GESDA summit: anticipation becomes a tool of diplomacy
The sixth GESDA summit in Geneva shows what scientific foresight can achieve: it creates options for policymakers, but does not replace their decisions.
Foresight is not an oracle
The sixth summit of the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator, GESDA for short, ended in Geneva on 15 October. According to the FDFA, more than a thousand representatives from science, diplomacy, politics, the private sector and philanthropy took part over two days. At the centre was a demanding idea: scientific and technological change should not be negotiated politically only once it has already reshaped everyday life.
That sounds self-evident, yet in practice it is unusual. Regulation often reacts to concrete harm, markets to existing demand, and diplomacy to acute conflicts. GESDA wants to extend the time horizon. The Science Breakthrough Radar 2027 identifies developments with perspectives of five, ten and twenty-five years. It is not meant to deliver predictions of individual events, but to make visible the topics on which research, society and politics must ask questions in time.
From radar to decision
The gap between insight and action remains the difficult part. The summit therefore also presented the digital instrument Compass. It is intended to link the opportunities and risks of new technologies with possible options for policy, regulation and governance. Whether such a tool leads to better decisions does not depend on its interface. What matters is who checks the assumptions, which interests are involved, and whether the analysis actually leads to verifiable steps.
For science diplomacy, precisely that is the interesting approach. It does not translate research directly into legal texts, but creates spaces for conversation between disciplines and states. With artificial intelligence, neurotechnology and space this is relevant, because rules often have cross-border effects while innovation takes place in a few centres. A shared vocabulary cannot prevent conflicts, but it can prevent states from reacting only after standards have already hardened.
Geneva as a locational advantage
With its international organisations, universities and non-governmental organisations, Geneva has a special infrastructure for such conversations. The location alone, however, is not a result. For science diplomacy to remain credible, it must include different perspectives: researchers from different world regions, states with different resources, business and civil society. Otherwise anticipation becomes a conversation among a few about the future of many.
The FDFA stresses that the new radar looks at time horizons of up to 25 years. This implies a methodological duty to be modest. The further the view reaches, the greater the uncertainty. Good foresight therefore does not provide certainty, but alternative developments, recognisable assumptions and options. Anyone who sells it as a promise of technology misses its purpose.
A public debate is part of it
GESDA and EPFL also presented a public portal designed to allow interactive exploration of possible scientific and technological developments. An open day at the Federal Palace on 24 October is meant to open this debate beyond Geneva. That matters, because the social consequences of new technologies are not merely expert questions. They affect healthcare, the world of work, security and the distribution of opportunities and risks.
For Switzerland, anticipation is thus part of its role as host of international cooperation. The added value arises not from a particularly futuristic tone, but from better decisions here and now. The GESDA summit provides instruments and contacts. Whether they turn into viable rules will be measured by concrete follow-up work.
