In industries where it is a necessity (e.g., government, payment processors, healthcare organizations, etc.), I think there are several things that could encourage adoption.
However, fear of distant future possible outcomes is probably one of the weakest human motivators.
If I could advocate for an approach, it would be through tax incentives, government underwritten insurance that requires adherence and practice of security controls, etc.
My thought is, we can very likely encourage Cybersecurity practices using the same tools we use to say, stimulate the economy (e.g., providing liquidity to housing markets, tax rebates for first time homebuyers, etc.) or adoption of lower emission energy technologies (e.g., tax rebates on purchases of electric vehicles).
Unfortunately, people and government have not seemed to want to make the investment necessary to implement methods I’ve suggested above. Which is bizarre, because some of what we have lost and continue to lose is priceless (e.g., OPM government employee records, IP related to military technologies, etc.).
How do we solve these issues without upskilling a bunch of people who don’t know/care about security? Is there even a solution, or are we just bound to hit some mr robot-esk post apocalyptic scenario before people get their shit together?