GESDA Summit 2026: “Anticipation is not prediction. It is preparation, guided by care and humility”

Honourable Ministers,
Excellencies,
Ladies and gentlemen,

Sixteen years ago this month, on 15 October 2010, deep beneath the Gotthard, this great Alpine massif connecting the north and south of Europe, a drill head broke through the last metres of rock.

For years, two teams had been digging towards each other through the mountain, one from the north, the other one from the south, at times beneath more than two thousand metres of rock. They never saw each other. Ahead of them lay rock no one had ever seen, and with every metre came the quiet risk that they might miss each other in the dark.

They did not. When the last rock gave way, the two tunnels met with a deviation of only eight centimetres sideways and one centimetre in height, in a tunnel fifty-seven kilometres long.

But my point is not the moment itself. It is everything that came before it. The Swiss people approved the project at the ballot box in 1992, eighteen years before the breakthrough and twenty-four years before the tunnel opened for operations in 2016. What followed the popular vote were nearly two decades of calculating, measuring and correcting, so that the two teams would meet in the middle of a mountain.

A breakthrough of this kind is no stroke of luck. It is a success that is the result of thorough preparation, built on the best knowledge available and achieved in a joint effort.

Science has always dug from one side of the mountain. You, the scientists in this room, push forward into what is possible. You do not always know what lies behind the next metre of rock. That is the very essence of research.

Societies, governments and diplomats dig from the other side. We start by setting political priorities, ideally based on what people need, what they fear and what they hope for. We work with laws, with institutions and with trust.

For a long time, these two teams did not dig towards the same point. Science pushed ahead while politics started late, and often in a different direction. Politics reacted to what had already begun to change the world. We saw it with the internet. We saw it with social media. And indeed, we are seeing it again with artificial intelligence.

When the two sides do not aim for each other, they never meet. They pass each other in the dark, each driving its own tunnel deeper and deeper into the mountain.

This is why preparation and anticipation matters. Anticipation is not prediction. It is preparation, guided by care and humility.

GESDA is, in a sense, the surveyor’s office of the future. It studies the rock ahead. With its Science Breakthrough Radar, it maps the scientific and technological advances that could shape our world in the years and decades ahead. And it brings the two teams into the same room. The GESDA Anticipation Summit is that room.

Here, a physicist sits next to an ambassador, a start-up founder debates with a humanitarian expert, and a young researcher challenges a minister. The future should not be discovered by a few and explained to the rest. It should be anticipated by many minds coming from different sides.

And GESDA does not stop at conversation. Its Open Quantum Institute, hosted at CERN, is a concrete example for action. It starts from simple but demanding questions. How can quantum computing serve humanity as a whole, and not only those who can afford it? How can we grant access to this technology for scientists and practitioners around the world rather than let them watch this revolution from the outside?

Why does Switzerland care so much about anticipatory science diplomacy?

Partly because it plays to our strengths, our people, our research and our long tradition of bringing different stakeholders together.

But it is also because of our political culture. Before we decide anything in Switzerland, we consult literally everyone.

So, anticipation matters deeply to us. If breakthrough science and technology is going to change the world in ten years, we need to start the conversation today. Only then will we be ready to decide before the disruption happens. In our experience, bringing everyone concerned to the table as early as possible is a success factor. And it is at the same time the very essence of International Geneva.

GESDA operates precisely in that spirit. This is why the Swiss Confederation, together with the Canton and the City of Geneva, founded GESDA in 2019, and this is why we continue to support it with conviction. For us, GESDA is science and tech diplomacy that looks ahead, acts, and thereby shapes what our Director General Marilyne Andersen calls a more intentional future, for the best of our international community.

In a world where technology has become an essential asset for every state, and increasingly a field of rivalry and competition, one question is widely discussed: who will win? This GESDA Anticipation Summit stands for another line of thought. This Summit should be a special space to discuss how we meet in the middle of the mountain, and how we move forward together.

In the same spirit, Switzerland is preparing, as we just heard from the Chair, to host the next Global AI Summit in Geneva on 21 and 22 June 2027. The theme of the Geneva AI Summit will be “Bridging Innovation and Trust” and this precisely captures the challenge before us.

Ladies and gentlemen,

The miners who met beneath the Gotthard massive in 2010 did not rely on luck. They relied on measurement, on patience and on each other. A slight inaccuracy is not perfection, but it comes close to it.

Anticipation works in a similar way. We will not get the future exactly right. But we can get close enough to meet one another, when the future breaks through.

So my wish for these two coming days is simple. Dig boldly from your side. Look out for those digging from the other side. And let us make sure that when the next technological revolution comes, we meet where the rock gives way.

Et avec cela, je vous dis : au travail !