Scientists, diplomats should discuss evolution of quantum computing: Marilyne Andersen

Quantum computing is in a nascent stage of development and therefore this is a time that experts in the field and scientists should be engaging with diplomats to be able to form governance frameworks, partnerships, coalitions, international collaboration,  and be “concretely ready” when the technology matures, Marilyne Andersen, director general, Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA), said in an interview.

Quantum computing refers to computers that use an entirely different non-binary architecture from conventional computers and thus can exponentially accelerate calculation, but at the same time threaten cybersecurity measures, which are premised on binary 1’s and 0’s architecture.

Ms. Andersen, who was a participant at the ongoing Raisina Dialogue here, met India’s Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA), Ajay Sood, on Friday along with members of the PSA office and around 60 representatives from science, government, diplomacy, business and civil society to “anticipate and govern emerging scientific and technological breakthroughs,” according to a press statement from the Swiss Embassy.

“As technology matures and disruption occurs, a governance gap becomes visible…this conventional reactive cycle served us adequately in eras when the pace of change was measured in decades. However, it is no longer adequate. are not distant abstractions. The governance choices we make in the next decade will determine the effectiveness with which technologies such as quantum computing, artificial general intelligence will serve humanity,” Prof. Sood said in a statement.

Deeper insight

Ms. Andersen, who was formerly a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston and the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL), said scientists weren’t always able to forecast the course of technology as they, like other humans, thought “linearly rather than exponentially.” However because scientific funding cycles usually worked in 5 or 10-year cycles, they did have a deeper insight into the stage of development of certain fields. Around 2021, the scientific community was largely confident of the emergence of something like GPT3 — the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer-3 (by OpenAI with its 175 billion-parameters).

“What they didn’t anticipate was that someone would put it out in the open — the ‘chat’ aspect of it. Many didn’t want to do that because they knew that once it is out in the general population it is a whole new game. So while scientists can’t precisely forecast, being experts and participants at conferences at the cutting edge of their science, they have a special voice,” she explained.

A Swiss foundation based in Geneva and created by the Swiss Federal Council, the Canton of Geneva, and the City of Geneva, GESDA’s central purpose is to anticipate scientific and technological advances 5, 10, and 25 years into the future and translate those insights into actionable diplomatic and policy initiatives. The Science Breakthrough Radar, one of GESDA’s flagship outputs, maps emerging scientific trends across fields such as quantum computing, synthetic biology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. The ‘radar’ is compiled with inputs from around 2,000 scientists worldwide, including India, and aims to give diplomats, policymakers, and civil society a conjecture the technological future.

The organisation’s location in Geneva — home to the United Nations European headquarters, the World Health Organization, CERN, the World Trade Organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross among others — is seen as a way to connect scientific foresight directly with the diplomatic machinery that shapes global governance.