We are not prepared for the most severe threats

This week, I've woken up with a bizarre feeling of living in a sequel to the Philip Roth novel The Plot Against America. In the book, the aviator, the national hero and Fascist Charles Lindbergh opposed candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and comes to power in the United States. The poison that had characterized interwar Europe had spread to the other side of the Atlantic.

Trump's return to the White House turns narrative into reality. Elon Musk Nazi-salutes a hall full of excited listeners, while Trump creates cryptocurrency to enrich his family, pardons those behind the biggest attack on American democracy in man's memory, deprives immigrants of constitutionally enshrined rights, and gives tech sector oligarchs the gift package they wanted: a reversal of Biden's feisty attempt to regulate companies' AI development. We are simply witnessing a regime change in American politics, from a rule of law to a personalistic and corrupt government.

As it creaks at the joins of the Liberal Democrat edifice, it is more important than ever to ensure the resilience of society to the threats we face, as the Government is gearing up to in its fresh white paper on total preparedness, with the subtitle “prepared for crises and war”. The crises we need to prepare for are everything from floods to new pandemics. What they have in common is that they are events that are difficult to prevent and predict and they cause great damage when they first occur.

Given its seriousness, it is striking that the message has barely been mentioned in the media since it was put forward two weeks ago. One explanation may be the absence of tangible means beyond a requirement to build shelters. That message actually is about a necessary structural change of civil Norway's ability to deal with the crises to come. But processes don't make headlines.

Think of preparedness as an analogy to the threats the body can be exposed to. A healthy body and psyche is a good bulwark against most threats. Likewise, we can build resilience in society so that we can deal with the crises to come, even if we cannot predict exactly which crises that will come.

Just as important as having good preparedness when the crisis hits is to reduce the chance of the crisis occurring. Pandemic surveillance and vaccine development prevent pandemics. An important step by the Government is therefore to build better foresight and coordination skills at several levels. Nevertheless, I miss a systematic presentation of the threats facing Norway and a socio-economic analysis of cost-effective means.

The Directorate for Social Security and Emergency Preparedness (DSB) regularly provides analyses of the most serious threats. But these have significant shortcomings. Experts say there is a significant chance that the development of AI will lead to disastrous results for humanity, but this is not even mentioned as a possibility in DSB's scenarios.

DSB includes pandemics, but the analyses do not reflect the seriousness. In the new Lancet Commission Global Health 2050, they estimate a fifty percent chance of a new pandemic killing more than 25 million people over the next 25 years. The chance of one killing more than 100 million people is estimated at 14 percent.

Better analyses are not enough either; they also need to be brought to the fore of the great and the people. In the Total Emergency Communication, the government proposes several new reports and messages. The intentions are good, but I'm worried that the messages will be a lot of text and too few numbers. The design of these messages should take inspiration from a proposal Borgar Jølstad, Johannes Bangum and I have presented in a Langsikt report.

We need a report to be presented to the Storting with an overview of the most serious threats Norway faces over the next hundred years, with quantitative estimates of probability and severity. It should also include a socio-economic analysis of what the most effective means are.

Such a message would have to be based on a principle of Expected benefit: we should prioritize the means that most effectively reduce the risk of the most serious incidents, not the worst-case thinking that Justice Minister Emilie Mehl refers to when she defends scattered settlement and demands to build shelters. Worst-case thinking makes for poor priorities. Anything that can be assumed to have a minimal chance of reducing severity in a worst-case scenario will pass, regardless of how unlikely the scenario is or how small the measure seems.

If we carry out an expected benefit analysis, we will probably find better tools than building shelters, such as strengthening health preparedness globally, through better virus surveillance, vaccines and support for the World Health Organization.

Another measure is to strengthen international cooperation to ensure the safe development of artificial intelligence. The race to create super-intelligent artificial intelligence is intensifying. With Trump at the helm, the chance increases development gets out of control.

A third measure is to link ourselves more closely with Europe. It is necessary if we are to secure vaccines in the next pandemic, but the need goes beyond that. With a United States moving in an authoritarian direction, threatening our neighboring countries and withdrawing from international organizations, we must look to other alliance partners to ensure the safety of Norwegian citizens.