Our mission is to prepare current and rising leaders across government, business, and academia with a sophisticated grasp of how the world's fast-evolving forces in cyber, big data, artificial intelligence, bioengineering, climate change, information metastasis, societal cohesion, and other domains are converging into transformative threats and opportunities for the twenty-first century.
Utah State University's Center for Anticipatory Intelligence has led the pioneering effort in the US to establish the academic field of Anticipatory Intelligence: a multidomain approach to anticipating threats and opportunities emerging from the world’s increasingly complex security environment, oriented around the goal of reducing uncertainty and designing resilience across future scenarios. CAI is a nexus of academic excellence designed to prepare students and professionals from a wide range of disciplinary and career backgrounds to anticipate and successfully navigate complex emergent security challenges that are affecting their own fields and industries. The ability to recognize potential vulnerabilities to novel and evolving threats and build resilience in the face of these challenges requires government, industry, and academic leaders who have a handle on the state of play in the contemporary geopolitical, technological, scientific, and societal landscapes. Our teaching, research, and collaboration all orient around the mission of equipping our diverse graduates with a potent combination of analytic and applied skills, cross-trained competencies, and an actionable professional education fit for the security challenges of the twenty-first century.
CAI's Anticipatory Intelligence academic programs examine the interconnected emergent security challenges across the domains of individual, community, private sector, national, international, and human security – illustrated by the rapidly-evolving ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic, global supply chain disruptions, resurgent great power competition, intensifying water and food security challenges, the frontier of AI-generated content creation, accelerating dual-use advances in synthetic biology, climate change-driven human displacement, information and disinformation cascades, and more. We seek to prepare our students and equip our professional partners to better anticipate threats and opportunities growing out of these developments that are beyond the training and focus of current industry leaders, enabling them to grasp the progressively interconnected fate of the public and private sectors in security issues, drive innovation by advancing meaningful diversity in security thinking, and build resilience against the unexpected consequences of complex emergent forces. Our mission is to cross-train current and future leaders to accurately grasp and effectively communicate these complex realities and their impacts on individual fields and industries – and to have an eye on the horizon toward their implications for the future of humanity.