Future and Emerging Technologies

‘Whoever becomes the ruler of AI will become the ruler of the world,’ said Vladimir Putin in September 2017. The USA, Russia and China are all adamant that artificial intelligence (AI) will be the key technology underpinning their national power in the future.What place, then, is there for Europe in this context? The European Commission has recently set out a European initiative on AI which focuses on boosting the EU's technological and industrial capacity, developing an innovation ecosystem, ensuring the establishment of an appropriate legal and ethical framework, and preparing for socio-economic changes. This edition of the Foresight Brief presents the results of a mapping exercise on AI’s impact on the world of work. It looks at the issues of work organisation and infrastructure, introduces the idea of ‘AI literacy’ for the workforce (as a necessary complement to technical reskilling), and details several AI risks for companies and workers. It also looks at aspects related to algorithmic decision making and the necessary establishment of an ethical and legal framework.

The past few decades have seen the acceptance of a new calculus in the role that air power can - and will - play in the future security environment. This is the result of fundamental shifts in the character and conduct of war and the technology-aided ability of air power to rapidly adapt to emerging situations. Wars or conflicts that have been fought over the past half century have all been irregular in character even if the intensity, tempo and spread have been as much as, and at times more than, what could be termed high-intensity war.

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.

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.

The technology-driven world in which we live is a world filled with promise but also challenges. Cars that drive themselves, machines that read X-rays, and algorithms that respond to customer-service inquiries are all manifestations of powerful new forms of automation. Yet even as these technologies increase productivity and improve our lives, their use will substitute for some work activities humans currently perform—a development that has sparked much public concern.
This report assesses the number and types of jobs that might be created under different scenarios through 2030 and compares that to the jobs that could be lost to automation.
The results reveal a rich mosaic of potential shifts in occupations in the years ahead, with important implications for workforce skills and wages. Our key finding is that while there may be enough work to maintain full employment to 2030 under most scenarios, the transitions will be very challenging—matching or even exceeding the scale of shifts out of agriculture and manufacturing we have seen in the past.

In the coming years, prosperity in Germany will have to be generated through technology and knowledge to an increasing degree. Technological progress will become the sole driver of growth in the long run as growth contributed by labour and capital declines in the face of demographic change.
Germany must now chart the course for this transformation.

Radical technological change will slash marginal costs, opening up completely new business models. This will change value added in key sectors including mobility, healthcare and energy, and increase integration with services.

Germany must take more concerted action than it has so far to set the course for industrial policy going forward. Although Germany still boasts a range of outstanding benefits as a business location, it must tackle weak points in the start-up environment, venture capital, public investment and regulatory parameters for key technologies.

The strategic priorities of German industrial policy must continue to be the deepening of the European single market and the international trade and investment regime. Bilateral and multilateral trade policy has moved into rougher waters while the untapped potential right here in the European Union
is wholly underestimated.

In the digital world too, a good balance must be found between productivity and social cohesion. While this vision is still forming on the horizon, the political course taken now will determine whether it will turn into a positive or a plaintive reality.

The Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Advisory Group has produced a report which proposes to put FET at the nucleus of the European Innovation Council.

The FET Advisory Group has been set up at the beginning of H2020 with the mandate to give advice to the Commission regarding the objectives and the scientific and innovation priorities of Future and Emerging Technologies.

As a result of discussions extending over more than a year, the group has now produced the report "The future of FET: a possible nucleus for the European Innovation Council", which proposes to put FET at the nucleus of the European Innovation Council.