IBM's quantum computer, one of several efforts to win the quantum race
Credit: AP
Imagine our world today if the timeline for developing a vaccine for a never-before-seen disease wasn’t 12 months but mere weeks, thanks to molecular simulations that could model the new virus and radically speed up the testing process.
The catastrophic global disruption of the past 12 months, with a death count of more than 2m and economies brought to breaking point, would be a dystopian nightmare, rather than today’s lived reality.
Now imagine if a vaccine wasn’t needed at all, because the virus hadn’t been able to spread in the first place. Imagine if machine learning had been able to model and map outbreaks of various new pathogens as they occurred – looking at human behaviour, social interactions, population density – zoning in on the ones that could to do the most damage and alerting policymakers before they got out of control.
Or what if every time politicians and scientists sparred over how to balance reducing transmission with the risk to the economy, arguing about compliance fatigue and behavioural consequences, they could turn to a computer-generated model of each scenario, with AI on hand to run the figures and determine the least bad option?
This might sound like something straight out of the fever dreams of Dominic Cummings. But quantum computing could make possible calculations on a scale that seems almost magical by today’s standards.
How IBM's quantum system will look
That has implications not just for responding to a pandemic, but developing personalised medicines, predicting financial crises, forecasting the weather, and a complete transport revolution driven by autonomous vehicles.
It also opens up the prospect of a fresh frontline in the cryptography wars, with old forms of encryption suddenly both vulnerable to attack and virtually obsolete, as “quantum encryption” enables a new breed of uncrackable codes.
No wonder, then, that the global race towards “quantum advantage” – solving a problem that no standard (“classical”) computer could even attempt – is one of not just scientific but geo-strategic importance. Whichever companies and countries come out on top will have a world-beating lead in the industries of the future.
The new Space Race
Combining the technological prestige of the US-Soviet Space Race with the practical and logistical urgency of the twentieth century oil wars, the potential prize of the quantum crusade is confirmed superpower status – for a generation or more.
Consequently, it is top of the priority list for the world’s two greatest powers: the US and China.
Quantum technology was made a cornerstone of China’s current Five Year Plan (2016-2020), with a $10bn national laboratory announced in 2017. That dwarfs the $1.2bn signed into law two years ago in America’s National Quantum Initiative Act (one of the few areas of bipartisanship under the Trump presidency).
Then again, the US government has its Silicon Valley titans to fall back on. The usual suspects – Google, IBM and Microsoft – all have their own quantum projects, partnering with world-leading universities to drive inconceivable breakthroughs.
And last year, it looked as though Google had won the race, or at least the first leg of it.
But in a story that feels eerily fitting for 2020, a new development in China this month has leapfrogged the other contenders.
About | What is quantum computing?
Light years away
Over the past few years, quantum computing has been moving out of the pages of sci-fi and into the realms of actual science, although the language used to describe it still sounds positively Asimovian.
As the tech behemoth IBM explains: “Universal quantum computers leverage the quantum mechanical phenomena of superposition and entanglement to create states that scale exponentially with number of qubits, or quantum bits.”
What this essentially means – other than the fact that quantum computers work thanks to things like laser beams (China) or by operating in a “quantum state” at temperatures around absolute zero, colder than space (IBM, Google, and others) – is that the capability of these computers increases not linearly, but exponentially. As we have all learnt from the Covid crisis, exponential growth is a powerful thing. Once it gets going, playing catch-up is next to impossible.
That’s what makes China’s quantum breakthrough at the start of December such a game-changer.
Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei claimed to have developed a photon-based quantum computer that could do in a few minutes a calculation that would take a classical computer 10 billion years.
That puts China out ahead in the quantum race. Its achievement far outweighs that of Google last year, whose announcement of quantum advantage was contested by claims that a classical computer could theoretically have matched it. It is also the first time that quantum advantage has been achieved using light beams.
While the technology is not currently programmable, meaning it cannot be used for practical applications, the potential is there for Beijing to develop a seismic advantage over its rivals, cementing its superpower status.
Google's Sycamore quantum processor, built by the tech giant
Credit: Google
Allies and adversaries
However, in any kind of war, allies matter as much as resources. And while no other nation matches the Chinese and American efforts towards quantum advantage, great strides are being made elsewhere too.
Quantum is high on the technological priority list for France and Germany, which have been driving ahead this year even in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. France unveiled its “national strategy for quantum technologies” in May, which called for €1.5bn of investment, while in June Angela Merkel pledged €2bn towards a German quantum innovation project. Both are vying to be global quantum leaders.
But they have competition – from Britain, and not just thanks to the £1bn investment threshold passed last year. Missed in the never-ending headlines about Brexit and Covid was the news in September that global quantum company Rigetti Computing was leading a consortium to build the UK’s first “commercially available quantum computer”, hosted in Abingdon, Oxford. Science minister Amanda Solloway spoke of the ambition for the UK to become the “world’s first quantum-ready economy”.
The UK is behind the likes of Jiuzhang and Sycamore, but the focus on commerciality is striking. Indeed, in an interview in this paper after the investment announcement, the Canadian founder of Rigetti Computing enthused about quantum’s potential in the next three-to-five years, with practical applications ranging from molecule discovery, to Netflix, to the military.
Worth noting too is the UK’s ability to draw investment and collaboration from global companies. China may have the technological edge at the moment, but in the present geopolitical climate – from the outbreak of coronavirus to aggression in Hong Kong and the South China Sea – it’s not hard to imagine a certain reluctance on the part of many multinational tech firms to join forces with the Beijing government.
So as the first doses of the Covid vaccine are administered and the pandemic is forced into the rearview mirror in 2021, keep an eye on the race for quantum advantage. Who wins could determine the leaders of the AI revolution, a new class of encryption, and preparedness for the next pandemic – and with that, the dynamics of geopolitical supremacy for generations to come.
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