Human ideas, government publications and ChatGPT visions for the SDSR long term future.

In my last post, I covered what the SDSR is, how it thinks about ‘the long term’ and what sources are used to prepare baseline views of the future.

In this post, I’m going to look at three sources that provide ‘visions' of the future, particularly addressing one of the questions raised in the SDSR - chiefly, ‘What challenges does the UK face out to 2050?’

What sources can we consider to think about the future?

In the last post, I theorised that in practice there are three sources of these visions being applied to the SDSR, these were:

1) Inputs from the general public

2) A baseline provided from the latest Global Strategic Trends publication

There is a 3rd source, but this is in contrast to the two above as both 1 and 2 are open, and the 3rd (inputs from internal secure discussions and priorities) will remain closed so not considered here (but remains something important to discuss later).

So the analysis that follows, will provide 3 different, openly available views of the future. As follows.

Input 1 = A sample of a humans ideas on future challenges to the UK (consultations were requested up until Sept 2024)

Input 2 = An abridged summary of the future challenges to the UK listed in the latest edition of Global Strategic Trends (published 27th Sept 2024)

and because of these AI-enabled times, I’ve included a third input

Input 3 = A Chat GPT generated summary of future challenges for the UK

Input 1 - Human ideas on the future challenges to the UK (AKA Chris’ view of the future)

As part of the public consultation, I completed a survey that asked a number of questions relating to the future of UK defence and security. For one particular question, In 500 words, I answered the question of ‘What challenges does the UK face to 2050’ with the following (abridged) answers (I will provide the reasoning behind these in another blog, but well, you know, there is a lot of this kind of stuff out there, but I will share it for completeness, you lucky people…). Anyhow, I digress. The abridged list is as follows:

1. Security provision to UK citizens homeland and abroad

2. Climate change and related crisis

3. Protection of critical national infrastructure

4. Maintenance of UK interests in globalised network

5. Balancing tech advantage with dependency

6. UK as a minor power on the global stage

So these answers are entirely based on my opinion, viewpoint and experience.

Input 2 = An abridged summary of the future challenges to the UK listed in the latest edition of Global Strategic Trends (published 27th Sept 2024)

The current futures baseline for the SDSR - Global Strategic Trends edition 7 - is available here.

It is in two formats - the full publication itself is a comprehensive and somewhat weighty reference coming in at 456 pages. It is delivered in conjunction with a ‘bitesize’ version of the report, coming in at a slimmer 48 pages (which in itself, is still quite a bite, I guess).

Together these provide authoritative and authored outputs. One of the reasons for their length is (conceivably) that they show the reasoning and the evidence/provenance of the information used to make the assessments they contain. Whether or not a long publication is the best place for this kind of evidence is debatable - will anyone actually read all 500 pages and is this best format for tracing sources etc? But, whatever the considerations of format, it remains a long term forecast that is a baseline for government planning. As a result it provides defence planners with something to work with when they are thinking about long term programmes and capabilities.

Using GST7 as a source, I’ve somewhat mercissley and manually abridged it to 6 main trends as follows (this is simply based on the Global Drivers of change, listed on pages 7 and 8 of the bitesize edition).

1. Global power competition.

2. Demographic pressures.

3. Climate change and pressure on the environment.

4. Technological advances and connectivity.

5. Economic transformation and energy transition.

6. Inequality and pressure on governance.

Input 3 = The top 6 challenges the UK faces out to 2050, generated from ChatGPT in Oct 2024.

To round this off and because, it is the times we live in. I asked the question ‘name 6 challenges the UK faces out to 2050’ - to ChatGPT, which in turn, harvested the internet and summarised things as follows (please note, I did this in late October 2024):

So to quickly abridge these in the same format as inputs 1 and 2, we get the following list:

1. Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability

2. Economic Inequality

3. Aging Population

4. Political Stability and Governance

5. Technological Change and Employment

6. Public Health and Healthcare System Resilience

So what next, what can we do with all these visions of the future?

As a means of completing these exercise, - what happens when we broadly compare these three lists?
If we combine them into one table, we get the following:

Which we can then broadly group into categories of similarity and them run into one final, aggregated list

So, a rough aggregation of the same trends (this is very broad - if they are the same colour, they have been labelled as the same trend…debatable in practice given the topic, but this is a high level strategic exercise (for fun!)) - is as follows:

And then finally - If you run these together into the same list that contains only the same summary of trends (i.e. if they occur more then once, they are combined)

So what does this yield, broadly a slightly longer list (it is now around 9 trends). At the very least, a simple analysis like this does uncover a number of further things to think about - all of which feed into the complexity and the challenge of doing an SDSR and what planners and policy makers need to juggle and the challenging nature of addressing security.

In terms of confidence, it probably shows that weighty human generated publications like Global Strategic Trends provide a good accounting of things (to be fair, the document itself does probably also feature the trends highlighted here, it just doesn’t summarise them in the same way). However, doesn’t it also raise a number of questions on how we currently think and prepare for the future - are using traditional foresight-based scenarios and ‘coffee table’ publications the best way of managing our understanding of trends? Do new technologies, like AI and the emerging field of advanced information modelling challenge these traditional ways of baselining the future?

This is something we’ll explore in our next blog.