Schroedinger’s revolution: Overhyped but underestimated?

• In Event: Quantum Technologies as Technological Promise: Toward an Uncertain Future - II: Responsible Futures of Quantum Technologies

Abstract

“Quantum 2.0” technologies - quantum communications, quantum measurement, quantum imaging, and quantum computing - are linked in the imagination only by their reliance on insights of quantum physics. A sociotechnical analysis of the promise of quantum technologies and their revolutions therefore requires a sharper focus. This paper focuses on quantum computing from our work embedded in the UK’s Networked Quantum Information Technologies Hub from 2014 to 2019.
Quantum computing is a contested space, not only in competing implementations of which one may emerge as the “winner”, but in the ontological question of what quantum computing is: “universal error-corrected quantum computing”, “Noisy Intermediate-Scale” or “possibly quantum, possibly useful” specialised implementations such as D-Wave.
The physical realisation of quantum computing technologies will mutually shape the institutions in which they are embedded. Incumbent companies are competing for “supremacy” and to offer quantum computing services at scale; meanwhile, insurgent SMEs provide specialised expertise in quantum algorithms and applications including machine learning, materials, and logistics.
However, as with many emerging technologies, quantum computing is surrounded by hype which obscures rather than illuminates its capabilities and the structural transformations which it might engender.
Whether quantum computing opens “a new computer technology era more powerful than anything that preceded it” (Khan 2021), or is merely useful for certain hard computing problems, the democratisation and development of these technologies in the public interest depends not only of the affordances of the technology but more fundamentally on the control, form, structure, and ownership of these institutions.

Authors

• Philip Inglesant, University of Oxford, Department of Computer Science

• Marina Jirotka, University of Oxford, Department of Computer Science

• Carolyn Ten Holter, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford

• Robin Williams, The University of Edinburgh