- Science & Technology
- Artificial Intelligence
- Understanding the Effects of Technology on Economics and Governance
The many technological advances underway in artificial intelligence, bioengineering, quantum technologies, energy innovations, and space capabilities are accelerating the pace and scale of change and introducing a new era of outsized possibilities and uncharted risks. New discoveries and technologies have always been disruptive, and some have been broadly transformative from the wheel to the printing press to the internet and the smartphone. With today's rapid pace of technological development and diffusion, it is increasingly risky for governments, industries, and communities not to anticipate and prepare for how new discoveries and capabilities will be used and how they will impact their interests, security, and daily lives. Strategic warning of their potential emergence, unintended applications, and unanticipated implications is increasingly essential. Once new technologies are unleashed, it may be too late to shape their applications or adequately prepare for likely implications.
To help leaders navigate this era of rapid innovation, Hoover’s Tech Futures Lab offers a provisional framework for thinking about future strategic technological surprises. Our framework offers criteria for defining strategic surprise, identifies different categories of technological surprise across the innovation lifecycle, widens the aperture beyond traditional military contexts, and suggests multiple approaches to better anticipate and prepare for disruptions. Rather than being definitive, we provide this framework as a starting point for conversations about the risks and opportunities of technological disruptions.
Key Takeaways
- Technological disruptions are strategically significant when they overturn prevailing assumptions, dramatically alter the course of events, empower actors and shift advantage, and require significant responses at the societal, national, and/or international level.
- Technology can produce strategic surprises at any point along its life cycle, from development to application to the appearance of additional long-term effects, and a surprise in one domain may lead to additional surprises downstream.
- Going forward, the greatest risks of technological surprise may not be failing to forecast the specific technological advancements, but being unable to anticipate the unplanned ways new and existing technologies can be applied and their longer-term systemic disruptions.
- Protecting and maintaining American security and prosperity will require consistent application of foresight methods to reduce the element of ‘surprise,’ and the adoption of strategies to make our societies, economies, and countries more resilient and adaptive to the inevitable disruptions.
