Technology

Disruptive technologies—such as the Internet of Things, robotics, and three-dimensional (3D) printing—have been heralded as the future of the global manufacturing sector. However, in Africa, they could hinder industrialization and result in fewer entry points into global supply chains. While it may be possible for African nations to “leapfrog” directly to newer technologies, it is more likely that developing the relevant worker know-how, infrastructure, and corporate capabilities necessary to leverage the potential value of these technologies will be a very gradual process. African policy makers must therefore pursue multipronged strategies to ensure relevance as 3D printing and other disruptive technologies move into the mainstream.

The United States’ Third Offset Strategy (TOS) is a step-change in military innovation offering the likelihood of strategic change in capability, designed to enable the US to maintain global hegemony in an era of great power competition. It represents a key opportunity of technological investment for US defence capacity, which in turn can stimulate the US defence industrial base and the broader technological ecosystem. This policy paper looks into how the TOS may impact Western defence and security decision-making and its strategic implications for the European Union.

The EU faces challenges from the outside and the inside. Most of those are the symptoms of big underlying trends, and handling them needs foresight. The Global Trendometer tries to provide foresight for decision makers in the EU by analysing the changes in these long-term trends. This publication does not offer answers or make recommendations. It presents summarised information derived from a range of carefully selected sources. This issue of the Global Trendometer analyses long-term trends on India, the labour-share of income, and democracy and artificial intelligence. It also features two-pagers on geoengineering, remittances, food security in China, economic waves, the US after Trump, public procurement and deep fakes.

Warfare is shaped by geopolitical, societal, technological, economic and military trends:
Geopolitical: The multipolar relations between ever bigger political entities with overlapping spheres of influences are defined by surpise and uncertainty. Smaller political entities will be weaker and proxy wars more common in the future. Detterence will be reinterpreted, vulnerable states more prone to aquire nuclear weapons and international norms weakened. Megacities will be central battlefields that leave ground forces vulnerable.
Social: Warfare will shift to the internet, it will be uncontrollably ‘open-source’, live and shocking, with ever more spectacular terror. Armies will be more network-centred, waging more personalised wars and will have to find new ways to interact with democratic societies. Women in combat and the disappearance of world war veterans change the way people think about war.
Technological: Mankind becomes more powerful over time, with non-state actors possessing capabilities currently restricted to super-powers. It will struggle to outlaw technological advances and wage war without violence. The West will lose its technological superiority and will have even bigger problems in knowing how and what to research. Both inferior and highly developed armies will develop new ways of engaging the enemy. Artificial intelligence (AI) will mean that democratic armies have to balance the ‘human in the loop’ policy against effectiveness.
Economic: The economy of the opponent will be a bigger target than in the past, with commercial and dual-goods becoming more important, and the environment a more widely used weapon.
Military: Possible future military situations will be more diverse then ever. Western armies will be vulnerable to cheap weaponry. The idea that wars will be easy to win will make the world more dangerous.
Key uncertainties are China, the cyber-dimension, robotics, autonomous systems and artificial intelligence, paradigmatic breakthroughs such as quantum computing, general AI and anti-ballistic systems, nuclear detterence and nuclear bargaining. Ten key questions for policy-makers focus on strategic autonomy, adaptation, balancing reserves, R&D, cooperation and export, interventions, China, weakening norms, anticipation, communication and procurement.

Weighing up all the risks, threats and opportunities for France, two main issues underpin the work in this review:
- France clearly cannot address all these challenges on its own. Our national autonomy is real and should be as comprehensive as possible, but it is limited within a growing number of fields. This calls for a clear-sighted approach to priorities based on the geographical proximity of threats and on the interests of our national community. France’s European and American partners are essential for facing these challenges.
- France also has global interests. These relate to its status within multilateral organisations and its presence around the world (in particular in its overseas territories and exclusive economic zone), as well as the fact that the world is shrinking as globalised technologies and flows of goods and people generate more interdependence.
Within this context, its responsibility is based on its unique situation in objective terms. France is the only EU country (post-Brexit) that is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a nuclear power, a founding member of the European Union and NATO, and that retains a full-spectrum and engaged military. As such, its ambition must be twofold: to preserve its strategic autonomy and to build a stronger Europe to face the growing number of common challenges.

While Europe has made substantial progress in the development of its High Performance Computing (HPC) ecosystem in the last few years, the study has identified a significant investment gap, which has led to a setback in its relative global position.
In this context, this study aims to assess the access-to-finance conditions for the development and deployment of HPC. In particular, the study’s specific objectives were to:
• Identify successful commercial business models in the HPC market.
• Assess the financing requirements in key market segments and identify current financing bottlenecks.
• Provide recommendations to bridge the current gap between technology providers/users (demand side for financing) and investors (supply side).
• Explore options for public-private partnerships in financing HPC and propose ways of funding the HPC sector under the current EU financial instruments.

This paper makes the case for smart policy development in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe (CESEE).
It uses European Investment Bank Investment Survey (EIBIS) 2017 results for CESEE cities to outline local infrastructure gaps and demonstrate the productivity and innovation gaps between CESEE cities and other EU cities.
It discusses negative demographic trends in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, and evaluates capital and non-capital regional convergence in CESEE countries.
Introducing a Smart Region Index, to allow the identification of gaps in CESEE regions compared with the EU, it also uses EIBIS to provide further conclusions on obstacles to investment for CESEE municipalities and highlights the importance of the use of EU funds.