything and everyone on Earth. This crisis becomes a driver of international competition for access to resources.

As the development of Chinese fisheries in the Antarctic Ocean emphasizes, Beijing seems keen on driving China through the immense “perfect storm” of the climate and resources crisis. In order to implement this long-term strategy, China organises the world and planetary “circumstances” in an advantageous way for its national interests.

We must now see how this Antarctic “surround and conquer” – “shih” strategy combine with the Chinese space program (Peter Wood, Alex Stone, Taylor E. Lee, “China’s Space Ground Segment, building the Pillars of a Great Space Power”, Blue Path Labs Report for the China Aerospace Studies Institute, U.S Air University, March 1, 2021).

The Ultimate Key Technologies of the Future (3) – Extreme Environments

Enabling human actions in an altered environment

This third article is the last part of our “equation” to identify the key technologies of the future.

We started, with the first article, in establishing that solely making laundry lists of new technologies was insufficient to identify the key technologies of the future. We needed more: a system explaining the logic behind the success of technologies. Thus, we developed a schematic model depicting the reasons for the use of technology, at individual and collective level.

Then, with the second part, we found conditions that make technologies key. Technologies that help satisfy one or more of the actions needed to meet individual and social needs, as well as the conditions for these actions, become key. Furthermore, because we have a model that allows for an evolution of technologies through time, our model is able to identify the key technologies of the future.

We must now look at the way these still potential key future technologies function in their environment. Indeed, they can only be key if they work and fulfil their function in a certain environment.

We first highlight the many ways through which our environment is degraded, indeed increasingly often leading to extreme environments. Furthermore, this degradation of our ecosystems forces us to increasingly use naturally extreme environments.

We then focus on the way key technologies of the future will have to be resilient to these extreme conditions. We explain that key technologies will need to enable actions in these extreme environments, with examples related to deep sea and deep underground environments. We also explore possible escalating feedback loops between the use of extreme environments and the alteration of the environment, using the case of disease and the rise of contaminated environments.

Finally, we highlight that some technologies will not only be key in the future but also for the future, if they can mitigate damages and, even better, heal our altered environment.

An altered environment

Our environment has changed compared with the past. This will be even more the case tomorrow, if we consider linear trends. Our ecosystems will change in ways that are essentially negative or threatening to the survival of individuals and societies. Several destructive forces are at work.

Adverse forces alter our environment

Numerous adverse forces, often interacting through positive feedback loops, alter our environment, notably:

  • Climate change (C02 in the atmosphere in particular);
  • Overpopulation;
  • Loss of biodiversity;
  • Invasive species;
  • Increase in diseases, epidemics and pandemics (stemming notably from the previous two factors);
  • Industrial, chemical and nuclear accidents;
  • Urbanisation;
  • Intensive agriculture;
  • Space activity and debris;
  • Etc

Towards extreme environments

The altered environment within which we, as individuals and societies, live will tend to become extreme. This will take place either as the altering forces transform the environment itself or as the new altered environment pushes us to discover new environments that were previously left aside because they were out of reach, harsh and because we did not need them.

Here we build upon the original idea of “extreme environments” as developed by the UK Ministry of Defence, Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) in its Global Strategic Trends – Out to 2040 (2010). There, the highly likely growing resource scarcity were to lead to strengthened interest in what was called “Extreme Environments”, i.e. the deep sea, space, the Arctic, Antarctica and the deep underground – and in their exploitation. The DCDC then abandoned this idea, despite its power.

Our future extreme environments will be:

  • The very cold: Arctic and Antarctica notably;
  • The very hot (with increased temperatures because of climate change) and the need to use all earthly spaces, such as deserts. Possibly we may have to move to very hot places on other planets;
  • Extreme weather events haphazardly shaking ecosystems;
  • Contaminated areas: pandemics, industrial hazards, radiations;
  • Space
  • Deep sea
  • Deep earth and underground
  • Digital and increasingly virtual environments: extreme for human beings as we need to adapt extremely fast to them and as these environments are totally alien to us.

(Photo Pandemic in India by Gwydion M. Williams, 2020_05_300100 – CC BY 2.0; Deep Earth : Professor Dale Russell , “The Future of Cities”, Samsung KX50: The Future in Focus, 29 août 2019, other images as on slide and Public Domain)

The key technologies of the future and extreme environments

The key technologies we identified will thus have imperatively to consider these extreme environments.

Extreme resilience, an imperative condition for the key technologies of the future

The key technologies of the future will imperatively need to function in altered environments, which become or are increasingly extreme.

No matter how wonderful a technology and how great it could be at helping satisfy human and social needs, if this technology is fragile and cannot cope with extreme environments, then it will be useless. It will thus not be a key technology of the future.

For example, wind turbines will need to be able to withstand increasingly powerful and frequent hurricanes and twisters (e.g. Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, “Wind Turbines in Extreme Weather: Solutions for Hurricane Resiliency“, 23 January 2018).

Computers and more broadly everything related to the digital world, including AI, will need to function under extreme weather events and under extreme temperatures. They will have to face possible disruptions or hard choice in terms of energy. As a result, energy-related technologies will become even more important. For example, photonic computing hardware, such as the chips LightOn develops, is a strong candidate for being a key technology of the future.

Here, to precisely identify the key technologies of the future, we shall need to add to our broad schematic model precise analytical mapping for each tech (or family of tech). We shall need to make sure all forces and their interactions are taken into account (see online course on analytical modeling). We must be sure some vulnerabilities are not overlooked. It will be crucial to analyse each and every technology in this way before to decide to use them if they demand substantial investments, if they have a crucial role within your company or organisation. Imagine that you invest millions, if not billions in integrating a technological system, to find out a couple of months or years later that this technology that is now at the heart of your system just fails repeatedly or worse definitely. This is also of course even worse for governments and state agencies and for governance infrastructures as whole countries could then face immense disruptions, with cascading adverse effects.

If you are investing in the development of new technologies, be it through portfolio on the markets or directly as a company or as a state agent in supporting this or that industry, use, then you will need, likewise, to check the “extreme resilience” of the technologies you support. Imagine what could happen if you chose wrongly.

To sum up, a sine qua non condition for a technology to be key in the future is to have as characteristics extreme resilience.

The key technologies of the future will need to help us access and operate in extreme environments

The key technologies of the future will need to help us access and operate in extreme environments.

Extreme environments are, by definition, those environments that are not favourable to human societies. As a result, it is always difficult to survive in these environments and most often hard to access them.

Even in the case of digital and virtual environments, negative and so far unknown impacts on human beings exist (e.g. Matt Southern, “Study Finds 4 Negative Effects of Too Much Video Conferencing“, SEJ, 27 February 2021; Cheryl Roy, “What are the harmful effects of virtual reality?“, Law Technology today, January 21, 2021; Lavoie, Main, King, et al. Virtual experience, real consequences: the potential negative emotional consequences of virtual reality gameplay. Virtual Reality 25, 69–81, 2021, etc.). Meanwhile, it is impossible to live only through and by digital and virtual reality. Finally, the countless companies handling cybersecurity, as well as the construction and development of the digital and virtual environment, are evidence of the difficulty of access to this type of world.

Detailed studies for each extreme environments will be necessary to determine conditions for access and operation. In the meantime and as example, we can give instances of new technologies helping us access the “under-worlds”, i.e. deep sea and deep earth environments.

Deep Sea

The deep sea is an extreme environment that is increasingly becoming crucial for the future (see Helene Lavoix, “The Deep-Sea Resources Brief“, The Red Team Analysis Society, updated January 2018, first ed 2012). It must be seen notably in the context of need for resources including energy, protection of fragile ecosystems, as well as strategically with the redrawing of real boundaries of states. Note that this last element, although fundamental, does not seem to have already permeated global awareness.

China is very advanced in developing and using deep sea technologies as Liu Feng, secretary general of the China Ocean Mineral Resources Research and Development Association (COMRA), highlights (Interview by Wang Yan, “China’s deep-sea mining, a view from the top“, China Dialogue, 18 October 2019). Strategically, it is also active in being involved with the corresponding international authorities. In October 2019, for example, Beijing Pioneer Hi-Tech Development Corporation and the International Seabed Authority (ISA) signed an exploration contract for polymetallic nodules in the western Pacific Ocean (ISA Press release, 24 October 2019). On 9 November 2020, the International Seabed Authority and China launched a joint training and research centre (ISA press release, 9 November 2020).

China has the highest number of sea bed exploration contracts with the ISA (map 22 April 2021 ISA – click on image to access original on ISA website).

Technologically, China has developed, among others, an unmanned submersible, Qianlong 3, that carried out its first 3500 meters deep dive in April 2018 (Global Times). Its deep-sea manned submersible Fendouzhe finished a deep-sea mission in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific and reached a depth of more than 10.000 meters in November 2020. This is the second deepest dive after an American record set in 2019 (“New Chinese submersible reaches Earth’s deepest ocean trench“, Phys.org, November 2020).

Deep Earth

The DARPA launched a Subterranean challenge in December 2017 to “develop innovative technologies that would augment operations underground”. The program should end in 2021.

Meanwhile, futurists, such as Professor Dale Russell, imagine a life underground (“The Future of Cities” in Samsung KX50: The Future in Focus, 29 août 2019).

Some quantum technologies, for example quantum gravimeters, may become key to map the underground world (e.g. Dr Nicole Metje and Dr Michael Holynski, “How can Quantum Technology make the underground visible?” University of Birmingham, 2016; Geoff Zeiss, “Applying quantum effects to detecting underground infrastructure“, Between the Poles, 8 February 2021). Thanks to them, underground developments are and will likely be easier to implement, which will most probably be key as deep earth environments become more important. The observation of these constructions will also be crucial in terms of security (Ibid.).

Geothermal energy

Geothermal energy is also an interesting example of deep earth usage (e.g. John W. Lund, “Geothermal energy“, Encyclopedia Britannica, 30 Apr. 2018; Julia Rosen, “Supercharged geothermal energy could power the planet“, New Scientist, 17 October 2018). It is an energy of the underground extreme environment. Although it has been used for millenia through its naturally easily accessible output such as hot springs, technologies allowing for a more systematic and deeper use are more recent and evolve as more extreme depth and heat are reached and channeled.

Such technologies are both key in terms of energy and in term of access to and use of extreme environments. They could also have serious deleterious impacts, thus participating, in turn, in altering the environment.

Geothermal energy could also be a game changer for some countries, as could signal El Salvador efforts to couple its volcanoes’ geothermic energy and so far environmentally unfriendly bitcoin. Furthermore, here, social coordination, through political authorities via currency, is also impacted (Reuters, “Does money grow on volcanoes? El Salvador explores bitcoin mining“, 10 June 2021).

Technologies related to geothermal energy are thus highly likely part of the key technologies of the future. To the least they must be put under watch.

Extreme emergence of disease: From deep earth to contaminated environments

Using deep earth environments may also have unexpected and unintended consequences. That usage of an extreme environment has the potential to create an escalating feedback loop with other extreme environments.

Let us look at a case that may help us start understanding what could happen. Even though the Mojiang mine in Kunming, China, is an abandoned copper mine and thus probably not part of what we would call deep earth environment, we may nonetheless use this example to imagine possible impacts of deep – and less deep – earth activities.

Following the illness and death of miners working in the abandoned mine in 2012, a new virus of a rodent-origin – henipa-like virus – was identified in the mine, while 293 coronavirus were sampled in and around the mine, out of which “eight are “SARS-type” coronavirus” (Zhiqiang Wu et al., “Novel Henipa-like Virus, Mojiang Paramyxovirus, in Rats“, China, 2012, Emerg Infect Dis. 2014 Jun; 20(6): 1064–1066.; David Stanway, “Explainer: China’s Mojiang mine and its role in the origins of COVID-19“, Reuters, 9 June 2021).

If new viruses and new possible hosts emerge, then, potentially new diseases with pandemic capabilities may also follow. The Mojiang mine case could thus be an example of how new epidemics could emerge out of interactions between human beings and so far pristine environments. As a result, the extreme environment related to contamination would highly likely be activated.

If we follow this train of thoughts, and apply it to 2021, then the key question is not to know if China is guilty or not of being at the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, possibly stemming from the mine. The real crucial question for the future would be to wonder how many of new extreme environment human activities enabled by technology, could unleash pandemics and how to mitigate the risk.

All locations surrounding extreme environments (namely deep sea, deep underground, very cold and very hot, space – possibly coming from other planets, virtual – by extension “cyber” viruses) would need to be closely monitored for the appearance of such new viruses and other organisms that could cause contamination. Bacteria and viruses emerging from the melting permafrost are another case exemplifying this possible threat (e.g. Jasmin Fox-Skelly, “Long-dormant bacteria and viruses, trapped in ice and permafrost for centuries, are reviving as Earth’s climate warms“, BBC, 4 May 2017). Technologies allowing for monitoring such risks and then necessary for accessing the extreme environments without triggering contamination would become key.

To sum up, those technologies, resilient enough to operate under extreme conditions, allowing us to access extreme environments and make them habitable for and exploitable by human beings and societies are very likely to be key in the future. Meanwhile, new possible alterations of our environment could appear, leading to deleterious escalating feedback loops.

This untoward possible twist, in turn, highlights a new need technology will have to meet, as we shall now see.

Ultimate Key technologies for the future

Taking into account our altered environment, we can consider two other functions that technology may play and that would make them key, indeed vital.

Technologies could mitigate the alterations of and negative impacts on the environment, as generated by previous human – and natural – activity.

Even more positively, we may imagine technologies that could repair the damages created and heal the environment.

Those repairing and healing technologies are more than needed. We may consider them not only as key technologies of the future but also ultimate technologies for our future.

Conclusion

To sum up, the key technologies of the future are those that help meet one or many of the actions and conditions critical to satisfy evolving individual and social needs. These technologies may notably help in ensuring energy as well as defense and attack needs. They may also be operative in three types of actions and tasks: motion and load transport, craftmanship and various types of implementation, and finally all the tasks related to calculation, memory, knowledge, understanding and transmission.

To be truly key in the future, and not only potentially so, these technologies will have to be resilient enough to function in an increasingly altered world and notably in extreme environments.

Furthermore, those technologies that will also allow accessing these extreme environments and enable human actions there will too be key in the future.

Finally, technologies that will help mitigate earlier damages to our environment, in the broader sense of the term, or even better heal this environment, will not only be key in the future but also key for the future.

Bibliography

DARPA, Subterranean challenge, 2017.

ISA Press release, 24 October 2019

ISA press release, 9 November 2020

Lavoie, Main, King, et al. Virtual experience, real consequences: the potential negative emotional consequences of virtual reality gameplay. Virtual Reality 25, 69–81, 2021

Lund, John W.. “Geothermal energy”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 30 Apr. 2018.

Metje Nicole, and Michael Holynski, “How can Quantum Technology make the underground visible?” University of Birmingham, 2016;

Phys.org, “New Chinese submersible reaches Earth’s deepest ocean trench“, November 2020

Roy, Cheryl, “What are the harmful effects of virtual reality?“, Law Technology today, January 21, 2021;

Russell, Dale, “The Future of Cities” in Samsung KX50: The Future in Focus, 29 août 2019.

Southern, Matt, “Study Finds 4 Negative Effects of Too Much Video Conferencing“, SEJ, 27 February 2021;

Stanway, David, “Explainer: China’s Mojiang mine and its role in the origins of COVID-19“, Reuters, 9 June 2021.WuWu

Wu, Zhiqiang et al., “Novel Henipa-like Virus, Mojiang Paramyxovirus, in Rats“, China, 2012, Emerg Infect Dis. 2014 Jun; 20(6): 1064–1066..

Yan, Wang, Interview “China’s deep-sea mining, a view from the top“, China Dialogue, 18 October 2019

Zeiss, Geoff, “Applying quantum effects to detecting underground infrastructure“, Between the Poles, 8 February 2021.

The Key Technologies of the Future (2) – Evolution

To be key, technologies must ease and improve human actions

In the first part of this series we found that solely making laundry lists of new technologies was insufficient to identify the key technologies of the future. Use of inadequate classifications made matters worse. We needed more: a system explaining the logic behind the success of technologies. Thus, we developed a schematic model depicting the reasons for the use of technology, at individual and collective level.

In this article, we apply our schematic model progressively to identify more precisely key technologies of the future. Using the logic we highlighted, we start with making the link between technology and human actions implemented to meet the needs of individuals and of society. Then we check that our model indeed allows us to look at evolution and dynamics as these are crucial if one wants to look at the future. This gives us first conditions or rules technologies must meet to be key in the future.

Key technologies enable actions and their conditions

As a reminder, we have a model that makes explicit the logic underlying why we need and use technologies (see part 1 for an explanation).

Now, we look again at this model from the perspective of the types of tasks and actions we need to carry out to make sure individual and social needs are met.

The individual and social needs (on the left hand side) are satisfied thanks to “tasks and actions” (the hand in the middle) enabled by technologies that will also help meet the conditions for successful action.

Key technologies are thus these technologies that participate in:

  • Enabling three types of actions
    • motion, load transport, as well as related force;
    • craftsmanship and various types of implementation, as well as related force;
    • all the tasks related to calculation, memory, knowledge, understanding, transmission, etc.
  • Helping meet the conditions for action
    • Energy: a sine qua non condition for action – and life. Indeed, without energy nothing is possible, as shown by Thomas Homer Dixon (The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, Random House Canada, 2006).
    • “Defence and attack”: compared with energy, the “defence and attack” capabilities need not to be all exerted permanently. The willingness to exert it, however, must be permanent. It is the awareness that there is an unwavering willingness to exert defence and attack that will make this very exertion discontinuous and temporary.
      An example of this phenomenon is nuclear deterrence (e.g. Alexey Arbatov, “Nuclear Deterrence: A Guarantee or Threat to Strategic Stability?“, Carnegie Moscow Centre, 22 March 2019). Another example is the internalisation of norms and the related moral system that allows a society to function (e.g. Boyd & Richerson, “Culture and the Evolution of the Human Social Instincts“, in Roots of Human Sociality, 2006). A third key example is the legitimate monopoly of violence, where rational authorities and legitimacy allows for the monopoly of violence to be truly used as little as possible (e.g. Moore, Injustice: The Social Basis of Obedience and Revolt, 1978, 440-449)

Technologies that help meet one or many of these actions and the conditions of these actions also become fundamental to meet individual and social needs. As a result they become key technologies.

Key technologies evolve with time: Towards a phylogeny of technologies?

Let us now look at these enabling technologies from a dynamic point of view. Does our schematic model allow for evolution along time?

What we seek to establish here is the evolutionary relationships between the meeting of individual and social needs and actions helped by technologies. Thus, borrowing from natural sciences, where Phylogeny is the science/study of evolutionary relationships between organisms, we are setting the first stones for a phylogeny of technologies (“Taxonomy and Phylogeny,” Biology Library, LibreTexts project, 2019).

Example of a phylogeny, here for the SARS-CoV2 (GISAID). Such approach could be adapted to follow the evolution of technologies and detect future key technologies.

In this article, as test and first steps, we shall remain at a schematic level, as our aim is to create a framework model that can then be applied to specific technologies. Obviously, a developed phylogeny would need to precisely detail the historical evolution of each enabling technologies we use as examples below. Right now, a sketch, however imperfect, is sufficient for our purpose. What we want is to test the logic behind the model.

Evolving technologies enabling the conditions for action

Energy-related technologies

Energy-related technologies moved with time. We had first a situation when no technology or hardly any was used, when the sun (and probably lightning) as well as hunting and gathering – food being the fundamental energy for human beings as highlighted by Homer Dixon (Ibid.) – were the sole source of energy. We moved then to a time when “tech”, then rather primitive, started being involved in the discovery of fire, and the use of wind and water.

Moving forward in time, we had technologies included in sedentary agriculture and those that allowed or facilitated energy-related discoveries, for example technology linked to wood, then coal and oil or more broadly fossile fuel extracted energy. Then technology participated in intensive agriculture, nuclear energy, transformation into electricity. Finally, we have higher or more complex technological use of natural forces such as hydroelectricity, solar panels, wind turbine, precision agriculture, etc.

Defence and attack-related technologies

Defence and attack-related technologies went from none, when only the human body was used, to the use of tools as weapons and caves as dwelling. We then had the development of metal and related weapons, archery, siege weapons, crossbows, alongside walls and fortresses, etc.

We moved then to modern weapons, extension of theatres of operations and corresponding defense systems allowed notably by gunpowder and steam engines. Technologies allowing for aviation were then added.

We are now heading toward high tech weapons and defence (for example, see, all the articles related to security and geopolitics in our section on AI).

Evolving technologies enabling action

Motion related technologies

Motion related technologies evolved from use of animals to modern transportation means such as cars, trucks, planes, trains, ships, space shuttles, nano-enabled “movers”, etc.

Craftsmanship and implementation-related technologies

Craftsmanship-related technologies, for example, went from tying basic materials and pelt then fabrics, to cutting and sowing with thread and needle, while looms became increasingly mechanised, to smart fabrics and programmable textiles and the capacity to manufacture each at best.

Cognition, perception and transmission related technologies

Cognition-related technologies can also be seen as evolving with time. For example, for calculation, we went from the abacus to increasingly powerful computers to quantum computers. An obvious example here is also the development of narrow artificial intelligence (see When Artificial Intelligence will Power Geopolitics – Presenting AI).

Considering current knowledge and research, we must here look at both cognition and perception (e.g. article based in part on an Integrative Science Symposium at the 2019 International Convention of Psychological Science (ICPS) in Paris, by Alexandra Michel, “Cognition and Perception: Is There Really a Distinction?“, Association for psychological science, January 29, 2020). We echoed this perspective when we underlined the importance of sensors for AI, the actuators for AI being nothing else that the possibility to carry out our actions and tasks (see our related section on sensors and actuators for AI, starting with Inserting Artificial Intelligence in Reality).

The importance of perception and sensors also tells us something more.

It reminds us that the evolutionary use of technologies takes place in the world. Perception must have something to perceive. Sensors must have something to sense. Meanwhile, the actions and tasks enabled by technologies act somewhere and on something.

Thus, all these technologies, which we identified as key, in the future are, actually, only potentially key. What defined them as key were necessary but insufficient conditions.

Technologies can only be key in the future (and the present for that matter) if they work, if they fulfil their functions in a certain environment. This is what we shall see in the next and last part.

Bibliography

Featured images: Spaceship and planet by Reimund Bertrams of Pixabay  / Public domain; hydroponic farm by iamareri of Pixabay  / Public domain.

Arbatov, Alexey, “Nuclear Deterrence: A Guarantee or Threat to Strategic Stability?“, Carnegie Moscow Centre, 22 March 2019.

Biology Library, “Taxonomy and Phylogeny”, LibreTexts project, 2019.

Boyd, R. & Richerson, Peter. (2006). Culture and the Evolution of the Human Social Instincts. Roots of Human Sociality.

Dixon, Thomas Homer, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, (Random House Canada, 2006).

GISAID

Michel, Alexandra, “Cognition and Perception: Is There Really a Distinction?“, Association for psychological science, January 29, 2020.

Moore, B., Injustice: Social bases of Obedience and Revolt, (London: Macmillan, 1978).

The Key Technologies of the Future (1)

We live in a world of increasingly abundant new technologies, seen as crucial for our future. Those are not only new, but also meant to revolutionise our lives for the better. Progress cannot be imagined without technology. Technology is meant to save us all. The speed with which bio-tech contributed to develop efficient vaccines against the COVID-19, as triggered by the early variants of the SARS-CoV2, exemplifies the saviour function of technology.

Meanwhile, actors, both public and private, have to constantly innovate, to fund the right science and technology research programs. They must invest in and adopt early enough the next key technology to make sure they do not fall behind in the ongoing technological race.

We need thus to keep track of technological development and innovation. Yet, this is only a pre-requisite. We also need to be able to sort through these many “new techs” and identify, as early as possible, which ones will be key for the future. If we invest in the wrong technology, or in the wrong way, or with the wrong timing, then the consequences are likely to be negative.

With this series, we shall address the first of these concerns: which new technologies could be key for the future?

As we are at a generic level, we shall, for now, not specify exactly “when in the future”.

How can we find the new techs that will become key in the future?

With this first article, we shall build a schematic model that will give us an understanding of why we need technologies. Indeed, it is only if we can find a logic behind the success or failure of new technologies that we can hope to identify key future technologies.

We start with looking at an existing good scan of current new technologies, using it as a case study. We then test the capability of this scan to identify future key technologies and highlight related difficulties. Thus, we underline what is missing in this scan to allow us moving forward with our question. Finally, building upon these findings, we start building a first schematic model that will allow us identifying future key technologies.

A classical comprehensive scan

Munich-Re, working with ERGO IT Strategy, provides us with a very useful yearly scan, the Tech Trend Radar (hereinafter “Radar“), which aims to raise “awareness of key trends” in the new tech sector. They focus on those technologies that are especially relevant to the insurance sector. Nonetheless, considering the breadth of insurance companies’ interest, their scan is relevant for many sectors and excellent for a general and comprehensive overview of current new technologies.

Furthermore, the famous reinsurance company started its tech scan in 2015 and thus has a collection of 6 yearly radars, which thus could give us depth if ever we wanted to look at historical evolution.

The methodology for the “Radar” is grounded in the compilation of trends, which are then screened according to four rules “to define the most relevant trends categorised in four primary fields” (Tech Trend Radar 2020, p.62). These rules are notably inspired by a management framework, the “Run-Grow-Transform” (RGT) model (Ibid., RGT model adapted to IT by Hunter et al, Gartner Research, 2008).

First, Munich-Re and Ergo Tech Trend Radar 2020 present their result sorted according to “four trend fields” (Tech Trend Radar 2020 and 2019):

  • User Centricity;
  • Connected World;
  • Artificial Intelligence;
  • Enabling tech, ex-disruptive tech in the 2019 edition.

(Click on the image to access Munich-Re document)

Munich-Re and Ergo further sort out the trend fields according to maturity/degree of adoption of each tech, which allows then to advise in detail on what to do with the tech.

We thus have 52 technologies of interest, out of which 10 are considered as new for 2020.

But which ones will be key in the future?

Can we use this approach for foresight?

Among these 52 technologies, which are or rather will be the key technologies or the most important ones in the future? How can we find out?

Furthermore, how can we be certain that all future key technologies are here? Could we be missing a key technology, or many key technologies?

The case of precision farming

For example, “precision farming” – also known as “smart farming” or “smart agriculture” – is a novelty in Munich-re-Ergo Radar 2020 and was not included in the 2019 version (Ibid.).

Yet, a company such as Deere & Company already started preparing for smart farming at least in 2017 (Helene Lavoix, Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things and the Future of Agriculture: Smart Agriculture Security? part 1 and part 2, The Red Team Analysis Society, 2019). Interest and investments in the field increased in 2018 and then in 2019 (Ibid.). Thus, the “Radar” is three years late. If we had used the 2019 “Radar”, then we would have entirely missed a technology, possibly key for the future.

The case of “Deep Fake”, stemming from generative adversarial networks (GANs)

Similarly “DeepFake Defence” enters the “Radar” in 2020, in the trend field “User Centricity”.

However, the name “deep fake” emerged in 2017 to convey concern with forgeries involving Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Laurie A. Harris, “Deep Fakes and National Security“, Congressional Research Service, updated May 7, 2021, 3rd version). The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has two programmes focusing on fighting Deep Fakes. The first, Media Forensics (MediFor) started in 2016 and the second Semantic Forensics (SemaFor) in 2019.

Thus, here again, the “Radar” is late, for our purpose, in identifying a key trend.

Meanwhile, Deep Fakes are most often grounded in generative adversarial networks (GANs), indeed identified in the “Radar” in AI this time. The GANs entered the “Radar” in 2019 (Ibid.)

Generative adversarial network (GAN) was invented in 2014.
GANs are part of Unsupervised Learning (UL): the ability of a machine to find underlying structures from unlabelled data.

GANs group, alone, objects, finding “concepts”: pixel trees with pixel trees, doors with doors etc. (e.g. Gan Paint).

The incredible quality of the images generated, which do not exist in reality, allows for mind-boggling possibilities. They may have negative applications, for forgery for example. They may also lead to constructive usages for many other activities, such as urban planning, architecture, cinema, fashion, etc. (see also Helene Lavoix, Inserting Artificial Intelligence in Reality, The Red Team Analysis Society, January 2019).

Identifying GANs should thus have led to look at it use and misuse, as early as the GAN new tech was found. Furthermore, the classification of two related “tech” in different categories – even if those categories are called “fields” – may create problems, as we shall see below.

Of course, only those who do nothing never make any mistake. Yet, if some technologies were detected late previously, then, could a methodology similar to the “Radar” lead us to miss something else now for the future?

If so, which could be the forgotten important new technology? We could change our sources, using better or more extended ones. But, would this be enough? How could we know?

Can we identify what is missing or what can be improved when we use an approach such as the one used for the “Radar“?

The problem with laundry lists

The “Radar” we use here as a case study presents us with a long list of technologies sorted out through categories labelled “trend fields”. But we do not know exactly how and why these “trend fields” are chosen.

Categories

Categories are used in and result from classification, a fundamental cognitive function for the brain (Fabrice Bak, 2013: 107-113). Indeed, “Categorization is a process by which people make sense of things by working out similarities and differences” (McGarty, Mavor, & Skorich, 2015). The highest level of categorization is hierarchical (organised as a tree) and called a taxonomy or hierarchical classification. In classical terms, categories must be clearly defined (which criteria are necessary to make an item part or not of the category), mutually exclusive (one item can belong to only one category) and fully exhaustive (all the categories together represent the whole set for which the categories are built) (OECD,”Classification“, using “United Nations Glossary of Classification Terms” prepared by the Expert Group on International Economic and Social Classifications; unpublished on paper).

The archetypal example of a taxonomy is Linnaeus’ classifications of plants, animals and minerals (Regnum Animale, Regnum Vegetabile and Regnum Lapideum), according to various classes, a work he started with his Species Plantarum, published in 1753 and continued throughout his life (see his bibliography). Building upon Linnaeus ‘ work, organisms are now organised in the following inclusive taxonomies, organised from the most to the least inclusive: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species, and Strain.

Not real categories

Now, if we look at the “trend fields” used in the “Radar”, what we observe is that they respect none of the specificities a category should have:

1- They are not well defined. There is not one criteria that allows to class easily one item in one “trend field” or another. For example, are various types of IAs not actually also enabling technologies?

2- They are not mutually exclusive, i.e. some items could belong to two or more “trend fields”: 5 G is enabling and also part of a connected world; smart textiles are also user centric and may be seen as part of programmable materials; IA enables autonomous things and precision farming as seen, etc.

3- They are probably not exhaustive, which creates our problem of not knowing if we did not miss something.

The four “trend fields”, here, seem to be mainly habits of thoughts, existing names or disparate categories that allow readers and users to identify quickly and easily the new technologies selected by the process. 

Static categories

In our case study, Munich-Re and Ergo then sort out the first “proto-categorisation” according to a second categorisation: maturity/degree of adoption of the tech.

The second categorisation appears correct in terms of the rules necessary for being a category. Yet, the criteria used to build the second category remain also turned inward. A dynamic explanatory element related to our concern is missing. We cannot know what will work or not, because we do not have a logic that explains future success for technologies.

Towards a model allowing us to understand what makes technologies key

What we need is a model that explains schematically the purpose of technologies, why we use them, why they are important to us, human beings. If we understand, even schematically this logic, then we can envision those technologies that will be key for the future.

Let us tell the story – or a story – of human beings and technologies.

We have a planet, populated with individuals.

Each individual living on planet Earth has needs, as explained by Maslow (Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 1954, 1987).

Actually, on the planet, we have crowds of individuals, living in different types of dwellings. Each crowd is organised as a society.

A society implies that social coordination must function. Social coordination is expressed according to three components (Barrington Moore, Injustice: Social bases of Obedience and Revolt, 1978):

  1. the issue of authority,
  2. the division of labour for the production of goods and services,
  3. and the distribution of these goods and services.

To satisfy the needs of social coordination, some tasks or actions must be carried out.

These tasks or actions will be impacted, made possible or not, facilitated or not, by some conditions and the environment.

This is where technologies are born, to facilitate and improve all these actions.

Thus, we can assume that the technologies that will be key for the future will be all those tech that will effectively help us to satisfy needs. Meanwhile, the actions required to meet these needs are more and more complex. They become increasingly complex because of previous actions – including the creation and use of previous technologies – and of their impact on the environment, and thus on the conditions for the actions. The evolution of needs resulting from this process also, in the same time, contributes to make actions and tasks more complex.

We now have a model that will allow us to find out which technologies are most likely to become key in the future, as we shall see in the next part.

Bibliography

Featured images: Spaceship and planet, and Safe by Reimund Bertrams de Pixabay  / Public domain.

Chappellet-Lanier, Tajha, “DARPA wants to tackle ‘deepfakes’ with semantic forensics“, Fedscoop, 7 August 2019.

Diamond, Jared Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, (W. W. Norton: 1997);

Goodfellow, Ian; Pouget-Abadie, Jean; Mirza, Mehdi; Xu, Bing; Warde-Farley, David; Ozair, Sherjil; Courville, Aaron; Bengio, Yoshua, “Generative Adversarial Nets“, Proceedings of the International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2014.

Harris, Laurie A., “Deep Fakes and National Security“, Congressional Research Service, updated May 7, 2021, 3rd version

Hunter R. et al., “A Simple Framework to Translate IT Benefits into Business
Value Impact,” Gartner Research, May 16, 2008.

Lavoix, Helene, Inserting Artificial Intelligence in Reality, The Red Team Analysis Society, January 2019.

McGarty, Craig, et al, “Social Categorization”, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, December 2015, DOI: , 10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.24091-9

Maslow, Abraham, Motivation and Personality, (London, Harper & Row, 1954, 1987);

Moore, B., Injustice: Social bases of Obedience and Revolt, (London: Macmillan, 1978).

Munich-Re and ERGO IT Strategy, Tech Trend Radar 2020 and 2019.

Antarctic China (1): Strategies for a Very Cold Place

                                               

Going South

While being under the increasing pressure of climate change, the Antarctic is attracting the strategic attention of China. Since 1983, China is a member of the 1959 international Antarctic treaty. This international treaty defines Antarctica as a scientific preserve and bans all military activity on the continent (The Antarctic Treaty). The only extractive activities are conducted for scientific purpose. More than 13 countries are represented on the continent by scientific bases. The treaty will be re-negotiated in 2048. This deadline is already creating new international tensions.

However, in the Antarctic, it appears that China’s activities are ramping up, both on the continent and on the ocean (Craig Hooper, “New polar Strategy Must Focus On China’s Long March to Antarctica”, Forbes, 2021/01/10).

This growing activity takes place on a continent completely covered by ice and a glacial ocean that climate change alters quickly (Julie Brigham-Grette, Andrea Dutton, “Antarctica is Headed for a Climate Tipping Point by 2060, with Catastrophic Melting if Emissions Aren’t Cut Quickly”, The Conversation, 17 May 2021).

In the meantime, the Chinese mineral and biological needs keep on growing. As a result, it is now time to understand Beijing’s strategic design for the Antarctic. Could we be witnessing something similar to China’s strategy in the Arctic region (Jean-Michel Valantin, (Jean-Michel Valantin, “Towards a US-China War? (1) and (2): Military Tensions in the Arctic”, The Red Team Analysis Society, September 16, 2019)?

Identifying China’s increasing presence in the Antarctic

Installing the Go board

Factually, from 1985 to present days, China’s presence in Antarctica has been quite small. For example, there are only four small Chinese bases, which, together, can accommodate only 180 workers. Comparatively, there are 22 U.S. Antarctic bases that host 1400 workers all year long, and 450 workers and researchers in Chile’s 11 bases (Craig Hooper, “With New Gear and Bases, China is Beginning to Make a Play for Dominance in the Arctic”, Forbes, 2020/12/23).

However, since 2014, there has been a significant increase of the Chinese activities on the continent and on the Antarctic Ocean.

China is ramping up its presence, through the construction of a fifth base that may open in 2022. It also builds a permanent runway, that will establish a direct line between the new base and China’s mainland. An extension of the Great Wall base is under way, while a Chinese company is building a runway close to the Zongshan station, both being part of the first Chinese bases. Since 2010, the Chinese authorities are installing satellite communication and telemetry devices in their different Antarctica holdings (Craig Hooper, “With new Gear…”, ibid).

Meanwhile, the Chinese icebreaker Xuelong supplies the Zongshan station. Since 2013, the Xuelong (“Snow Dragon”) has also done numerous arctic tours. Furthermore, since 2019 another icebreaker, the Xuelong 2, has started navigating  in both the Arctic and the Antarctic (“MV Xue Long 2”, Wikipedia).

In 2020, Beijing also demanded Chinese sovereignty on a 20.000 square kilometres area around the Kunlun area. This is tantamount to creating an air and space sovereignty zone. This zone would create a territorial discontinuity between the American Amundsen base and the future Australian Davis base (Craig Hooper, “New polar Strategy…”, ibid).

Extreme fishing

In the same dynamic, since 2015, the Jiangsu Shen Lan Distant Water Fishing Company has been building two modern giant krill fishing vessels. The first one, the Shen Lan, was launched in May 2020. This vessel, and its forthcoming twin, and the four other already existing Chinese krill fishing ships turn China into a massive krill harvesting power (Mark Godfrey, “Glitzy New Vessel Leads Chinese Foray into Antarctic Krill Fisheries”, SeaFoodSource, 19 June 2020).

Krill is a microscopic crustacean that lives in very large schools. One cube meter of seawater may contain up to 20.000 individuals. Krill is the very basis of the whole halieutique, mammal and avian life in the Antarctic. Under the Antarctic treaty, it is possible to harvest only a total 620.000 metric tons of krill a year (Godfrey, ibid).

There is a rapidly growing Chinese demand for krill meat and oil, because of its sanitary qualities. And on top of the Shen Lan 1 and 2, two or three more Chinese krill fishing ships are currently built up or drawn. This means that the Total Allowable Catch limit for China will be under growing pressure. And this pressure may very well increase as 2048, the time-limit of the current Antarctic Treaty draws near.

Satellites for the Antarctic

On the ground, China installs its Beidou system in Antarctica. Beidou, the Chinese GPS, is a space-based dual, i.e civil-military, technology system for air, space and maritime navigation. So it is also able to monitor and support air and space weapons systems. In 2010, Beijing has installed a Beidou system, in the Great Wall and Zongshan stations and, in 2013, in the remote Dome A Kunlun station (Peter Wood, Alex Stone, Taylor E. Lee, “China’s Space Ground Segment, building the Pillars of a Great Space Power”, Blue Path Labs Report for the China Aerospace Studies Institute, U.S Air University, March 1, 2021).

Beidou will also be an integral part of the equipment of the 2022 China’s fifth station. (Anne-Mary Brady, “China, Russia Push GPS Rival in Antarctica”, The Australian, September 6, 2018).

Australia air observation have also antennae systems at the Taishan station (Jackson Gothe-Snape “China Unchecked in Antarctica”, ABC News, 12 April 2019). According to Eric Chol, those antennas may be infrared devices used to track satellites launching (Eric Chol, Il est Midi à Pékin, 2019).

High ground: strategy, strategies

Icebreakers

It is interesting to note that the different ways China installs itself in Antarctica are close reminders of its Arctic, seafood access and space strategies.

Indeed, as in the Arctic, the Chinese navy learns to use its Xuelong and Xuelong 2 icebreakers ships in the Antarctic Ocean. The navigating difficulties met by the Xuelong in 2014 are nothing but steps on the learning curve of its crew. This navigating experience will be important to ensure a regular, or permanent, link between the stations and mainland China (“Antarctic Rescue : Chinese icebreaker Xue Long “stuck in ice””, BBC News, January 4, 2014).

Convergence with the Belt & Road initiative

The installation of Beidou systems are congruent with the Arctic, space, and Belt and Road strategies (Toru Tsunashima, “Chinese Beidou eclipses American GPS”, Nikkei Asia, November 25, 2020). Indeed, the Beidou systems stations are systematically installed in the Belt and Road member states. It is also true in Sweden and in Norway, even though they are not official members of the Belt& Road initiative (B&R) (Wood, Stone and Taylor, ibid).

However, those two countries are at the European end of the Russian Northern Sea route, which extends from the Bering strait to the Atlantic from the Barents Sea and the Norway coasts. Thus, installing Beidou systems is quite helpful for the growing number of Chinese ships that use the Northern Sea route / “polar silk road”.

The warming effects of climate change on the Arctic Ocean are the basic condition for the opening of this route. Also, as Chinese cargo ships use this route increasingly frequently, Beijing turns it into the “Polar silk road”, meaning the arctic segment of the B&R (Jean-Michel Valantin, “Is the West Losing the Warming Arctic?”, The Red Team Analysis Society, December 7, 2020).

Food security from the Cold

One must also note that the drivers of Beijing’s Antarctic interest appear as being the same as for other areas, i.e. accessing resources, reinforcing food security and increasing geographic influence. For example, China’s food security strategy reveals itself with its (over) fishing capabilities and dimension (Jean-Michel Valantin, “The Chinese Fishing Fleet, Influence and Hunger Wars”, The Red Team Analysis Society, April 20, 2021). The new krill fishing vessel and its coming twin are part of the humongous Chinese distant water fishing ships fleet.

The purpose of this fleet is to position its “squads” of ships in a dominant position. Doing so, they can exploit ocean biological resources. And they do so from the South China Sea to the Guinea Gulf and Bolivia economic exclusive zone (Valantin, ibid).

As it appears, Beijing is also becoming increasingly active, alongside Russia, in contesting and blocking addenda to the Antarctic treaty. For example, for the five past years, both countries have systematically refused to validate the creation of three marine protection zones. Thus, de facto, the concerned areas remain potentially open to fishing exploitation (Alvaro Etchegaray, “The Growing Cloud of China in Antarctica”, SupChina, November 3, 2020).

So, in the Antarctic, the Shen Lan ship starts its activities while Chinese companies declare their intent to fish two to three million tons of krill a year. That is to say a much larger total than allowed by the Antarctic treaty (Mark Godfrey, ibid).

So, the ways and means of the increasing presence of China in the Antarctic could thus be an extension and a transposition of the different other segments of the “Middle Kingdom” great strategy.

Projection of the “Chinese Need in the Antarctic

Thus, Beijing is increasing its land and ocean Antarctic presence. In the same dynamic, it puts under pressure the norms that define the international status of the South pole continent (Alexander B. Gray, “China’s Next Geopolitical Goal: Dominate Antarctica”, The National Interest, 20 March 2021). And this happens for the same reasons as elsewhere. The Chinese government and companies have to find resources to satisfy the immense needs that drive China’s growth.

Building bases, developing ultra-modern ground for space infrastructures, and increasing maritime capabilities necessitate an incentive of a unique magnitude. This incentive is the Chinese “power of need”. We mean by this the enormous need that drives the economic and material development of the 1,4 billion people strong “Middle Kingdom”.

In the 1980s, an emergent Chinese middle class of 300 million people started discovering consumerism. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of other Chinese people escaped from the clutches of poverty and hunger (Jean-Michel Valantin, “China and the New Silk Road, from Oil Wells to the Moon… and Beyond”, The Red Team Analysis Society, July 6, 2015).

So, the Chinese “power of need” is the immense and permanent need for different kinds of resources and products. Those are necessary to answer the basic and developing needs of a giant country going through a triple cycle of economic growth, consumerism, and very rapid urbanisation (Loretta Napoleoni, Maonomics, 2011).

Taking the high ground on a warming planet

Destabilization

As in the Arctic, this reinforcement of China’s presence in the Antarctic happens in the context of the global competition for mineral, energetic and biological resources on a warming planet. Indeed, the warming Arctic and Antarctic are extreme environments, going through profound and rapid alterations because of climate change.

Contrary to the Arctic, the Antarctic warms up because of the Ocean, not because of the atmosphere warming. This process is destabilizing the massive continental glaciers. The thermic fluctuations may have dire consequences on the global ocean level during the coming decades (Alexandra Witze, “East Antarctica is losing ice faster than anyone thought”, Nature, 10 December 2018, Sarah Sloat, “An Enormous Cavity Inside an Antarctic Glacier Harbors a Dangerous Threat », Inverse Daily, February 1, 2019 and Chelsea Gohd, « Over a Third of Antarctic Ice Shelf  Could Collapse as Climate Change Warms the World », Space.com, 11 April 2021).

Those alterations already start to open chunks of ground to “geological exploration”. It is interesting to note that a similar phenomenon takes place in Greenland. And that Chinese companies also try to develop Greenland’s new ice-free ground (Jean-Michel Valantin “Arctic China: Towards New Oil Wars in a Warming Arctic?“, The Red Team Analysis Society, 14 September 2021 and Mark O’Neill, “China’s Vote damages China’s Rare-Earth Plans”, Ejinsight, 15 April, 2021) .

The race is starting

In other words, the development of China in the Antarctic projects the mammoth Chinese “power of need” throughout the ice continent and its ocean.

So, China installs infrastructures that will allow to “import” more and more capabilities in the Antarctic. Meanwhile, the need for resources is going to become always more important. And from a strategic point of view, the Antarctic may very well be a gigantic resources deposit.

We now have to explore the mammoth geopolitical consequences of the Chinese Antarctic strategy, on an Indo-Pacific as well as world scale.

Featured image: Antarctica by Sarah N from Pixabay

From Cassandra’s Curse to the Pythia’s Success

(Art design: Jean-Dominique Lavoix-Carli)

When delivering warnings, are we doomed to never be believed, sharing the same fate as Cassandra, the tragic character of Greek mythology? Or, on the contrary, can we hope to become as successful as the Pythia, the oracle priestess of Apollo at Delphi?

Her gift of prophecy becoming a curse, Cassandra lives thrice all tragedies: once when she foresees them, once when she fails to convince those who could prevent disasters and finally once when she herself suffers the dire events she foresees. She lives through Troy’s fall, is abducted and raped, taken as captive and then murdered (The Editors, “Cassandra“. Encyclopedia Britannica, 14 Feb. 2019; Seth L. Schein, “The Cassandra Scene in Aeschylus’ ‘Agamemnon’“, Greece & Rome, Vol. 29, No. 1, Apr., 1982, pp. 11-16).

By contrast, the Pythia, the famous oracle priestess of Apollo at Delphi was an institution that was so successful it lasted from ca. 800 BCE to AD 390/91 (Julia Kindt, “Hidden women of history: the priestess Pythia at the Delphic Oracle, who spoke truth to power“, The Conversation, 22 janvier 2019). Her foresights were sought by kings and commoners on public and individual matters (Ibid.). They were believed, became advice, and were richly rewarded (Ibid.).

Thus, how can we emulate the Pythia’s destiny rather than Cassandra’s fate? We need to find out what can make strategic foresight and early warning a successful activity and not a curse, and apply our findings to our work.

To help us in this endeavour, we shall notably build upon Christopher Meyer’s research on warning and conflict prevention (“Beyond the Cassandra Syndrome: Understanding the failure and success of warnings“, King’s College Lecture, 26 February 2014). Indeed, Meyer, after having highlighted problems related to warnings and prevention, identifies three key elements that make a warning successful, from the point of view of prevention (Ibid.). He furthermore suggests ways to bridge the “warning-response gap”.

To make sure strategic foresight and warning is successful, we shall first highlight that proper strategic foresight and warning needs, intrinsically, to be actionable. It must also walk a thin line between being useful to decision-makers and interfering. We shall particularly emphasise the challenge of impact assessment and suggest that proper scenario tree is a key tool for offering policy alternatives to decision-makers, alongside involving policy-makers as stakeholders. We shall, second, turn to hurdles linked to the reception of warnings by policy-makers, as identified by Meyer, and to ways forward. Finally, carefully comparing Cassandra and the Pythia, we shall single out important keys explaining why warning can be either a curse or a successful activity.

A real warning is actionable

No, everything is not an early warning

Of course, first, to be able to deliver a successful warning, we need to make sure we communicate a real warning, and not any opinion, brief or piece of information.

As Grabo* reminds us, indeed:

A warning concerns a situation, an objective, an opportunity, a danger, a threat or a risk, which are specific and defined (the issue). 
“Warning” deals with the future. It tries to anticipate and predict dynamics and events which do not yet exist. 
An analysis explaining solely the past or present is NOT warning.
A warning is not made only of facts, data and information, but results from analysis and synthesis.

Cynthia M. Grabo, Cynthia M., and Jan Goldman. Anticipating Surprise: Analysis for Strategic Warning. Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic Intelligence Research, Joint Military Intelligence College, 2002, pp. 4-16.

Meyer’s research similarly highlights that any report, brief, piece of information, or even merely opinions, reinterpreted with hindsight does NOT constitute a warning (Ibid). Actually, it is because these warnings did not exist that we are faced with surprise, what we seek to avoid. Even broad generic statements, not backed up by proper analysis, and made before the events cannot qualify as warning. At best, they could be considered as “proto-warnings”, but would need to be substantiated and transformed into proper foresight and warning.

Proper warnings must be actionable. This means that they must be specific enough to allow for proper action. They must be detailed enough and include an evaluation of probability, as well as an impact assessment.

If we use a real life example, the beginning of a proper warning could look as follows:

As long as travel restrictions remain in place due to the COVID-19 situation, it is highly likely that production and sales of fake test certificates will prevail. Given the widespread technological means available, in the form of high-quality printers and different software, fraudsters are able to produce high-quality counterfeit, forged or fake documents.

Europol’s “Early Warning Notification: The illicit sales of false negative COVID-19 test certificates“, February 2021. My emphasis: in bold the likelihood assessment.

This warning, to be truly actionable and complete, would need to include an impact assessment, done according to the decision-makers receiving the warning.

The problem with impact assessment

To assess an impact may appear as first glance as something relatively easy to do. However, there are hidden traps in this apparently simple evaluation.

If we think about it, what do we need to do to assess impacts? Actually, we fundamentally need to judge and evaluate past and current policies and decisions, as well as those policies for the future, which have already been decided. This is what Meyer highlights when he stresses that, in an impact assessment, there is an implicit judgement on current policies and what should be done (Ibid.). We thus judge what policy-makers and decision makers are doing and have been doing and appear to be ready to do. This may easily lead to tension with our decision-makers, as they may not be ready for what they may perceive as a fault-finding exercise.

This potentially dangerous implicit judgement may contribute to explain the absence of impact assessment in Europol’s warning. The public quality of these warnings and the multinational character of the agency probably only enhance the difficulty of impact assessment. We may imagine that classified versions of Europol’s warnings include such impacts assessments, if member-countries gave the right signals to ensure they wanted them.

Furthermore, “simple” impact assessments, focusing on past and present policies and decisions, also invite criticism from decision-makers. They could complain it is easy to point out future problems while no other solution is offered or suggested. Indeed, Meyer underlines that, often, warnings do not make the case for the feasibility or existence of other course of actions, and that it is a flaw from the point of view of prevention (Ibid.).

Policy alternatives, scenario tree and decision-makers as stakeholders

Scenario tree and key decisions

If we want to consider alternative policies, then a solution – even the best solution – is to develop properly a complete scenario tree and to use it for our warnings. Indeed, a scenario tree considers critical uncertainties. This implies that, most of the time, we also assess a range of possible actions with key decision points. Thus, we look at other possible courses of actions, which should help policy-makers and decision-makers in their tasks. With a proper scenario tree, our strategic foresight and warning becomes truly fully actionable for prevention.

However, there, we also enter further into the realm of policy-making. This could be seen as contradicting, for example, the position of the intelligence community according to which the realm of action should be completely separated from all intelligence analysis, including strategic foresight and early warnings analysis (e.g. Fingar 2009, Meyer 2014). On the contrary, practitioners in the field of conflict prevention and in risk management are not so adamant on this separation (Meyer 2014,; ISO 31000:2018; for a summary on risk management, Helene Lavoix, “When Risk Management …“, The Red Team Analysis Society, 2019). They even see these two dimensions as linked, and, for them, policy options or alternatives must be attached to warnings.

Fundamentally, as long as the decision regarding policy choices remain with decision-makers, then there should not be any issue related to the blurring of responsibilities.

Including decision-makers as stakeholders in the strategic foresight and early warning process

Furthermore, in its final stages, the scenario tree related to our warnings could also be developed with members of the policy-making community. By making the latter stakeholders in the development of the final strategic foresight and warning products we could create conditions favourable to the acceptance of warnings.

To create such substantiated, precise yet encompassing warnings including the evaluation of probability and impact assessment, preferably under the shape of a scenario tree highlighting key possible decisions and impacts is difficult. It also demands a lot of work. It is however feasible and is a condition necessary but not sufficient to achieve successful warnings. As such, it should be seen as an investment.

Thus, one of the key to success is to consider decision-makers and the very object of strategic foresight and warning, i.e. decisions and actions, from the very start of the process. It will smooth the last steps of that process, the very delivery and communication of the warnings. Yet, we still have to face many hurdles.

Receiving early warnings

Over-warning or “warning fatigue”

This is a premium article. To access the remaining part of this article, you must become one of our members or register for an online course.Log in if you are a member or have registered for a course.

Notes and Bibliography

Featured image : Art design: Jean-Dominique Lavoix-Carli – Photos by Zack Jarosz from Pexels and from PxHere

Notes

* For some context on Grabo’s seminal work, see Hélène Lavoix, Communication of Strategic Foresight and Early Warning, The Red Team Analysis Society, 2021.

**The Dunning-Kruger effect: According to this bias, “the skills that engender competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain” (Kruger and Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It…”, 1999). In other words, the less one knows about something, the best one thinks one is in this field.

Bibliography

Bar-Joseph, Uri Bar-Joseph and Arie W. Kruglanski, “Intelligence Failure and Need for Cognitive Closure: On the Psychology of the Yom Kippur Surprise“, Political Psychology, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 2003), pp. 75-99.

Betts, Richard K., Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning, Brookings Institution Press, Dec 1, 2010.

Betts, Richard K., “Surprise Despite Warning: Why Sudden Attacks Succeed“, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 95, No. 4 (Winter, 1980-1981), pp. 551-572

Cancian, Mark, Avoiding Coping with Surprise in Great Power Conflicts, A Report of the CSIS International Security Program, February 2018).

Davis, Jack, “Improving CIA Analytic Performance: Strategic Warning,” The Sherman Kent Center for Intelligence Analysis Occasional Papers: Volume 1, Number 1, accessed September 12, 2011.

Doyle, Andrea, “Cassandra – Feminine Corrective in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon” Acta Classica, vol. 51, 2008, pp. 57–75.

Fingar, Thomas, “”Myths, Fears, and Expectations,”  Payne Distinguished Lecture Series 2009 Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence and National Security, Lecture 1, FSI Stanford, CISAC Lecture Series, March 11, 2009.

Fingar, Thomas, “Anticipating Opportunities: Using Intelligence to Shape the Future,” Payne Distinguished Lecture Series 2009 Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence and National Security, Lecture 3, FSI Stanford, CISAC Lecture Series, October 21, 2009. 

Grabo, Cynthia M., and Jan Goldman. Anticipating Surprise: Analysis for Strategic Warning. [Washington, D.C.?]: Center for Strategic Intelligence Research, Joint Military Intelligence College, 2002.

ISO 31000:2018 Guidelines (revised from the 2009 version), IEC 31010:2009, Risk assessment techniques, and ISO Guide 73:2009 Vocabulary.

Kindt, Julia, “Hidden women of history: the priestess Pythia at the Delphic Oracle, who spoke truth to power“, The Conversation, 22 janvier 2019

Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments“, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 77, no 6, p 1121-1134, American Psychological Association (1999).

Lavoix, Helene, Why the Messenger Got Shot and how to Avoid this Fate, The Red Team Analysis Society, April 2021

Lavoix, Helene, “Communication of Strategic Foresight and Early Warning“, The Red Team Analysis Society, 3 March 2021.

Lavoix, Helene, “When Risk Management Meets Strategic Foresight and Warning“, The Red Team Analysis Society, 2019.

Lavoix, Helene, “Revisiting Timeliness for Strategic Foresight and Warning and Risk Management“, The Red Team Analysis Society, 2018

Lavoix, Helene, “Ensuring a Closer Fit: Insights on making foresight relevant to policymaking”, Development (2014) 56(4);

Lavoix, Helene, “What makes foresight actionable: the cases of Singapore and Finland”, confidential commissioned report, US government, November 2010.

Meyer, Christoph O., Beyond the Cassandra Syndrome: Understanding the failure and success of warnings, King’s College Lecture – 26 February 2014

Schein, Seth L. Schein, “The Cassandra Scene in Aeschylus’ ‘Agamemnon’“, Greece & Rome, Vol. 29, No. 1, Apr., 1982, pp. 11-16

Schelling, Thomas, foreword to Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decisions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962).

Strategic Foresight, Warning and Intelligence Products and Documents

You will find below public documents and products related to strategic foresight, warning, risk analysis and intelligence, published by countries, international organisations and private actors. Interesting documents are added progressively.

Latest, we added the video just published (28 April 2021) by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence to advertise their recently released (8 April) Global Trends 2040.

Continue reading “Strategic Foresight, Warning and Intelligence Products and Documents”

The Chinese Fishing Fleet, Influence and Hunger Wars

(Art design: Jean-Dominique Lavoix-Carli)

The Chinese fishing fleet is a gigantic organisation. It is composed of a mind-numbing number of ships, “somewhere” between 2.600 and 17.000 distant-water fishing ships (M. Guttierez, A. Daniels, G. Jobbins, G. Guttierez Almazor, C. Montengro, China’s Distant Water Fleet, Scale, Impact and Governance, ODI, 2020).

These myriads of ships operate in Asian, African and South American waters. The multiple operations trigger a growing number of violent incidents at sea. They happen during aggressive encounters with other fleets or with the coast guards that try to protect their national fisheries (Ian Urbina, “How Expanding Chinese Fishing Fleet is Depleting the World’s Oceans”, Yale 360°, August17, 2020).

Numerous analysts and commentators are focusing on the dual, i.e. civil-military, dimension of the Chinese fishing fleet. They observe how fishing operations are also mixed with the “fishing militia”. The latter is one of the arms of the Chinese Navy (D. Grossman and L. Ma, “A short history of the Chinese fishing militia and what it may tell us”, Rand Corporation, April 6, 2020).

It transforms the Chinese fishing fleet, through its size and interconnectedness with the military into a formidable tool of maritime and geopolitical influence. As it happens, the Chinese fishing operations are often heavily imposing their presence in exclusive economic zones. These maritime actions result in “marking” marine stretches as being under China’s influence. This is especially true in the South China Sea (Grossman and Ma, ibid).

The mammoth size of this fishing fleet dwarfs the U.S., European and Japanese fleets (S. Yozell, A Shaver, Shining a Light: the Need for Transparency across Distant Water Fishing, The Stimson Centre, 2019). De facto, the Chinese fleet has a unique character because of its very scale. In comparison, the U.S. fishing fleet is only 300 distant-water ships strong. From a geopolitical point of view, this means that China’s distant-water fishing fleet operates at the global scale.

This begs a massive question: in a time of ocean depletion and acidification, what is the strategic meaning of such a national fishing force projection capability (Ugo Bardi, The Empty Sea: the Future of the Blue Economy, 2021)? In other terms, is the Chinese fishing fleet “simply” a tool of influence and economic development, or is it a signal of the coming “hunger wars”?

Projecting the power of need

The über scale of the Chinese distant-water fishing fleet is totally out of proportions with other fishing fleets. In 1983, China had only 13 distant-water ships. In 2016, The Chinese fleet represents almost 40% of the total activities of the 10 top distant-water fishing fleets. It captures 15,2 million tonnes of fish annually (Gutierrez et al., ibid).

Those are roughly equivalent to 20% of global catches, while China consumes 38% of the global fish production (which includes aquaculture products as well as foreign purchases).  This fleet also contains very different kinds of ships, from long liners to trawlers, squid jiggers, and many more (Yozell and Shaver, ibid).

The Emperor Fisherman

Top 10 distant-water fishing fleet Proportion of fishing effort
China37,99 %
Taiwan21,49 %
Japan10,06 %
South Korea9,96 %
Spain9,77 %
USA3,33 %
Vanuatu2,59 %
France1,90 %
Russia1,50 %
Others1,42 %
Source : Stimson Distant Water Fishing Fleet – (based on AIS data from Global Fisheries Watch, 2016-2017)

Seafood plays a basic role in Chinese food security, considering Chinese culinary tradition and economy. In the 1980s, Chinese citizens started becoming richer. So they can afford a greater culinary diversity. One of the consequences is that the Chinese people eat more than 35 kg of fish annually. By comparison, the average global consumption is of 18 kg (“The consumption of fish and fish products in the Asia-Pacific region based on household surveys”, FAO, December 2015).

The South China Sea plays a major role as far as the Chinese food security is concerned. An important proportion of the Chinese fish production is caught in the South China Sea. Its natural resources also include its fisheries, with consequences in terms of food security.

The South China Sea is one of the richest maritime ecological systems on Earth. One can find there more than 3.365 different fish species, very important reef areas, as well as giant clams (Rachaele Bale, “One the World’s biggest fisheries is on the verge of collapse”, National Geographic, August 29, 2016).

The militarization of fishing

These biological resources attract the fishing fleets of more than seven nations, including Vietnam and the Philippines. In this regard, China is notably developing a system of joint operability between its coast guard fleet and its 50.000 strong fishing fleet that mixes ships of all size, types and range. By contrast, the distant water fleet is composed of the boats able to navigate international distances.

This mixed armada is dubbed the “fishing militia” (Megha Rajagopalan, “China trains “fishing militia” to sail into disputed waters“, Reuters, April 30, 2016). It is quite difficult to know its exact number because numerous captains turn off their transponders, turning their ships into “stealth ships” (Christopher Pala, “China’s Monster Fleet”, Foreign Policy, November 30, 2020 and Ian Urbina, “The Deadly secret of China’s invisible Armada”, NBC News, July 22, 2020).

The depletion of the fisheries near the Chinese coast is driving the fishing fleet farther and farther away in the South China Sea. This often triggers incidents between ships of different countries, because of the aggressive practices of Chinese ships (Brad Lendon, “Beijing has a navy it doesn’t even admit exists, experts say. And it is swarming parts of the South China Sea“, CNN, April 13 2021).

Meanwhile, the Chinese government is strongly supporting the modernisation of the fleet. This is done through heavy subsidies and the replacement of old ships by new ones, with a steel hull. In the meantime, the owners can equip their vessels with Baidu systems, the Chinese global positioning system, which puts them in direct contact with the coast guard fleet (John Ruwitch, “Satellites and seafood: China keeps fishing fleet connected in disputed waters”, Reuters, 27 July 2014). Fishermen also receive basic military navy training, especially on manoeuvering (Ibid).

Sea power on the Anthropocene ocean

Hence, the scale of this leviathan of a fleet, vastly superior to any other competitor. This scale reveals its singular function. As it happens, it is a de facto extension of the enormous need that drives the economic and material development of the 1,4 billion people strong “Middle Kingdom”. In the 1980s, an emergent Chinese middle class of 300 million people started discovering consumerism, while hundreds of millions of Chinese escaped from the clutches of poverty and hunger.

Need as Power

In other words, the Chinese fishing fleet is a sea power instrument. It projects the mammoth Chinese “power of need” throughout the ocean. The Chinese “power of need” is the immense and permanent need for different kinds of resources and products. Those are necessary to answer the basic and developing needs of a giant country going through a triple cycle of economic growth, consumerism, and very rapid urbanisation (Loretta Napoleoni, Maonomics, 2011).

This projection triggers numerous frictions and incidents when Chinese ships start operating in national maritime economic exclusive zones. Over the last years, those incidents have taken place not only in Filipino, North Korean and Vietnamese waters, but also in Cameroonese, Peruvian and Bolivian waters (Grossman and Ma, ibid). In Cameroon and Bolivia, the coast guards have arrested the entire crews of Chinese vessels for illegal fishing.

In Mozambique, Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, the Chinese ships are dangerously overfishing and depleting the sea (“China’s fishing fleet plundering African waters”, Farming Portal, 4 January 2019). By doing so they deprive coastal communities of their food and income sources (Jean-Michel Valantin, “Somali Piracy: a model for tomorrow’s life in the Anthropocene?”, The Red Team Analysis Society, 28 October, 2013).

The Chinese fishing fleet as a global power

The map of these tensions and incidents reveals that the Chinese distant-water fishing fleet is an actor that projects the Chinese power of seafood extraction at global level. However, there is a profound paradox at work with this singular Chinese power projection. Indeed, it aims at answering the exponentially growing Chinese demand for seafood. Between 1990 and 2010, the Chinese seafood consumption has been growing at a 6% annual rate. Consequently, China is responsible for 34% to 38% of the global fish consumption. This rate may grow by 30% by 2030 (Gutierez et al., ibid).

However, this fantastic fishing effort takes place on a warming, polluted and acidifying ocean. Indeed, as a matter of fact, the quickly heightening levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases, among them CO2, which drive climate change, are also acidifying the seawater. (“Climate change indicators: Ocean Acidity“, U.S Environmental Protection Agency, 2021).

Dead zones

This process combines with the chemical and biological impacts of land industrial and agricultural pollution. This combination endangers the fisheries that are essential components of the food resources of entire maritime facades. These changes have direct geopolitical consequences. Indeed, they impact the most basic geophysical equilibrium upon which human societies and international relations are dependent. (Lincoln Paine, The Sea and Civilization, a Maritime History of the World, 2013)

An example, among multiple others, is the Indian Ocean (Jean-Michel Valantin, “The warming ocean as planetary threat”, The Red Team Analysis Society, July 2, 2018). There, a mammoth crisis may well be currently unfolding in the Western Indian Ocean rim. A study shows that an alarming loss of more than 30% of the phytoplankton in the western Indian Ocean took place over the last 16 years. (Koll Roxy and al., “A reduction in marine primary productivity driven by rapid warming over the tropical Indian Ocean”, AGU Publications, 19 January 2016).

This loss is most certainly due to the accelerated warming of the surface water, where the phytoplankton lives. This warming is blocking the mixing of the surface water with deeper and cooler subsurface waters, where the nutrients of the plankton – nitrates, phosphates and silicates – come from and remain blocked (K. S. Rajgopal, “Western Indian Ocean phytoplankton hit by warming”, The Hindu, 29 December 2015).

The Ocean and the shadow of the future

The problem is that plankton is the foundation for the whole ocean food chain (Callum Roberts, The Ocean of life, the fate of Man and the Sea, 2012). For example, in 2012, research unveiled a massive decline in the shoals of fish near the Kenyan and Somali coast. These declines were not solely the result of overfishing. They were also the consequences of the combination of overfishing with the loss of plankton. (David Michel and Russel Sticklor, “Plenty of fish in the sea? Food security in the Indian Ocean”, The Diplomat, 24 August 2012).

This trend is very likely to continue in the foreseeable future. The cause for this tendency is the warming of the ocean because of climate change (P. Beaumont and G. Readfearn, “Global heating supercharging Indian ocean climate system”, The Guardian, 19 November 2019). Thus, this evolution is going to alter the whole Indian Ocean. There is a growing risk that this biologically rich ocean may turn into an “ecological desert” (Amantha Perera, “Warmer Indian Ocean could be “ecological desert” scientists warn”, Reuters, 19 January 2016).

If we translate what is happening in the Indian Ocean elsewhere and apply to it the Chinese fleet’s operations, then we see that the giant Chinese fishing fleet is overexploiting the resources of a changing and rapidly depleting ocean. By so doing, the Chinese fleet also competes with other countries for access to food resources.

This changes the perspective on the Chinese fishing fleet as a medium of influence in terms of classical power games for dominant position.

Towards hunger wars on an empty ocean?

The singular strategic dimension of this fleet reveals itself through the state of tension that emerges from the current competition between the Chinese fleet and virtually all the other fishing fleets, as well as from its numerous infringement on economic exclusive zones. The final goal of the systematic confrontations created by this giant fleet is access to seafood on an emptying ocean.

From fishing to food security

This seafood is first for Chinese consumers. Then, it is to be sold on the international market by Chinese companies. Thus, it generates revenues for the development of China. In other terms, there is a growing Chinese and global demand for a rapidly shrinking resource (Charles Clover, The End of the Line, How overfishing is changing the world and what we eat, 2006 and Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Sea, Crime and Survival in the Last Untamed Frontier, 2019) .

Thus, the Chinese fleet is both an instrument of economic development, and of food security. Its goal is to ensure the constant and growing supply of seafood, i.e. of proteins, to mainland China, despite the competition and the state of the ocean.

This strategic goal explains why the Chinese fishing fleet is a civilian-military force. In other terms, the Chinese fleet is a food security force that possibly prepares China for maritime food resource wars, i.e. “hunger wars”, on a global scale.

High ground on an emptying ocean

It does so by prepositioning itself on the remaining biologically rich waters. In the same dynamic, Chinese food companies develop multiple infrastructures that secure Chinese access to those resources. Thus, they protect the whole fishing and processing process for themselves, despite the presence of other actors.

For example, Chinese distant-water fishing ships operate in the Gulf of Guinea. They are attracted by its biological abundance, while the riparian national coast guards capabilities of the different coastal states of Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon and Gabon are vey weak. In the same time line, Chinese companies are currently building the Andoni fishing port and processing zone (Mark Godfrey, “Chinese overfishing threatens development of West Africa fishing sector”, SeaFoodSource, June 26, 2020).

This will allow the Chinese ships to sell directly their catches to the local Chinese industrial zone. There, they will be processed and sent to China or other destinations. Meanwhile, the Chinese investment and infrastructures building in Africa are so numerous that they turn China into a major power broker in these countries (Farming Portal, ibid) .

Preparing the Hunger Wars?

So, in the case of the Andoni facility, we see the emergence of a Chinese “seafood access security zone” that efficiently overcomes its local competitors through the convergence of the Chinese fishing militia, coastal operations and influence.

Through this example, we can observe how the Chinese prepositioning system of fishing and processing may become of strategic importance. This process may maintain seafood extraction by Chinese actors while ocean depletion accelerates during the coming years. This process drives the growing violence for access to seafood by non-Chinese actors against Chinese actors. However, Chinese actors are ready to defend their major share, especially through their global civil-military prepositioning.

For example, between 2015 and 2020, more than 500 North Korean ships have been found drifting and lifeless in the Japan sea by Japanese coast guards. The North Korean crews were nothing but skeletal corpses, dead because of starvation. As it happens, those ships were pushed aside from their fishing waters by waves after waves of Chinese squid fishing ships.

Those Chinese operations literally emptied the once squid abundant North Korean waters. This forced the North Korean crews to go farther and farther at sea, where they died. In other terms, if the “hunger wars” are still in the future, it appears that “marine hunger battles” are already ongoing. ( Ian Urbina, “The deadly secret of China’s invisible armada“, NBC News, July 22, 2020).

In other words, the way China is using its mammoth “fishing fleet and militia” may very well be a way to attain, as early as possible, the dominant position for the coming hunger wars on a rapidly emptying ocean.

Why the Messenger Got Shot and how to Avoid this Fate

“Shooting the messenger” is a popular metaphor to highlight that those who deliver warnings most often are blamed, as if they were responsible for the reason for the warning. Meanwhile and as a result, warnings are also not considered.

This saying underlines that the norm is the exact opposite of the objectives of early warning and strategic foresight. Moreover, it shows that we, practitioners of early warning and strategic foresight, may be blamed. We could be blamed even though we have at heart to improve the situation and even though listening to us would indeed allow for preparedness and best response.

Faced with such a conundrum, how can we improve the odds to see decision makers pay heed to our early warning and strategic foresight products. Accessorily, how can we also protect ourselves from “being shot”?

We saw previously that if we were carefully following necessary steps to deliver and communicate our early warnings and strategic foresight, then we were improving the likelihood to see decision-makers taking our warnings into account (Helene Lavoix, “Communication of Strategic Foresight and Early Warning“, The Red Team Analysis Society, 3 March 2021).

We also underlined that this apparently simple process was fraught with challenges. Among these hurdles, we find the many biases that may affect the cognition of decision makers and that potentially impact all steps of the delivery and communication process, and even the very delivery of warnings and strategic foresight.

In this article we thus focus on and explore a bias identified as “motivated ignorance” or “active information avoidance” (Daniel Williams, “Motivated Ignorance, Rationality, and Democratic Politics“, Synthese, 2020; Golman, R.et al. “Information Avoidance“, Journal of Economic Literature, 2017). This bias, alongside others, could contribute to derail early warning and strategic foresight or more broadly anticipation. Indeed, it could even prevent the very delivery and communication of warning and foresight products. We shall first explain this bias and the way it could operate in our case. Then, assuming it is at work, we shall suggest ways to mitigate it to improve the delivery of our warnings and foresight.

What is motivated ignorance?

When knowing is felt as too costly

According to Williams (Ibid), “motivated ignorance” means that an individual will purposefully refuse to know because the cost of knowing is too high. Here, we are concerned with the very act of getting and accessing the information. Thus, instances of “motivated ignorance” or “active information avoidance” can be: not opening a letter, not taking a test, not reading something, not listening to certain types of news. In some cases, it could be “shooting the messenger”. This refusal to know or intentional non-action can be both conscious and unconscious (Williams, ibid).

“Active information avoidance” (Golman et al., 2017, p. 97) must satisfy two conditions:

“(1) the individual is aware that the information is available, and

(2) the individual has free access to the information or would avoid the information even if access were free.”

The objective of the individuals engaged in motivated ignorance is to make sure they will not have to reach certain conclusions that they perceive as detrimental (Williams, Ibid).

How Tigranes came to cut off the head of the messenger

In the case of early warning and strategic foresight, motivated ignorance would mean that decision-makers make sure, consciously or not, they do not listen or do not have to listen to people who could give them knowledge, information and analysis they are seeking to ignore.

In the most extreme cases, decision-makers could decide to not-set up early warning systems or more broadly anticipation processes. If these systems already exist, then motivated ignorance could lead decision-makers to find various ways to not-listen to what they produce. Early warning systems and strategic foresight capabilities could even be destroyed, either directly or indirectly by making sure they cannot function properly.

More broadly, at the level of society, motivated ignorance could mean that those who may be perceived as holding knowledge, understanding or simply information one wishes to avoid will be excluded, whatever the way to achieve the exclusion can take. The knowledge, understanding and information produced will similarly be discarded through all possible means.

This goes a long way to explain the “Cassandra curse”, as well as ancient and popular metaphor such as “shooting the messenger”. We may recall here what Greek philosopher Plutarch told us in his Life of Lucullus:

“[25] Since the first messenger who told Tigranes that Lucullus was coming had his head cut off for his pains, no one else would tell him anything, and so he sat in ignorance while the fires of war were already blazing around him, giving ear only to those who flattered him…”

Plutarch, “The Life of Lucullus“, The Parallel Lives, published in Vol. II of the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1914, University 0f Chicago, p. 551.

The story does not stop there. Plutarch let us know about the fate of Tigranes, and of those unfortunate enough to serve such rulers, even those who struggle against their leaders’ motivated ignorance with the best possible intention:

“The first of his friends who ventured to tell him the truth was Mithrobarzanes, and he, too, got no very excellent reward for his boldness of speech. He was sent at once against Lucullus with three thousand horsemen and a large force of infantry, under orders to bring the general alive, but to trample his men under foot. … A battle ensued, in which Mithrobarzanes fell fighting, and the rest of his forces took to flight and were cut to pieces, all except a few.
Upon this, Tigranes abandoned Tigranocerta, that great city which he had built, withdrew to the Taurus, and there began collecting his forces from every quarter….”

Plutarch, “The Life of Lucullus“, The Parallel Lives, published in Vol. II of the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1914, University 0f Chicago, p. 553.

Repeating many times the same mistake, Tigranes is vanquished. On the contrary, Lucullus, the Roman aristocrat, General and Consul, listens to the advice of those who understand and warn him and synthesise them. Lucullus then adds to these analysis his own genius and is victorious.

From our perspective, Plutarch’s story highlights the importance of proper early warning and strategic foresight contrasted to what happens if motivated ignorance comes into play.

Knowing little enough for avoidance and the Dunning-Kruger effect

Furthermore, the deleterious impact of motivated ignorance can become even worse and more entrenched, as motivated ignorance ends up favouring motivated ignorance. Let us see how this vicious cercle can take place.

To be able to engage in motivated ignorance, individuals must have an idea of what they want to ignore. They need to know enough to know what to avoid. Thus, individuals who are engaged in motivated ignorance have a general knowledge and understanding of the issue of concern. Yet, most of the time, their knowledge will remain generic and superficial. If they had a specific and detailed knowledge then they could not claim ignorance, or if they did, then we would be in the realm of lies, which is a different phenomenon.

As a result, in instances of motivated ignorance, another bias can come into play, the Dunning-Kruger effect. According to this bias, “the skills that engender competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain” (Kruger and Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It…”, 1999). In other words, the less one knows about something, the best one thinks one is in this field.

The Dunning-Kruger effect could thus act as a factor reinforcing motivated ignorance. Indeed, by practicing motivated ignorance, individuals would make sure their knowledge remains superficial and thus both ignore inconvenient truth while strengthening their beliefs in their superiority in this field. As a way to mitigate the Dunning-Kruger effect is likely to increase the knowledge of individuals prey to the effect, motivated ignorance would forbid this solution.

Are we thus faced with an inescapable fate? Are those who, as Plutarch’s Tigranes, engage on the path of motivated ignorance doomed to remain ignorant and then finally succumb to their enemy or whatever threat and surprise they proudly ignore? As practitioners of early warning and strategic foresight are we doomed to fail and be shot if destiny or lack of fortune gives us as decision-makers individuals favouring motivated ignorance, or locate us in a time and civilization where motivated ignorance reign?

Let us explore further motivated ignorance, looking at the causes that lead people to engage in such behaviour. We may then try to devise strategies to act on causes. Note, however, that because we are facing active ignorance, our means to reduce this bias are singularly small. We certainly need to make sure we do not provoke motivated ignorance for our next warning or our next foresight product, while going on “speaking truth to power”. However, more difficult, if it is our very activity that is actively avoided, we need to work around it. Thus it will not be so much our products that must have specific characteristics, but other things outside them, these other things remaining to be determined according to specific cases. We shall again build upon Williams’ research (Ibid.).

The reasons for motivated ignorance

As exemplified in Plutarch’s story about Lucullus’ victory and Tigranes’ fate, motivated ignorance is a bias that can be extremely dangerous in terms of consequences, both at individual and collective level. To struggle against this bias, we need to understand why people would wish to ignore something, even though it would appear, from an external point of view, that knowing and understanding would be best.

Avoiding negative emotional states and countering strategies

This is a premium article. To access this article, you must become one of our members or register for an online course.Log in if you are a member or have registered for a course.

Featured image: Photo by Harun Benli via Pexels, free of use.

Bibliography

André, Christophe, “Les émotions qui nous détruisent“, Chronique on France Inter, 14 février 2017.

André, Christophe, “La sérénité, ça s’apprend”, Conférence, MAIF, 12 march 2015.

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “The Best of all possible worlds“. Encyclopedia Britannica, 6 Jun. 2017.

Golman, R., Hagmann, D., & Loewenstein, G., “Information avoidance“, Journal of Economic Literature, 55(1), 2017, 96–135.

Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, 1651.

Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments“, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 77, no 6, p 1121-1134, American Psychological Association (1999).

Lavoix, Helene, “Communication of Strategic Foresight and Early Warning“, The Red Team Analysis Society, 3 March 2021.

Lloyd, Sharon A. and Susanne Sreedhar, “Hobbes’s Moral and Political Philosophy“, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed.

Marshall, G., Don’t even think about it: Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change, (New York, London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

Nerdahl, Michael, Bowdoin College, Review of Manuel Tröster, Themes, character, and politics in Plutarch’s Life of Lucullus : the construction of a Roman aristocrat. Historia. Einzelschriften, Heft 201. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008, Bowdoin College, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2008.

Pham, Michel Tuan “Emotion and Rationality: A Critical Review and Interpretation of Empirical Evidence,” Review of General Psychology, 2007, Vol. 11, No. 2, 155–178, DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.11.2.155.

Plutarch, “The Life of Lucullus“, The Parallel Lives, published in Vol. II of the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1914, University 0f Chicago.

Voltaire, Candide ou l’Optimisme, 1759.

Williams, Daniel, “Motivated ignorance, rationality, and democratic politics“, Synthese, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02549-8

Williams, Daniel,”To communicate scientific research, we need to confront motivated ignorance“, LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog, 13 January 2021

EN
FR ZH EN