David Reilly: “We live in a world that technologically is based on classical physics and we are moving towards a world that’s based on quantum physics. There’s a difference between those two. That difference is deep. It’s rich, it’s mathematically distinct and I think that does lead to disruptive technologies. Technologies that break from where we are today and the incremental path that we’ve been on. A time is coming where we’re going to be making use of those distinct and different aspects of the quantum world and using those different aspects for revolutionary, disruptive things.”

David Reilly: “It wouldn’t be fair of me to say that it is like other disciplines, in that although scientific curiosity is certainly potent here, there is hanging over us this major application for quantum information to be used in the context of security. That has been a really strong and great force in our community because it’s something that has enabled tremendous progress. I think it would be a different world if we were trying to develop technologies as impactful as they were, as disruptive as they were, and it turned out that they didn’t have implications for things like security. If that were the case I think we’d be on a different path because we wouldn’t have had the resources and funding that we’ve had for the last 20 years.”

Elsa Kania: “My research focuses on Chinese Defense Innovation and emerging technologies, looking at everything from information warfare, to unmanned systems, to artificial intelligence and quantum technologies. These are technologies in which the playing field is fairly level, in which traditional U.S. military technical advantage may not convey an advantage within these new domains. The Chinese military is actively pursuing these new technologies, which they see as the strategic commanding heights of future warfare. Beijing is investing billions seeking to lead the world, particularly in artificial intelligence and quantum technologies which are also priorities under China’s strategy of military-civil fusion, which attempts to leverage the synergies between commercial and defense developments.”

Bentley B. Allan: “The Newtonian revolution helped reconfigure international order in a variety of ways at a variety of different levels. In its most simplistic, and perhaps overly simplistic, terms the Newtonian revolution really introduced determinist natural law into the world. If you look at Renaissance and late medieval discourses, this view that the world was controlled by law was infused with divine implications so that what political discourses unfolded within was the idea that divine providence controlled the world and was the central force of the world. And this, through links of traditional monarchical theories of sovereignty, helped to legitimate political order based on hierarchical ordering of aristocratic institutions. The Newtonian view again not only helped to undermine the aristocratic ordering of politics by introducing new ideas about say what blood was. If blood was no longer the aristocratic sacred essence of the elite, but merely just a substance that travelled through people’s bodies — and again it wasn’t Newton that articulated that, but rather Harvey and other scientists in the middle of the 17th century — by eliminating that source of the sacred in the aristocratic blood it helped to undermine that discourse. So the Newtonian not only undermined previous existing discourses but it constructed new ones built on this idea that the world was a harmonious system that could be understood in terms of natural laws, governed in terms of those natural laws. And again this really culminates in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna when the powers that were represented there attempted to directly manipulate the balance of power, to directly arrange the system. If you look at all of the things that those leaders had to believe in order to actually consciously engage in that act, you have to understand that it was Newtonian scientific ideas that made all that possible.”

Bentley B. Allan: “I think quantum didn’t have revolutionary implications for international politics and for the basic underlying concepts of international order in part because although quantum provides a rich source of metaphors to creatively reimagine our life and concepts of time and space and certainty and uncertainty, those ideas were never institutionalized in what I call the core sites of international order. That is they never entered into state bureaucratic apparatuses in a way where they could be reliably and regularly reproduced in a similar way. There are lots of different understandings of quantum and there are lots of different understandings about what its implications are for the human and time and so on and so forth. But in order to have a reliable and powerful effect on political institutions you need those ideas to be reproduced by a specific group of individuals in a stable context over time. To do that it has to be reproduced within a base of knowledge. The social sciences for example would have to take up the concept of quantum in a really serious way, not in just a metaphorical way but in a way that restructures the models of the human that they deploy in their models of society, economy and politics and so on. I think that if quantum were to have that effect on the social sciences that over the course of maybe 200 years or 100 years or some long period of time, then quantum would have really revolutionary implications for international order. By reconfiguring these basic concepts of what it means to be a human, whether or not we can control the world in determinative and complete ways.”

Ronald Deibert: “I think first of all, there is obviously a lot of military research and development and potential use of quantum technology. There is also a huge amount of R&D around surveillance capitalism and the use of quantum technology. And in that regard I think it will only accelerate some of the things that we’ve been seeing and amplify them. That said I have to be faithful to what I started out by saying and admit that there will probably be unexpected twists and turns as this stuff unfolds.”

Michael J. Biercuk: “The development of computational technologies that are able to crack public key encryption systems, are obviously of great interest for security agencies, for governments, for private organizations worldwide. But more generally, I think the advent of technologies that are powered by exotic quantum effects, as we’ve talked about in the last couple hours, really show that there’s a whole host of new capabilities that range from applications in mining and stand off detection for military purposes, through to more or less the way we organize society. That comes from these really ambitious goals that our community is developing, associated with the production of so-called quantum simulators. Things that are able to solve major problems in materials science and in chemistry, that while they sound esoteric are actually directly linked to the way we generate and disseminate energy globally. That of course has massive impact on the way we organize society, we organize cities, and as we heard in some of the discussion today has major ethical and political, as well as security questions about how we support a large and growing human population.”

Jon R. Lindsay: “There are applications of quantum that are envisioned to empower the offense by cracking known codes, and are envisioned to empower the defense by providing provable security on some links of the network. You have the same technology that’s empowering the offense and empowering the defense, so if it works it will make these strategic contests more complicated. I do not think that quantum will lift the fog of war for the same reason that existing technologies have not lifted the fog of war. In fact we see that the very technologies that are designed to reduce uncertainty often become sources of uncertainty themselves.”

Jon R. Lindsay: “Will China get there first and what does that mean for international politics? Obviously it depends on where ‘there’ is. I think there are many different benchmarks. There’s no one quantum supremacy. China will continue to invest and so people are worried that China will have these amazing networks and then they will be able to have incredible intelligence and military advantages. One thing I think we have to appreciate is the Chinese motivation. It is not to improve their ability to exploit and improve their military power. Chinese are deeply paranoid about the military information technology advantages of the West. Why did they name their satellite Micius? Micius was a Chinese philosopher who believed in peace and harmony and eschewed war. He argued that if you were going to get involved in war it should only be for the defense. He argued that you should master science for purely defensive purposes and in fact his disciples, the Mohists, went around and helped towns that were under siege by stronger powers to resist and overcome that onslaught. So by naming the satellite Micius the Chinese are telegraphing that, number one, they’re interested in the scientific applications, and number two, they are deeply concerned about their information position vis-a-vis the United States.”

Jon R. Lindsay: “Sun Tzu definitely talks about the importance of deception, the importance of intelligence or spies, and the importance of using stratagem to win without fighting. Or if you have to fight, to win very efficiently. Sun Tzu’s really talking about the importance of the organizational, the human and the intelligence dimensions of warfare, which Clausewitz doesn’t necessarily disagree with but says it’s very difficult to do intelligence operations and to achieve surprise on the battlefield because these same human organizations are very difficult to manage and they break down all of the time. I think we need to think both of these things together. Does quantum fit into this more intelligence and deception driven paradigm of, I don’t even want to say warfare, but political confrontation? Absolutely. The quantum revolution continues the intelligence revolution and the cryptographic revolution that has already happened. This is a marginal improvement on what has already been a major transformation in the way that international relations between states and non-states happens to be conducted. But then the second part of that is also important. Deception is great if you can do it, intelligence is great if you can get it, but it still has to be implemented in machines and human organizations. This is where Clausewitzian fog and friction continues to be a big problem. There is going to be quantum friction in the world that is going to undermine the great expectations that many people have.”

Kate Crawford: “But what about the supply chains needed to actually build and maintain quantum computers? I’m going to talk about this in two separate ways. One is, of course, the politics of temperature. Now, the delicate infrastructures required to actually make quantum work really have to function at close to absolute zero. And each one of these computers, yes, cost millions to produce. But it’s that idea that, in fact, having to maintain extremely low temperatures close to zero Kelvin, colder, in fact, than the temperatures in outer space, introduces a new political valency to think about who can and cannot participate in quantum mechanics. As we’ve seen with fermion vaccines, temperature control facilities can create a haves and have not dynamic. And I think that gets worse when we look at actually who can afford to build quantum scale. Then of course, there’s the politics of minerals. Now, most recently, there’s been a lot of excitement about rare earths as being the way to address some of the questions in terms of how to make quantum efficient. In fact, I’m quoting here from one of the most recent papers on how to deal with the mineral layer for quantum. ‘If successful, we may have found the quantum equivalent of silicon with rare Earth qubits reassembling silicon transistors, which could fuel rapid advancements in quantum technologies and communication, computing and sensing.’ So now we have a new type of rare earth race. This, of course, is happening in exactly the same moment at President Biden’s executive order, specifically noting that rare earths and our supply chains of mineral layout for computation is currently at risk. And by that they mean, they wish to secure the supply chain purely within national boundaries. And this is again pointing to the so-called AI wars and resource wars between the U.S. and China, which of course here includes quantum as well. So I think part of the way in which sometimes the solutions that Quantum is supposed to be providing can also be part of the problem.”

Ronald Deibert: “My view from the beginning was the most important perspective to take on technological development — I learned this from my own readings of theorists of technology who pre-date the Internet, in some cases by centuries — we can’t really predict the outcomes of technological innovation. They’re developed for a specific function but then they go off in wildly different directions and contingency is very much important part of the equation. So you have something that’s developed here and we end up with this social or political outcome and often it’s not a very good one. At the beginning I always had my radar up for that, in fact when I created Citizen Lab the idea was to stop theorizing about the technology and start interrogating what’s going on and gathering evidence so that we can put to test some of these claims that people are making, especially about — at that time — authoritarian regimes, autocrats would never be able to sustain that form of political authority and rule in this highly distributed ecosystem of technology. In fact it turns out it’s looking like the opposite is the case.”

Toby Walsh: “China has really impressed me in the way that it has invested in A.I. and quantum. They’ve made it very clear that they’re seeking technological dominance, both in an economic sphere and a military sphere. And they’re going about it in short order. We see huge great investments being made both by the large tech companies in China and also by the state, and a real advance in how the science is going there, the number of papers being published, the number of patents being taken out by Chinese and how that’s going to translate into uses and misuses of the technology. That’s something that I talked about, the very great concerns that we’re starting to see about how technologies are being used to surveil the population, being used to suppress religious minorities and where that may take us.”

Toby Walsh: “It’s clear why China is all in on A.I. and quantum. It’s because if you’ve got a burgeoning middle class that you want to keep happy then you really need to have the sort of economic growth that investing in these sorts of technology is going to bring. Equally if you want to control your population then… Orwell got it wrong. It’s not humans watching people, it’s computers watching people and you need AI to do that watching.”

Elsa Kania: “I think that certainly the PLA recognizes an opportunity to try to leapfrog the US military through betting heavily on these emerging disruptive technologies. If it is able to pioneer new paradigms of military power it could gain an advantage relative to the US. Of course there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty with these technologies and their future trajectory remains to be seen, and of course the human element and human factors involved will absolutely remain vital going forward.”

The potential of quantum to greatly enhance computer processing power has also raised questions about its use in Chinese domestic security affairs.

Toby Walsh: “I mean China seems to be using the technology mostly to control its own within its own borders and to do that very successfully. It’s not clear, maybe the Silk Road is the beginnings of their more global aspirations but it’s clearly already being used in the provinces against some religious minorities to show what you can do with these technologies. And it really is a mix between Orwell and Huxley.”

It is difficult to separate almost any technology from potential or actual military application. The concerted pursuit of quantum advantage by the world’s leading security and intelligence organisations does however indicate quite clearly that quantum is seen as a particularly sensitive and important military technology. The extent to which the obvious strategic aspects of quantum science can be separated from the pure science is a common topic of conversation amongst physicists and social scientists.

Michael J. Biercuk: “It’s interesting to people like myself and my colleagues who’ve been funded by agencies like the Army Research Office and the National Security Agency for many years, in a completely open, university based, publication based, knowledge dissemination based way, to have seen articles in major media outlets that spoke about the NSA’s investment in quantum information in some kind of nefarious or underhanded way. The suggestion was very clear that something dirty and scary is going on behind the scenes and it’s agencies like the NSA which of course has a nasty reputation… so you know people think all sorts of scary things are going on behind the fence that agencies like the NSA which have developed a kind of unsavory reputation, their involvement shows that the field is somehow corrupted and that there’s something to be feared. So one of the leaks that came out in a Washington Post article quoted a particular technological development as evidence of the things that the NSA was doing. It related to a quantum control technique. It turned out that very similar text appeared in the statement of work from one of my grants, which is just an open university based research grant, because the kinds of challenges that the NSA is looking to overcome are very much academic challenges. These are scientific, fundamental science and engineering questions that they are asking academics like myself and my colleagues globally to try and overcome. It just says that a lot of the hyperventilation, a lot of the fear that’s developed about what role agencies like the NSA or other military organizations have in funding this kind of research are really quite overblown.”