Looking Beyond the AI Haze 1: What’s Ripe for Disruption?

Ask leaders what disruption they are planning for and most will say AI. But the disruptions that matter most over the next decade are more likely to emerge where slow, near-certain forces collide with genuine uncertainty, and finding them takes a different kind of looking.

AI has become the default answer to almost any question about the future. That is understandable, but it narrows the view. Disruptions rarely look or feel the same: the app economy, the software-defined vehicle and the invasion of Ukraine had little in common, beyond catching many organisations off guard. A plan that starts and ends with “watch out for AI” risks missing the shifts compounding underneath it. So where else should we look?

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the best place to start is with what we already know. Most foresight work opens with volatility and ambiguity, yet much of the next decade is already determined. Drawing on Art Kleiner’s work on predetermined elements, we can name forces that are already in motion. The 1.5°C threshold was crossed in 2024, and seven of nine planetary boundaries had been transgressed by 2025. Two-thirds of humanity lives with below-replacement fertility, and by the mid-2030s almost all net workforce growth will be African. Solar and wind are poised to become the largest source of global electricity, the cost of sequencing a genome has collapsed, and debt and ageing populations are tightening a fiscal vice on governments.

The scenario planner Pierre Wack compared this to seeing heavy rain fall in the Himalayas and knowing the Ganges will flood downstream days later. It is not prediction; it is describing the consequences of something that has already happened. These forces are the playing field. What remains uncertain is how they will play out.

To explore that uncertainty, we return to six lenses first used in Future Agenda’s World in 2020 programme: Health, Wealth, Happiness, Mobility, Security and Locality. There is deliberately no AI lens. Unlike STEEP, where technology sits in a box of its own, these lenses treat technology and politics as forces that cut across every area of life, which makes it easier to see where change actually lands.

Where the certain meets the uncertain, disruptions start to come into view, and few of them make the AI headlines. By 2035, biological age could be a standard line item in hiring and insurance underwriting. Employee misery may become an insurable, litigated workplace liability. Low-altitude airspace above cities could become a contested, regulated resource. And knowing which internet you operate on could become as basic a strategic question as knowing which currency you are priced in.

Spotting a disruption is only half the task; organisations also have to act on it. As the economist Frank Knight observed a century ago, uncertainty cannot be measured, whereas risk can. The work is to move from one to the other: asking what would need to happen for each disruption to emerge, how big, fast and soon it might be, and what risk would come out the other side. Only once a disruption has a number on it can a business absorb it into its plans, budgets and risk registers.

These questions now sit at the heart of Future Agenda’s work on The World in 2035.

 

Seeing through the AI Haze_Pt 1 

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