Cybersecurity
Futures2025
Explore the scenario worlds
Our future-looking scenarios tell logical stories about how forces of change could overlap and combine to create a cybersecurity landscape in 2025 that is meaningfully different from what we see today. Experience the scenario worlds by watching the four short videos below, prefaced by an introductory video featuring Walter Parkes that situates the scenarios and explains how to use them. Download the full written version of the scenarios here.
Intro to Cybersecurity Futures 2025
American film producer and screenwriter Walter Parkes introduces Cybersecurity Futures 2025, situates the scenario narratives, and instructs on how to use them.
QUANTUM LEAP
This is a world in which a few large governments attempt to control the proliferation of quantum computing technology and apply it to the objectives of national power. The non-proliferation effort ultimately fails, leaving in its wake re-shuffled geopolitical alliances and new centers of power, as powerful quantum technologies fall into the hands of city consortia and deviant criminal networks.
NEW WIGGLE ROOM
This is a world in which there is ‘perfect information’ and imperfect identity. The combination of omnipresent sensors and ubiquitous connectivity turns out to be a poisoned chalice. We now know too much—and know it too accurately—for societies to remain stable, though people find ways to introduce new uncertainty by adopting multiple identities.
BARLOW’S REVENGE
This is a world in which two nearly opposite grand bargains for digital security emerge. Some countries secure the internet within their borders by essentially nationalizing it; other governments step back and cede all responsibility to corporations and the market. The middle ground of regulation and innovation that the digital world inhabited for the last 40 years is hollowed out.
TRUST US
This is a world in which an AI-powered SafetyNet overwhelms security challenges and makes the digital world largely safe, at least for big institutions. For most individuals, privacy is a distant memory, and there is looming distrust of a machine that is capable enough to explain its own decision-making processes to humans (since it knows exactly what they want to hear and believe.)