In the year 2000, Agency experts released a report about the challenges of the future. So how right were they? And what did they miss?
Way back in the futuristic year 2000, the CIA convened a group of experts from outside the Agency. Their mission: to gaze into the near future and predict 2015 would look like.
The result was a 70-page report covering everything from the rise of nanotechnology through oil shocks and demographic change to the fate of the global economy.
Fifteen years later, how right were they about the future we are living through now?
Many of their conclusions were uncontroversial: water would still be wet, sugar would still be sweet, and ethnic and religious tensions would continue to drive conflict in nations where governance is poor.
But other predictions have fallen flat – such as the notion we’d all be eating cloned beef burgers, or that North and South Korea would be unified.
Read on to find out just what they got right and wrong about the world of today.
The internet revolution: RIGHT
The CIA’s experts correctly predicted the explosion in digital and mobile technology which has transformed the world as we know it.
"Internet access holds the prospect of universal wireless connectivity via hand-held devices and large numbers of low-cost, low-altitude satellites"
“Universal wireless cellular communications”, they said, would create “the biggest global transformation since the industrial revolution.” Looking at the way smartphones have proliferated across the planet, putting seven times more computing power than the chess computer which beat Gary Kasparov into the palm of your hand, who could disagree?
The “IT revolution”, as they called it, would also have political consequences. In the Middle East, a “web-connected opposition” would pose new challenges to authoritarian regimes – as it did in the Arab Spring.
Meanwhile, the same technologies would create new avenues for conflict between states. This was borne out in reality by Chinese and Russian cyber-attacks in the USA and by America’s own use of a computer virus, Stuxnet, to sabotage the Iranian nuclear programme.
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