In coming decades, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and 3D printing will pose new risks to people, nations, and global security. At the same time, accelerating change will challenge policymakers’ capacity to adapt. Some of the questions that Michael Rich and his team are exploring in RAND under a series of RAND research projects are:
What might be the impact of artificial intelligence on nuclear security? How disruptive will additive manufacturing—3-D printing— be to our military supply chain and economy? How do millennials perceive security? What are the drivers and disruptors of “health security”? Does speed, meaning a faster society, influence our notions of security?
The center’s founding director, Gregory Treverton, once described these as “threats without threateners,” the big-picture problems that cross industries and borders. We use the broadest definition of risk—a threat to the security of something. That could mean a threat to personal security, such as crime; a threat to state security, such as adversarial states or terrorism; or a threat to human security, such as climate change, natural disasters, or pandemics.
They are looking to the mid-future of 2040, and at some of the forces that will shape our path from here to there. The with aim is to seek new approaches to identify and assess the impact of several trends over the coming decades—political, technological, social, demographic—and to generate some useful guidance for policymakers.
The effort, known within RAND as Security 2040, has one overarching goal: “The world is changing rapidly,” said Andrew Lohn, an associate engineer at RAND and one of the lead researchers on the artificial-intelligence question. “We want to just be ahead of the curve.” The lead investigators are all early-career researchers, drawn from fields as diverse as nuclear strategy, anthropology, and microeconomics.
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