A Swiss foundation with global reach and a private-public partnership working from Geneva, GESDA was started in September 2019 to develop and promote anticipatory science and diplomacy for greater impact and multilateral effectiveness.

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Top Trends 2024

Introduction

A Letter from the Chairmen

Peter Brabeck-LetmathePatrick Aebischer

Explainer

About the Science Breakthrough Radar

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Martin MüllerSophie Gilbert

Introduction

Press & Media

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Facts and Figures

Explainer

GESDA's Approach to Science Anticipation

Michael O. Hengartner

Introduction

Highlights of the 2024 Edition

Lenses

Geostrategic security is in crisis at a time when urgent action on humanity’s intertwined environmental, technological and infrastructure systems is critical to long-term sustainability. The natural world, energy, food, water, raw materials, health systems and digital information networks are in volatile transition. Scientific discovery and invention bring revolutionary progress, yet often generate unanticipated systemic risks.

Lens

AI Futures: Peace and War

Peter KingsleyWendy Hall

October 2024 marks the release of the fourth annual edition of the GESDA Science Breakthrough Radar®, a unique and growing collection of data and insights about anticipated breakthroughs in science and technology. To develop and compile the Radar, GESDA has engaged with more than 2000 researchers across over 60 different fields of scientific, technological, social and diplomatic research.

Lens

Anticipating the Future of Research

Martin MüllerSophie Gilbert

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are being deployed on a massive scale throughout the world. While the technology is still developing, it is clear that it will have equally massive potential consequences for a wide variety of sectors — and diplomacy and international relations are no exception. AI systems can act as force multipliers for both war and peace, and in the service of individuals, states, non-state actors — such as major technological players — and the international system.

Lens

Anticipating the Geopolitical Impact of Advanced AI

Emmanuel R. Goffi Fabian Toux

The current state of the planet, marked by climate change and biodiversity loss, presents one of humanity’s most urgent challenges, further exacerbated by a projected population increase to nearly 10 billion by 2050. Scientific and technological advancements are vital for monitoring and mitigating these issues, offering solutions for humanity to coexist with a changing planet in a sustainable way. In this spirit, the third platform of GESDA’s Science Breakthrough Radar® provides an overview of trends and breakthrough anticipations in “Eco-Regeneration and Geoengineering" over 5, 10, and 25 years, including critical strategies such as decarbonisation, Earth Systems Modelling, Ocean Stewardship, Solar Radiation Modification, and Future Food Systems to ensure nutritional security for all. Amidst these efforts to sustain the planet’s health while adapting to accelerating global change, the 2024 Philosophy Lens zeroes in on eco-augmentation.

Lens

The Philosophical Lens: Eco-augmentation: Shaping the future of social-ecological systems

Eric DesjardinsOrit HalpernEmma Ruttkamp-bloem

Invited Contributions

Recent years have seen repeated remarkable advances in the creation of deep-learning systems, most recently large language models (LLMs). These systems have demonstrated the ability to respond to complex natural-language prompts with informative answers and perform a wide variety of cognitive tasks on par with humans.1 Oftentimes their abilities have surprised many of us and even significantly exceeded the expectations of their creators.

Invited Contribution

Artificial Cognition

Chris Eliasmith

It may not attract much attention in everyday life, but the fungal kingdom has a remarkable breadth and depth of impact on human and environmental well-being.
Fungi are integral to health, agriculture, biodiversity, ecology, manufacturing and biomedicine. They are Earth’s pre-eminent degraders of organic matter, are among the best-characterised model systems for biomedical research and produce enzymes crucial for fermentation, food production, bioremediation and biofuel production. Fungi have also made invaluable contributions to medicine: they produce a phenomenal diversity of chemicals that we have found uses for as antibiotics, immunosuppressants that make organ transplants possible and drugs that reduce the risk of heart disease.

Invited Contribution

Fungal Pandemics

Leah CowenJoseph Heitman

Anticipation of scientific and technological breakthroughs is critical for enabling society and its legitimate decision-makers to craft inclusive, global solutions and progress toward sustainable futures. However, such techno-scientific anticipation is not enough by itself. It only makes sense when framed within more fundamental questions about humans, society and the planet — questions at the heart of the social sciences and humanities. We must also anticipate the future of these latter disciplines if we are to cope fully with the complexities of today and tomorrow.

Invited Contribution

Future of Social Science and the Humanities

Yasuo DeguchiMarkus GabrielJun Sawada

The human embryo makes all of its organs during the first 40 days of pregnancy. It is during this extremely sensitive period that most pregnancies fail, most developmental defects form and drugs such as alcohol have the most toxic effects. It is also the part of pregnancy that we know least about, with obvious implications for our ability to develop medical interventions.

Invited Contribution

Growing Embryo Models: Challenges and Future Promise

$In an ever more fractured world, unification can be a valuable process. It might be political, such as the unification of East and West Germany. It might be scientific: physicists have long been searching for a “grand unified theory” that will reveal the common origin of the various forces of nature. But it can also be mathematical.$

Invited Contribution

Mathematics for Humanity

Due to the profound impacts of climate change, the intersection of space technology and global health is emerging as a crucial area of focus. Climate change is fundamentally altering the global landscape, causing extreme weather events such as wildfires, droughts, cyclones and floods. These events reshape our physical world and profoundly impact public health by altering patterns of disease spread and facilitating outbreaks. Space monitoring technology, combined with artificial intelligence, is playing an increasingly important role in tracking these environmental changes, and related disease outbreaks, to improve public health interventions.

Invited Contribution

Space Technology and Global Health

Antoine GeissbühlerCaroline PerrinAwa Babington-Ashaye

If you cool certain materials down to a very low temperature, they begin to conduct electricity with zero resistance, meaning that no energy is lost in transmission. This phenomenon — superconductivity — is rooted in quantum mechanics and has far-reaching implications for science, technology and society in sectors such as healthcare, clean energy and transportation. Superconductive materials include alloys and simple intermetallic compounds: those most commonly used are based on niobium, as well as an entire class of ceramic compounds known as high-temperature superconductors, such as yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO). A third group, iron-based superconductors, was discovered more recently.

Invited Contribution

Superconductivity

Carmine Senatore

Fusion, often referred to as “putting the sun in a bottle”, could help meet our energy needs using nothing more than the hydrogen atoms found in seawater. Squeeze together two hydrogen atoms at a high enough temperature and pressure, and they fuse together, releasing vast amounts of energy. This is the process that powers the Sun.

Invited Contribution

The Future of Fusion

Ian ChapmanMike PortonAhmed Diallo

The decade following World War Two saw the beginnings of a profound change in global governance, with the founding of the United Nations (UN) in 1945 and the creation of many other new treaty-based, formal intergovernmental organisations (FIGOs), such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Health Organization. Much of our current understanding of international organisations, global governance and rules-based international order is based on analyses of the operations of these organisations.1

Invited Contribution

The Future of Multilateralism

Thomas Biersteker

Digital technology has had a profound impact on modern society, permeating nearly every aspect of our lives and economies. One aspect that is not as widely recognised as it should be is the transformation it is bringing about in world trade.

Invited Contribution

The Future of Trade

Richard Baldwin

Deep Dives

Report from the GESDA 2024 Anticipation Workshop on Eco-augmentation
Villars, Switzerland, 25 –27 March 2024

Deep Dive

2024 Villars Anticipation Workshop Report: Shaping Ecosystems: Anticipating an Age of Eco-augmentation

Michael O. HengartnerBridget BaumgartnerJackie Goordial + 20