Dateline: April 2 2032
Science and technology have been propelled into the front lines of the global contest. It’s not a military war, but an economic one, with companies and countries battling for supremacy. China and America are the main protagonists, but smaller players such as the United Arab Emirates are creating havoc on the sidelines.
By now everyone has accepted that tech dominates every industry and business, but hard science is the sharp end of the spear. Real scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations are keeping the leaders ahead of their trade rivals, and “mad scientists” are in hot demand. And those with the deepest pockets are winning this war.
We’ve gone beyond digital supercomputers and AI engineers, though those have helped, along with robotic experimentation. Now we’re betting on atomically thin transistors, molecular assembly and bio-fabrication of exotic devices and materials that have quantum properties. Coupled with photonic computation and gamma lasers these inventions — to name just a few — promise to revolutionise everything from communications to energy to medicine, transport and manufacturing.
The old trade wars based on tariffs and cost efficiencies have evaporated in the face of new realities, where superior intellectual property is the ultimate secret weapon. The countries and companies with the best scientific minds, the best research programmes, and the best entrepreneurs to turn innovations into exponential opportunities, are leading the charge into the next economic era.
It’s not just a fight to dominate the next industrial revolution. It will change society and civilisation as we know it. It’s a fight for the future. /First published in Mindbullets April 3 2025.
Intelligent machines create the new hegemony
Dateline: December 3 2030
In the past 15 years we have seen the stunning rise of an exponential technology — machine learning and AI. Like Moore’s Law on steroids, smart machines and computer systems have created entirely new global industries, turbo-boosted productivity and destroyed old, industrial-age business sectors.
The Economist, now a purely digital research and analysis house, estimates the “new value” created by this phenomenon at more than $19-trillion globally. But a full 70% of this windfall has landed on the US and China, which have dominated the tech scene, almost to the exclusion of other nations.
Though the “nation state” is an almost anachronistic concept in the 2030s, both China and the US have stubbornly clung to their historically strong ideology of building their own economic empires first, and dispensing largesse to the rest of the world later. It’s in their nature.
Other developing nations have sought to innovate and grow on the coat-tails of these two giants and some have succeeded; but many are dependent on the markets and investments they provide, and are forced further down the value chain, almost like vassal states.
Industrial powers such as Germany and France have used regional integration to hang on to some semblance of importance in this new world order, but factory work, such as it is, has drifted to India — the world’s sweatshop, with the biggest pool of workers.
Like two gorillas in the same territory, China and America maintain an uneasy alliance. Each is waiting for the other’s first misstep; in the meantime, the dual hegemony is benefiting both. /First published in Mindbullets September 20 2018.
Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures, and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.
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