The future is coming. Most governments are still just taking notes — Ahmad Ibrahim

NOVEMBER 12 — Every few years, governments publish a glossy report about the future. It will be full of impressive charts, expert quotes, and bold predictions about artificial intelligence, clean energy, and the industries of tomorrow.

Then it goes on a shelf, and very little changes.

This is the strange state of “technology foresighting”. Countries know they need to do it. Technology changes constantly, and nobody wants to be the nation still building fax machines while everyone else moves to email. So governments hire experts, run workshops, and produce lots of reports.

After all that effort, are countries actually any better prepared for the future? Often, no. 

The first problem is a basic misunderstanding of what foresight is for. Many people assume the goal is to predict the future: figure out exactly which technologies will matter, then invest in those. Pick the winners, avoid the losers.

The honest answer, as the European Union’s own policy lab puts it, is that foresight “will not tell you the future.” Nobody can. The value of looking ahead isn’t in making a perfect prediction. It’s in mapping out the range of possible futures, spotting the warning signs of change early, and building the flexibility to respond when surprises arrive.

When governments treat foresight as a guessing game, they end up with a list of trendy technologies to fund—and none of the agility needed when reality takes a detour, which often happens.

The second problem is that the tools themselves are showing their age. The workhorse of government foresight is something called the “Delphi method,” invented in the 1950s. The idea is simple: gather a panel of experts, ask them questions, share the answers anonymously, and repeat until everyone roughly agrees.

It’s slow. It’s expensive. And it has a well-known flaw: experts tend to converge on conventional wisdom, missing the wild cards that end up mattering most.

Interestingly, a 2026 study found that a group of large language models—AI chatbots, essentially—could stand in for human experts in these exercises and reach similar conclusions far faster and cheaper. That’s genuinely useful: it could free up human experts to focus on the harder questions of values and trade-offs, rather than the routine work of trend-spotting.

But automating the old process doesn’t fix the deeper issue. Faster reports that still gather dust are just dust gathering at higher speed.

A robot waits to serve customers at a mini market in Beijing September 22, 2026. — AFP pic

The real problem: foresight without consequence. Here’s the crux of it. The biggest obstacle isn’t methodology. It’s that foresight exercises are often disconnected from the decisions that actually matter—budgets, laws, regulations.

The United Kingdom learned this the hard way. It launched a national foresight program back in 1993, produced hundreds of recommendations, and funded plenty of them initially. But over three decades, the approach kept shifting, because one-off mega-exercises simply don’t stick. Meanwhile, Finland—a country of just 5.5 million people—built foresight directly into its political system, with a permanent parliamentary committee and a government futures report every four years. The difference isn’t smarter experts. It’s that Finland made looking ahead part of how government works, not a special project.

Think of it this way: a company that does an annual “innovation workshop” but never changes how it operates isn’t really innovating. It’s performing. Too many governments are performing foresight.

What should change?

Three things, and none of them require reinventing the wheel.

First, make foresight permanent. Instead of a big report every five years, governments need ongoing scanning—people whose actual job is to watch for weak signals and feed them into decision-making in real time. Singapore and the UK have moved in this direction. Most countries haven’t.

Second, stop pretending there’s one right method. A small country with limited resources might get more from a focused study of one critical industry than from a sprawling national exercise. Regional cooperation—like the Asean Foresight Alliance—can help smaller nations avoid duplicating effort. There’s no single template; there’s only what fits.

Third—and this is the uncomfortable one—admit that foresight is political. Every choice about which technologies to prioritize, which scenarios to explore, and whose voices count is a choice about values and power. Pretending these are purely technical matters doesn’t make them neutral. It just shuts the public out of decisions that shape their lives. Citizens have a stake in these conversations, and they should be part of them.

The countries that handle technological change best won’t be the ones with the fanciest reports or the longest list of experts. They’ll be the ones that built the habit of acting on early warnings, the courage to confront uncomfortable possibilities, and the humility to admit the future can’t be controlled—only prepared for.

* Professor Datuk Dr Ahmad Ibrahim is affiliated with the Tan Sri Omar Centre for STI Policy Studies at UCSI University and is an Adjunct Professor at the Ungku Aziz Centre for Development Studies, Universiti Malaya. He can be reached at [email protected].   

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.