As the 20th century intelligence revolution blasts, full bore into the 21st century, there is a need to take stock of the direction in which the modern practice of intelligence is headed. Modern intelligence itself is little more than a century old, born out of the circumstances of international insecurity and fast-paced military and technological change that seized Europe before World War I. Predictions about its future, if made at past points in its severely punctuated growth, would have been hazardous enterprises with a high likelihood of failure. Perhaps predictions made in the second decade of the 21st century will be no less hazardous and error prone; but at least we have some accumulated history to work with, and a pressing need to make the attempt.

Future projections about the nature of intelligence have to be based on a reading of the accumulated historical experience. This is the only methodology available to us in escaping the capriciousness and fraud of the crystal ball; but there is, of course a catch. In predicting the future of intelligence, you don't want to be caught just predicting the past, or, even if slightly better, disguising the future as a lightly reworked version of the present. Wilhelm Agrell, a noted Swedish intelligence scholar, in his reflections on the future of intelligence, calls this the “cognitive prison of the present”.