up and comming risks / mod report

[Tarrel]

On the face of the Guardian synopsis, I agree. However the report itself covers a lot of detail, and acknowledges the difficulty of predicting into the future, and the rising uncertainty that goes with that.

It takes a huge amount of foresight to anticipate the myriad of potential "black swan" events that could arise in the next 30 years. Bear in mind that 30 years ago the internet was barely in its infancy. It's natural for us to envisage a future which has more of the same of what we have now (e.g. continued rise of China, existence of middle-east terrorism, more drones, etc), but much more difficult to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and envision new scenarios out of thin air. But it's the new, unexpected events that tend to create the biggest seismic shifts and threats. That's why resilience is important.

"All the calculations that would ever be needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which were then being built—one in Cambridge, one in Teddington, and one in Manchester. No one else would ever need machines of their own, or would be able to afford to buy them."

Prof. Douglas Hartree - early British computer pioneer - around 1951