TL;DR

I’m once again hearing “who could have imagined?” for things that are very easy to imagine. If you actually stop for a moment and do some imagination, and maybe prep your mind with some science fiction, and perhaps also listen to early career voices.

Again?

I’ve written on this topic before. Though last time was a bit more narrowly focused on IT security.

Drones

Who could have imagined the Ukrainians using drones like that?

Well… I could. I didn’t specifically cover an Operation Spider’s Web like scenario in my 2012 CloudCamp London “Drones” presentation; but it’s the sort of thing I had in mind. And not because I’m some kind of futurist genius. It wasn’t hard to imagine a handful of cheap drones and thermobaric grenades[1] might be used to wipe out 1/3 of the Russian strategic bomber fleet[2]. That presentation referenced Scott Adams’ “The Religion War” (2004) and Marc Stiegler’s “David’s Sling“[3] (1988).

The future of cheap drones winning out over established (and expensive) military capability has been imagined for a long time, but somehow seems to have been an inconvenient truth to those allocating the billions in defence spending.

It’s not even that recently that it’s become a practical issue. Long before the drone usage we’re seeing in Ukraine (and by the Houthis in the Red Sea[4]) there was the adoption of drones delivering bombs by ISIS and similar ‘Violent Extremist Organisations’ operating in Syria and other parts of the Middle East. Oddly this never seemed to make the mainstream media in the West, though there are plenty of YouTube clips out there[5].

Air power, long the privilege of affluent state powers, is no longer inaccessible for Violent Extremist Organisations. ‘Commercial-off-the-shelf’ drones have enabled these organisations to build capabilities within the aerial domain. This is challenging the traditional dominance of air power that state powers have enjoyed and has consequences for both the forces operating on the battlefield and the within the world of air power studies.

Air Power Proliferation: How ‘Commercial-off-the-shelf’ Drones are being used by Violent Extremist Organisations to Influence The Future of Warfare in the Air by Flight Lieutenant Peers Lyle RAF

9/11

Who could have imagined people flying airliners into buildings?

Well… the writers of X-Files spin off ‘The Lone Gunmen‘ for sure. Maybe also the 13M people who watched the Pilot episode that featured an attempt to fly a commercial airliner into a building. And not just any old building, the World Trade Center in New York.

That episode screened on 4 Mar 2001. Six months and one week before the attack.

There seems to be some kind of collective amnesia about it ever being shown. And I’m not surprised that the series wasn’t renewed[6].

I also don’t think for a moment that the episode inspired the attack, as planning was already well underway, and the World Trade Center was a perennial target.

But every time I heard ‘who could have imagined?’ I had to choke back “um… perhaps you missed… but…”.

There are people whose job it is to imagine

So we should pay attention to them, and maybe try to incorporate their ideas into our risk models and other ways we reason about “what’s the worst thing that could happen?”.

Those people are science fiction authors (and TV script writers). I’ve already referenced a few examples.

One of my favourite SF writers is Cory Doctorow. For the purpose of this post he helps me out by having ‘gone meta’ a few times in writing about the relationship between SF and seeing into the future:

• Cory Doctorow: A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future (Locus 2012)
• The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories (Slate 2020)
• 1900s futurism (Pluralistic 2024)

There’s more, but search engines for me to find them again have gotten grotesquely bad via a process Doctorow coined a term for – enshittification. He doesn’t just help us see into the future, but also reason about the present.

Another is Charles Stross. Some of his (near future) SF keeps popping up in reality so frequently that I keep pinboard tags named after the novels: Accelerando, Halting State and Rule 34.

Maybe the most astute observation goes to William Gibson:

The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed

We don’t have to imagine very hard. Just take a look around at what’s happening – especially the weak signals from new stuff. Then think a little about the consequences.

There’s a problem here with power structures

Flight Lieutenant Lyle has a clear eyed view of how things are going to change over the course of his career.

Is that view shared by the newly designated Chief of Defence Staff Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton? Maybe. Knighton is possibly a terrible example, as the first engineer (and first non flight crew) ever to be made Chief of the Air Staff.

The point I want to make here is that junior people have a long race ahead of them, and the thoughtful ones are expending some effort on what they might need to adapt to. Senior folk not so much. They’re thinking about the final yards to the finish line, hoping that not too much changes before they retire.

Organisations, and particularly their strategic planning approaches, need to be open to diverse input; and not just be an ‘old boys club’ where everybody thinks the future is just like the past, but a bit newer and harder to explain to your parents.

Conclusion

If you want to be able to cope with what the future’s going to throw at you then read science fiction, listen to younger voices, and take the time to actually think through “what’s the worst that could happen?”[7].

Notes

[1] Arguably what’s happening in the Russo-Ukranian theatre isn’t just about drones, but the combination of drones and thermobaric weapons. Trent Telenko’s thread Patterns of Drone War Casualties makes for grisly reading. My take away is that nobody’s ready for how battlefield dynamics just changed, even the most well resourced armies.
[2] Particularly when a proportion of that fleet was obligated to be out in the open (for satellite surveillance) to comply with the START treaty.
[3] David’s Sling is also now the name of an Israeli missile defence system, which (amongst other things) can shoot down drones.
[4] This has become an excellent example of the economic asymmetry of drone warfare, with drones costing ~$1-10k being shot down with missiles costing ~$100k-1M fired from platforms costing ~$1B.
[5] Filmed by a mixture of people inspired by ‘look what we can do’, ‘look what we have to deal with’ and ‘this used to be a nice neighbourhood’.
[6] In the show it’s not murderous Arab terrorists but an inside job by the US government, which I guess might have played some part in the subsequent crazy conspiracy theories.
[7] Or should this be “what’s the worst thing that could happen that we have agency to mitigate?”. The worst thing that could happen is a gamma ray burst from a distant star dying that sterilises the planet before we have time to even observe the neutrinos our satellites detected shortly ahead of the energy.