Scenario development:
11 ways to challenge assumptions.

Older Britons back conscription far more than the young: in a June 2024 poll, 61% of over-65s supported national service, against 19% of 18 to 24-year-olds (Lord Ashcroft Polls (opens in a new tab)). But the older voters weren’t expecting to serve. So what would have to happen for pensioners to be conscripted instead of the young? Is that, actually, a credible future?

People go to zoos to stare at bored animals. Flip it: people go to zoos to run from them. Robot deer, safe to bite and packed with meat, steered in VR by stag parties competing to survive longest. They might beat the lynx, even the Amur tiger. But can they survive the boss level: a pride of hungry lions?

Robot dogs carry guns. Swap it: put the gun on a real dog. A real dog is more agile and bonds with its handler. With a harness carrying an auto-aiming gun the handler controls, it becomes a mobile turret that police can send where they can’t go. Now it starts to make sense.

People go to space to feel more alive. What if they went to space to die? Assisted dying in orbit: the wealthy spend their final hours doing something extraordinary and setting a record, like the first spacewalk without a suit, or racing to be first on Mars, since a one-way trip is far cheaper.

Garden centres complain that customers are stingy with plants but lavish money on their pets, which give companionship, love and a sense of being needed. So use AI and sensors to turn a garden, a window box or a terrarium into a pet. New owners appear: people who can’t manage a cat or dog, or don’t want to feed one meat. And an ecosystem is an argumentative place: the drama between plants and fungi can play out, with the owner asked to take sides.

Adverts are annoying, so the industry bombards and targets us harder while we try to escape. What if people treated adverts as lottery tickets, staying up for the ad breaks? What if the ads became a butler, bringing the things we actually want? Could that work, and what would the world look like if it did?

If we can have flying cars, why not flying wheelchairs? What would they mean for everyone on a mobility scooter, and for tourism? Would we see the first wheelchair user summit Everest?

Humid heatwaves are becoming deadlier, and the body has a cliff edge: when the air is too humid for sweat to cool you, a few degrees can be the difference between discomfort and death. When one strikes, the roads lock, electric cars run flat in the jams, smog traps the heat, and air conditioners overload the grid until transformers burn. The slums become deadly. A business offering a place in an air-conditioned cool centre can charge whatever it likes.

So a new kind of disaster insurance appears: a cool room by subscription. And nationalist politicians reserve cooling and power for their own tribe, opening the way to a new kind of genocide: withholding the infrastructure people need to survive.

When the laser was invented in 1960, fiction filled with ray guns and death stars; cheap laser pointers for playing with cats arrived in the 1990s. Star Trek imagined the communicator, but never Kirk and Spock in a WhatsApp flame war with Klingons, swapping cat videos. So shrink today’s expensive novelty, a fermentation lab with a 3D food printer, to a cartridge: load it with leaves and hedge clippings the night before, and it makes two burgers for dinner. Then work back: the military first, then disaster relief, then factories, the technology getting smaller and cheaper at each step, until every home has a printer sold cheap and paid for by cartridge subscriptions.

A drone that reports the news is a niche idea. But mass-produced humanoid robots, telepresence and AI let anyone hire a humanoid to interview people on their behalf. What starts as a cost-cutting way to do fast, low-risk journalism becomes the norm, and human field reporters become the exception.

Parents want the right child. But how would they know? What if DNA analysis, mapped to personality and brought to life by generative AI, let parents interview their embryos before choosing which one is born? What happens when that child grows up not wanting to be the person their parents chose? And which cultures would embrace it?

Refugees want to escape. Countries don’t want to let them in. Companies need seasonal workers. Solution: ships that carry refugees from country to country, selling their labour while confining them to freeports their visas won’t let them leave. Everyone is happy, for a while. Then everyone adapts: countries grow less tolerant of refugees, labour companies ramp up the exploitation, and each feeds the other.

One of my favourites: save the rainforests from being cleared for grazing by spreading radioactive waste through them. The wood and the beef lose their value, and the forest survives. Even the people who live there might prefer a higher cancer risk to losing their land and their culture. It solves two intractable problems at once: where to put nuclear waste, and how to stop deforestation.

But how could anything so taboo ever happen? Suppose a catastrophic burn made saving the rainforest a superpower’s top issue, and it chose to make an example of a small forest nation: securing its airstrips, contaminating its forests, then threatening its neighbours with the same. A new kind of environmental coercion. Still unlikely, but no longer impossible.

What if it made more sense to pay a multinational to insure you against invasion than to keep your own army or join an alliance? If military technology turns over so fast that kit is obsolete within years, and alliances shift as quickly, a company selling Defence Obligation Contracts could keep a rotating stock of equipment and people. A standing army is an insurance policy that mostly never fights; the insurer’s kit would be fighting constantly, gaining experience and paying for itself before it dates.

Then the problems arrive: two countries at war with the same insurer, or more wars than the insurers can cover at once. It’s AIG in 2008, with tanks.