Australia to rethink its position as a global quantum leader

Descriptive transcript

[Upbeat music plays. The video opens with a wide shot of a conference room. People are seated, and a panel of speakers is at the front. The UTS and ASPI logos are visible on banners.]

My name is Danielle Cave and I'm the Deputy Director of ASPI's International Cyber Policy Centre, which now totals around 30 people working across cyber, critical and emerging tech, foreign interference, information operations and disinformation issues.

Thank you very much for joining us for the launch of our project, the new report, "An Australian Strategy for the Quantum Revolution", and for the authors of the report, who I'll introduce in a little bit, for flying down here to join us, and for Tara online, who's Skyping in from Queensland.

Before we begin the proceedings, I'd like to acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional owners of the land on which we're currently sitting, the Ngunnawal peoples. It is upon their ancestral lands that the Australian Strategic Policy Institute is built, and as we share our own knowledge with each other today, may we also pay respect to the long history of knowledge sharing and the enduring traditions of the Ngunnawal peoples.

This is only the second time, I think, in over a year now, that I've spoken to a room of actual people, as opposed to the never-ending cycle of 100% virtual events, where you largely don't see anyone on the other side. It's really nice to have this hybrid model of events become the new norm. We're all here today in person in a very, very COVID-safe room, and I think we have 150 or so people joining us online, and others will catch up on YouTube later. I really like that model. It caters to everyone, whether you want to turn up in person or watch from your pyjamas later on. I think it has a lot of traction.

The report produced as a part of this project makes a very strong and compelling argument for a ramp up in Australian focus on quantum, and that would include a clear strategy, strong political leadership, and organised policy focus and public investment. Quantum computing, quantum communications, and other quantum-enabled technologies will change the world, reshaping geopolitics, international cooperation, and strategic competition. And as this paper argues, in the past, Australia has held a competitive advantage in this space, but is at risk of falling behind, and, as revealed through the research, has already really fallen behind. The report also, very importantly, recognises that quantum is just one among a number of critical technologies, and that a step change is needed in Australia's policy settings related to critical and emerging technologies more generally.

It was really important to all of us who worked on this project over the last year to have a very policy-focused report, and there was a huge amount of back and forth between us on the policy recommendations, which I think ended up coming out at three or four pages or so, which is quite unusual. We also went through about ten internal and external peer reviewers, which again is more than usual, but we wanted to make sure that this piece of work was commented on not just by quantum experts, but also those who work across the critical tech field, in the private sector, on the policy side, in civil society, and so on. This, I thought, was really important, so we ended up examining both the opportunity and challenges that quantum brings Australia, whether it's from a university and research perspective, a business perspective, and a government and policy perspective.

The way I'll run our event today is: I'm going to ask everyone on stage—well, you're already here—we're joined by these three and Tara virtually. I'm going to ask them one to two questions each, then we'll open it up to the audience, so please make sure as they're talking you think of different questions that you might want answered. I want to make sure we have at least 20 minutes for a back and forth. I also can get questions online, and I have an iPad here that apparently will feed me questions, which is very convenient. Then we'll finish bang on 6:30, so that we can enjoy canapés and drinks—and sorry to those online who don't get to participate in that.

Now to our panellists and report co-authors. So, Simon at the end here is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Quantum Software and Information at the University of Technology Sydney, and co-founder and Managing Director of the quantum consultancy firm HBAR. Tara, online joining us from Queensland, is a researcher in science communication and responsible innovation, working with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems and also CSIRO. Gavin here on my left is a Professor of Physics at Macquarie University, working in quantum information theory. He's also Director of the Macquarie Centre for Quantum Engineering and a Chief Investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence in Engineered Quantum Systems. And then Peter in the middle there is a Senior Lecturer and ARC Future Fellow in the Centre for Quantum Software and Information at the University of Technology Sydney.

Simon, I'm going to kick off and start with you, if that's all right. The report that you have all produced and that we're launching today argues that Australia has previously held a global leadership position in quantum, but is now being left behind. Could you outline to us what competitive advantage Australia has previously held in quantum, and arguably still holds some of, and why is it, and how are we falling behind the rest of the world in this space?

[Simon:] Well, we got into quantum quite early compared to other nations around the world. The Centre for Quantum Computing Technology was first established as a special research centre in 2000, and became a Centre of Excellence in 2001 when the Centre of Excellence schemes came into the ARC funding paradigm. As a part of that, we grew very strongly. Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland, Perth—basically all the capital cities—had a very strong representation in terms of quantum experiments, for quantum computing, communication, sensing, and the major platforms that we've been doing. Consequently, we ended up having a huge impact on the world stage. We basically invented optical quantum computing up at the University of Queensland and Griffith. We invented the silicon paradigm for quantum computing at UNSW with Professor Michelle Simmons and others. We had a huge theory component up at UQ, down at Melbourne University, where I graduated from. That kept going throughout the 2000s. Australia was a very attractive destination for quantum researchers. Academics in Australia get paid comparatively quite high on world standards, and it was tough to get into the Australian system and actually participate in it. Then, what ended up happening was around 2013, 2014, we started seeing a much heavier level of investment come in, both from corporations, the venture capital sector, but also governments—and governments that really didn't have much of a quantum program. The most notable one is China. China came in at about 2013, 2014, and started dumping a whole lot of money into it, and started training up a huge amount of domestic talent, actually mostly through Japan. What happened is we haven't kept up. We haven't kept up with this level of investment. We're really at risk now of getting crowded out globally, because we're just not competitive from a funding standpoint. For example, as we detailed in the report, Australia was sixth in terms of sovereign funding in the OECD prior to about 2013, 2014. Now we're last. In fact, we're the only member of the G12 that doesn't have a national initiative. Basically, all major countries have announced something. The Americans have announced several major programs, including the US National Initiative—that was a $1.2 billion project. The Chinese have announced they're dumping $13 billion into quantum. The Europeans have done $1 billion. The French and the Germans, just on their own, have done $2 and $3 billion, respectively, in the last year. Even the Dutch just announced in April that they were going to put $1 billion into quantum computing, on top of the European flagship. So, at the moment, it's just becoming difficult for us in Australia to keep up in the way that we planted the seeds for it in the early 2000s. We still have the talent here, but we don't have the capital. So it's becoming harder and harder for us to compete with either the corporations, which are pilfering talent left, right and centre from Australia—Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, they're all in the game—or it's other national initiatives that have huge experimental or theoretical budgets. So unless Australia really decides, "OK, we're going to have to do this, we're going to have to do this much more seriously,"—now, I wouldn't for a second suggest that we can compete financially with the level of China's investment or the US investment—but we did a comparatively very good job in the early 2000s, when it came to holding our own, even though we had a smaller population, a smaller capital base to play with. We've just got to take it to the next order of magnitude. If the rest of the world's going to increase funding by a factor of 10 or 100, we've got to increase it by a factor of 10 or 100. That won't necessarily match the other investments, but it will keep us in the game.

Tara, I'm going to throw to you now online. In the public discourse around critical technologies, we hear bits and pieces about what these technologies are and what they're capable of, but how that is portrayed publicly can be quite patchy and seen through a particular lens. For example, how quantum may benefit just the Defence Force or one particular industry sector. What I think is often missing—and this came through a lot of your contributions to the report—is how quantum will likely impact us on a societal and individual level. Could you run us through how you see quantum impacting our society and us as individuals over the next, say, decade or two?

[Tara:] So, I think, first off, we covered off a bit of a timeframe in the report to try and give people a little bit of scope for addressing where we see near-term and then long-term implications of quantum technologies on the international scale. The important thing that I think came through is, like we heard from the Chief Scientist in March, that quantum is this potentially game-changing industry for Australia. But like any significant piece of technology, it needs to be developed responsibly, ethically, and inclusively. If we've learned anything from the history of technology in society, it's two key things: first, that we're pretty terrible at anticipating how technology can impact us; and second, we can't just assume that that's all going to happen in some sense of public benefit. So, trying to think through some of those things is one of the recommendations that we put into the report. The promises that we hear from quantum technology use in society are really broad, and that's what makes them so exciting. It spans multiple areas—healthcare all the way through to financial services, telecommunications, through to things like weather modelling. But the conversation that we're not having at the moment is really around the public good of those technologies. So, breaking down the motivations for investment beyond just talking about national security and economic gain—which, you know, those are not surprising motivations for any national policy in technology; they're kind of the default reasons for investment—but I think we need a little bit more. So, starting to look into more grounded case studies about individual technologies. If we're thinking about those near-term options, looking at something like quantum sensors and thinking about how we see them in different areas—like civil engineering, in resource recovery, and in autonomous systems—three very diverse use cases just there. Then delving into who will be impacted by that development and use, and taking our lead from the examples from other novel technologies. Most prominently, we've got artificial intelligence and machine learning, where our understanding of the peoples and the environments that were going to be most impacted by those technologies came a bit late, and we had to be quite reactive in our responses and mitigating ongoing problems. We've also seen that a bit in energy efficient technologies—Shobita Parthasarathy in the US pointed out to Congress that research and development can be really focused on feasibility and economic gain, and inequities in innovation are then addressed retrospectively with limited success. So, in the report, the idea was that there's a bit of a call for us to be proactive as a nation about what we're going to do with novel quantum technologies, and thinking about how we can really benefit from it—so, maximising the benefits of the technologies and bringing in stakeholders to make it better. There are different tools that we can use for that, like inclusive design and responsible innovation. The policy recommendation was really about making use of different expertise in dialogue with government and policy and industry, as well as everyone in quantum, to approach technologies from the different viewpoints, and then establish a framework of some principles for best practice creation and use, so that we can prepare the tools and processes that we need for governing their introduction and use in our society.

Thanks, Tara. I wish you were here with us on stage today.

Gavin, I'm going to turn to you now. There appears to be this global race to build quantum technologies happening in real time. How is this race playing out around the world, and what strategies are different countries employing when it comes to quantum, whether it's our allies or partner countries, or countries that are not our partners or our allies? And a chaser to that, which really makes yours, unfortunately, a three-part question, is that in the report you all argue that this is not just a race about science and commerce, but it's a race for geopolitical leadership. What does that really mean?

[Gavin:] Yes, it's a great question—well, questions. There is a real race and you can actually see it played out. A couple of years ago, Google announced a quantum supremacy experiment, where they demonstrated in a 53-qubit—qubit is what we call a quantum bit—device, the Sycamore chip, which performed a computation that would be extremely hard to do on our classical computers, even including supercomputers. Not long after, there was a response from IBM saying, "Well, let's think about that a little more carefully, maybe we could," and Alibaba had a response in China. Then, of course, there was an actual experimental demonstration by the Chinese of another problem that's very hard to solve on classical computers. I should mention that both of these problems—the ones by the Chinese and by Google—are completely useless as actual computational problems, but in terms of demonstration, it's a very big technical and scientific advance in demonstrating control of quantum devices at the single level to a point where we could do something that just could not be done on classical computers in a reasonable time. You're going to see this race playing out a lot more. There are some big players on the scene for quantum computing: there's Google, IBM, Microsoft, and then there are some less well-known companies, but they're no longer really startups—they're actually large companies—like PsiQuantum, which works on photonic quantum computing, co-founded by two Australians, an experimentalist and a theorist. There's IonQ, based in the US, which is working with what are called trapped ion quantum computers. There's another company in Toronto, Xanadu, which was founded by an Australian experimentalist, again on photonic quantum computing. We don't know who's going to be the winner. We don't even know what technology is going to win, but you really see it as a very competitive race and people aren't releasing all their results. A few years ago, people were quite open about saying what their technology can do. Now it's much more secretive—you learn as you go, because it's a big payout.

When I started out, my first postdoc fellowship was funded by DARPA to work on quantum computer architectures, and that was in the US at NIST. The intelligence communities were a big part of getting the program started in the US, because they actually worked closely with the scientists. This is another thing we pointed out in our report—that it's important to open up these levels of communication between the scientists and the intelligence communities. That was largely spurred because quantum computers could be used to crack public key cryptography, which, of course, is used for everything from credit card transactions to attorney-client privilege documents, which are secured using public key cryptography that you want to have secure for a long time. If a quantum computer comes out, then you've completely lost the privacy associated with those kinds of documents. So it was a big risk and people wanted to spend a lot of money.

But now, yes, it's really unsure whether the US is going to have this kind of dominant position that they've initially had because of the initial investment, because of these big infusions of cash in Europe and in China, South Korea, and Japan. We believe that Australia should be one of these players because we have the intellectual capital—people want to come here. We just need the political will and the investor interest.

To get into the third question, there are a lot of consequences for quantum technologies beyond just cracking codes and just doing things faster. For example, there are quantum sensors, which—everyone has a phone, which oftentimes has an accelerometer and a magnetometer—these devices that help you navigate. In important issues, if you're in a situation of a GPS-denied environment because of some attack, then quantum technologies can provide you a way to efficiently and accurately navigate your craft. They can also use quantum sensors for mining. If you have a much better way to determine where precious minerals are, you will have a strategic advantage over your competitors, which will certainly play a role, for example, in mining activities in Africa and other nations where you need to be the best team around to get the advantage of having access to those minerals.

There are a lot of geopolitical consequences as well to movement towards digital currencies, because suddenly you're going to have power of computation determining the value and integrity of currencies, and who has access to the best computing devices—which will be quantum—will have an advantage in that sector. All these things become quite interlinked in sometimes ways we didn't anticipate years ago.

It also sounds incredibly multi-sector—like, this isn't just a defence issue, actually. It'll be agriculture and healthcare, as you said, strategic minerals—a whole bunch of areas, it sounds like, will be really impacted.

Peter, lucky last, and again, I think I've got a two-header here for you. I wanted you to come in on what specifically are the opportunities and threats when it comes to quantum tech from the national security, defence and intelligence space? We have a whole section that zooms in on that in the report. And then a follow-up—and I'll remind you of this if you go deep on this first question so that we come back here—for the Australian government, what are the urgent or really critical gaps that you think need to be filled here from, I guess, a policy recommendation perspective?

[Peter:] So, in terms of opportunities and threats, some of them were alluded to before—things like the ability to crack codes. It's pretty obvious that that poses a significant intelligence threat, but also a huge boon to anybody who possesses it. So you can immediately see that there are some strategic considerations here. It's not just about, "We want to develop this technology and have it"—we also need to be mindful of who we don't want to have it. But at the same time, some of these technologies also offset one another. Another big area of quantum technology is quantum cryptography, where we can make cryptographic codes that even quantum computers can't break. So there's a potential method to bypass the threat of quantum computing in compromising codes of the past. At the same time, these things naturally progress into one another. Currently, we're able to demonstrate quantum cryptography quite well over short scales, and the Chinese have done it by satellite over almost 2,000 kilometres within mainland China. That naturally is the type of technology that later on will be utilised when we build full-fledged quantum computers. So you can't just deny single-use abilities of quantum technologies—they all feed into one another, and there's a complex interplay. But the dominant one, of course, is the economic interplay, because ultimately economics is what determines strategic strength. So we want to be able to have mutual benefit from others in the advancement of these technologies, in the same way that we're all better off by the fact that the whole world is connected on the internet. That's undeniably mutual benefit. But at the same time, with classical supercomputing, there are certain countries that we deny access to for supercomputing facilities because of potential malicious uses. So there's a very, very complex dynamic here, which is why it's not just as simple as "We want to pump more money into research and we want to make sure that this is advanced as quickly as possible." There needs to be unified consideration in the same way that there is with many other dual-use technologies. What is our place in the world? We're a medium-sized economy. We're not a superpower. We don't even get to dictate the path here. We have to acknowledge where we sit in the world, and from that, also make diplomatic decisions. How are we going to form alliances in the future, given the huge political influence that this kind of technology could have?

The second question—ah, yes. If you're up in Parliament or you're a senior policymaker across a range of departments and agencies, and they're suddenly told, "OK, we really need to focus on quantum," where do you think the most urgent gaps are?

The gap is that we don't do exactly what you just said, which is having a unified umbrella that oversees all of these things at this very, very high level. At the moment, our approach is we pump a certain amount of money into research and development in this sector. There are lots of people that approach people like us for advice on how this might affect their future business operations, financial optimisation, whatever the case may be—all these different interests involved and money being pumped into it, but not with any sort of cohesive long-term vision of what's the ultimate goal here. It's not just throwing money at things; it's about creating a domestic ecosystem which satisfies the needs of the country as a whole. The same way with anything that has strategic importance—it's not just you throw money at it wildly. You need an overall goal of how does this fit into our place in the world as a medium-sized economy and alliances that we have? How does this affect our future alliances and diplomatic considerations? Because we don't get to dictate the path. We're part of the global economy and we're a relatively small player in that, but we can't just go it alone.

From a defence, intelligence and national security perspective, that is certainly one of the most important ones, for the sorts of reasons that we've discussed. That's exactly why it shouldn't just be allowed to be a free-for-all, because obviously some of these technologies—just like back in the Cold War, the obvious parallel is nuclear technologies—are hugely advantageous for certain applications, hugely detrimental for others if they go into the wrong hands. Like any sort of dual-use technology, it needs to be thought of in that kind of framework—how does this affect our alliances and our global diplomatic position?

I will just add to that, that in comparison to, say, the United States or countries in Europe, the defence and intelligence sector in this country has not engaged in the same way. As Gavin said, when this got started in the 90s and the 2000s, the US intelligence and defence sectors were heavily involved in funding the research and supervising the research and talking to scientists. I don't know anyone in our community that holds high-level security grants, that can even have these discussions with members of defence or intelligence and say, "OK, where do you see the threats being, and how do you think quantum's going to help you or how do you think quantum's going to hurt you in the long term?" I don't know anyone who has that level of engagement.

It's also—they're difficult shoes to fill, those ones, because people in that kind of position can't just be your everyday sort of intelligence or defence type of people. They need to be people with an intimate understanding of the nuance of this technology. It's very different to conventional technologies that we're all familiar with, and there's an enormous amount of nuance and subtlety to it. So people in those sorts of strategic decision-making positions need to have a clear understanding of the nuances of the technology as well, which is a difficult thing to fill.

I'm going to ask one more question, and then we've got quite a few questions coming in online, and I'll also open it up. Before, a couple of you were talking about heads of these quantum start-up companies, which really aren't start-ups anymore. I don't know if you did this deliberately, but almost everyone you mentioned was an Australian citizen who had co-founded the company, started the company. Are any of these people in Australia? Is the brain drain all happening to the US and Europe? What does it take to get people back here?

[Simon:] Well, yeah, so the drain is to where the money is, and also where the big fabrication facilities are, which is Silicon Valley. The investors are willing to make that risk because it's a big payout, and it's proven technology. It's built up, it's taken time, but the principles are correct and it's passed the test. There really is no fundamental obstacle to getting these things built. In Australia, it does take a national initiative, but it's not just about the government spending money. It's also about fostering a culture with investors here who are willing to make the leap. I just have to say that Australia is recognised as being a really great country to come to—I was attracted to come here. I know many people around the world in Europe and North America who very much like Australia, would live here, but if they're involved with start-up companies, it's just easier to go elsewhere. The investment is available there, and there are more jobs elsewhere.

We have a question from Mark who's watching online. He's asked: When you postulate a strategic race, you have to consider not only how useful the tech could be, but also how likely it is that a competitor will gain that capability far enough in advance of you doing so that they will be able to use that advantage. How likely is a major strategic surprise that ends up making the difference?

Certainly, it can't be denied—the Chinese level of investment into quantum technology has spurred a lot of the other investment into quantum technology. The Americans did get spooked a little bit and got caught a bit on the back foot with their initiative. That sort of came on the back of the Chinese announcements in regards to their push to heavily industrialise and commercialise their quantum technology, and they have spent a lot of money in that space. So, whether or not you want to say we're at the stage now where somebody's pulling ahead—we're not quite there yet in the sense that you could say Chinese technology is significantly better than the Americans or significantly better than the Europeans. But I suppose that is something that's going to happen in the next five or six years, depending on whether it's the start-up space or the corporate space or the sovereign space.

Just also to be clear, people see the money that comes into Google and comes in from IBM and the VC community, but sovereign investment still dwarfs all of this. The amount of money that governments are spending on their national initiatives and their national research programs is still much, much larger than what's coming in from the private sector at this stage. So, have we gotten to the point where there could be a strategic surprise in an adversary or a non-friendly nation pulling too far ahead? No, not yet. In fact, everyone's somewhat level, I would say.

As Gavin mentioned, there are multi-platforms for quantum computing, which in and of itself is hard to explain, because people—if you say there's different types of computers, if it was just a standard laptop, people would think, "Oh, OK, it's Intel versus PowerPC," or "It's Mac versus Windows," but it's all still silicon-based technology. In the quantum computing space, we have at least seven systems that are completely different from each other. Some are based on particles of light, some are based on atoms, some are based on all kinds of different things. We haven't yet filtered that out yet. Everything's sort of about the same. Most of these systems can reliably produce qubits, we can fabricate them, we can control them quite well. But during the 2020s, that's going to change. By the end of the 2020s, I think we're going to have a much cleaner outlook of what's going to happen both in the computation, sensing, and communication space.

Do you think that cleaner outlook is going to attract more funding from sort of medium-sized governments once they realise the potential? Certainty is always an attractor for business investors. Nothing a business likes more than some sort of predictability. But the fact that we can't predict it at the moment does mean that it's a blue-sky investment for most.

All right, let's open it up to questions. I've got a few more coming online. Does anyone want to jump in?

[Audience member:] Thank you. You mentioned the goals for Australia as a medium-sized economy. What sort of goal do you think we should have in this quantum world?

[Peter:] So, there are multiple goals, but the first and foremost long-term goal is that we can't put ourselves in a position where we end up becoming purely a client state. If you think of our reliance on silicon chips at the moment, we're completely dependent upon others. The same applies to so much technology. Software is easy to make at home, but all of the hardware is effectively entirely manufactured overseas. Obviously, there's a huge risk associated with that. If someone decides to close the tap, then you're in big trouble. The same applies with any technology. The real profit-making, not just in the monetary sense but also in terms of the strategic positioning, comes in who is the supplier, not just who buys it as a client. That's what we have to avoid and why we have to get in early—it's to position ourselves so that we're producing things and selling them to others, rather than licensing a cloud subscription service from a future quantum cloud provider.

Are you suggesting a service that's government capability, or just that we should be involved in the marketplaces?

Well, it's not as though we have the ability to have any kind of complete market dominance in this space, just because of our economic size. We can't possibly compete with large economies. But even though you can't dominate it, you can still play an integral role where you're part of the dependency that other people rely on. You don't have to be producing all the chips in the world to play a part in the supply chain for computers. So we need to have an integral role in the production process and the provision process. But it's hard to foresee exactly what that will be.

[Gavin:] National coordination, I think, is a key goal that we would like to see, certainly as the authors of this report, to come out of this. The evolution of quantum in this country—and it's certainly not the fault of a

Descriptive transcript

My name is Danielle Cave and I'm the Deputy Director of ASPI's International Cyber Policy Centre, which now totals around 30 people working across cyber, critical and emerging tech, foreign interference, information operations and disinformation issues.

Thank you very much for joining us for the launch of our project, the new report, "An Australian Strategy for the Quantum Revolution," and for the authors of the report, who I'll introduce in a little bit, for flying down here to join us, and for Tara online, who's Skyping in from Queensland.

Before we begin the proceedings, I'd like to acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional owners of the land on which we're currently sitting, the Ngunnawal peoples. It is upon their ancestral lands that the Australian Strategic Policy Institute is built, and as we share our own knowledge with each other today, may we also pay respect to the long history of knowledge sharing and the enduring traditions of the Ngunnawal peoples.

This is only the second time, I think, in over a year now, that I've spoken to a room of actual people, as opposed to the never-ending cycle of 100% virtual events, where you largely don't see anyone on the other side, and it's really nice to have this hybrid model of events become the new norm. We're all here today in person in a very COVID-safe room, and I think we have 150 or so people joining us online, and others will catch up on YouTube later. So, I really like that model. It caters to everyone, whether you want to turn up in person or watch from your pyjamas later on.

The report produced as a part of this project makes a very strong and compelling argument for a ramp up in Australian focus on quantum, and that would include a clear strategy, strong political leadership, and organised policy focus and public investment.

Quantum computing, quantum communications, and other quantum-enabled technologies will change the world, reshaping geopolitics, international cooperation, and strategic competition. And as this paper argues, in the past, Australia has held a competitive advantage in this space, but is at risk of falling behind, and, as revealed through the research, has already really fallen behind.

The report also, very importantly, recognises that quantum is just one among a number of critical technologies, and that a step change is needed in Australia's policy settings related to critical and emerging technologies more generally.

It was really important to all of us who worked on this project over the last year to have a very policy-focused report, and there was a huge amount of back and forth between us on the policy recommendations, which I think ended up coming out at three or four pages, which is quite unusual.

We also went through about ten internal and external peer reviewers, which again is more than usual, but we wanted to make sure that this piece of work was commented on not just by quantum experts, but also those who work across the critical tech field, in the private sector, on the policy side, in civil society, and so on.

And this, I thought, was really important, so we ended up examining both the opportunity and challenges that quantum brings Australia, whether it's from a university and research perspective, a business perspective, and a government and policy perspective.

The way I'll run our event today is I'm going to ask everyone on stage, and Tara virtually, one to two questions each, then we'll open it up to the audience, so please make sure as they're talking you think of different questions that you might want answered. I want to make sure we have at least 20 minutes for a back and forth. I can also get questions online, and I have an iPad here that apparently will feed me questions, which is very convenient, and then we'll finish bang on 6:30, so that we can enjoy canapés and drinks—and sorry to those online who don't get to participate in that.

Now to our panellists and report co-authors. Simon at the end here is a senior lecturer at the Centre for Quantum Software and Information at the University of Technology Sydney, and co-founder and managing director of the quantum consultancy firm HBAR. Tara online, joining us from Queensland, is a researcher in science communication and responsible innovation, working with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems and also CSIRO. Gavin here on my left is a professor of physics at Macquarie University, working in quantum information theory. He's also director of the Macquarie Centre for Quantum Engineering and a chief investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence in Engineered Quantum Systems. And then Peter in the middle there is a senior lecturer and ARC Future Fellow in the Centre for Quantum Software and Information at the University of Technology Sydney.

Simon, I'm going to kick off and start with you, if that's all right. The report that you have all produced and that we're launching today argues that Australia has previously held a global leadership position in quantum, but is now being left behind. Could you outline to us what competitive advantage Australia has previously held in quantum and arguably still holds some of, and why is it and how are we falling behind the rest of the world in this space?

Well, we got into quantum quite early compared to other nations around the world. The Centre for Quantum Computing Technology was first established as a special research centre in 2000, and was elevated to a Centre of Excellence in 2001 when the Centre of Excellence schemes came into the ARC funding paradigm. As a part of that, we grew very strongly. Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland, Perth—basically all the capital cities had strong representation in quantum experiments for computing, communication, sensing, and the major platforms we've been working on. Consequently, we had a huge impact on the world stage. We basically invented optical quantum computing at the University of Queensland and Griffith. We invented the silicon paradigm for quantum computing at UNSW with Professor Michelle Simmons and others. We had a huge theory component at UQ and Melbourne University, where I graduated from. That kept going throughout the 2000s. Australia was a very attractive destination for quantum researchers. Academics in Australia get paid comparatively quite well on world standards, and it was tough to get into the Australian system and actually participate in it.

Then what ended up happening was around 2013, 2014, we started seeing a much heavier level of investment come in, both from corporations, the venture capital sector, but also governments—governments that really didn't have much of a quantum program. The most notable one is China. China came in at about 2013, 2014 and started investing a huge amount of money and training up a lot of domestic talent, mostly through Japan. What happened is we haven't kept up. We haven't kept up with this level of investment. We're really at risk now of getting crowded out globally, because we're just not competitive from a funding standpoint. For example, as we detailed in the report, Australia was sixth in terms of sovereign funding in the OECD prior to about 2013, 2014. Now we're last. In fact, we're the only member of the G12 that doesn't have a national initiative. All major countries have announced something. The Americans have announced several major programs, including the US national initiative that was a $1.2 billion project. The Chinese have announced they're investing $13 billion into quantum. The Europeans have done a billion. The French and the Germans just on their own have done $2 and $3 billion, respectively, in the last year. Even the Dutch just announced in April that they were going to put a billion dollars into quantum computing on top of the European flagship.

So at the moment, it's just becoming difficult for us in Australia to keep up in the way that we planted the seeds for it in the early 2000s. We still have the talent here, but we don't have the capital. It's becoming harder and harder for us to compete with either the corporations, which are pilfering talent left, right, and centre from Australia—Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, they're all in the game—or with other national initiatives that have huge experimental or theoretical budgets. Unless Australia really decides, okay, we're going to have to do this much more seriously, I wouldn't for a second suggest that we can compete financially with the level of China's or the US's investment. But we did a comparatively very good job in the early 2000s when it came to holding our own, even with a smaller population and capital base. We've just got to take it to the next order of magnitude. If the rest of the world's going to increase funding by a factor of 10 or 100, we've got to increase it by a factor of 10 or 100. That won't necessarily match the other investments, but it will keep us in the game.

Tara, I'm going to throw to you now online. In the public discourse around critical technologies, we hear bits and pieces about what these technologies are and what they're capable of. But how that is portrayed publicly can be quite patchy and seen through a particular lens—for example, how quantum may benefit just the defence force or one particular industry sector. But what we think is often missing, and this came through in a lot of your contributions to the report, is how quantum will likely impact us on a societal and individual level. Could you run us through how you see quantum impacting our society and us as individuals over the next, say, decade or two?

So I think, first off, we covered off a bit of a timeframe in the report to try and give people a little bit of scope for addressing where we see near-term and then long-term implications of quantum technologies on the international scale. The important thing that I think came through is, like we heard from the Chief Scientist in March, that quantum is this potentially game-changing industry for Australia. But like any significant piece of technology, it needs to be developed responsibly, ethically and inclusively. If we've learned anything from the history of technology in society, it's two key things. First, that we're pretty terrible at anticipating how technology can impact us. And second, we can't just assume that that's all going to happen in some sense of public benefit. So trying to think through some of those things is one of the recommendations that we put into the report.

The promises that we hear from quantum technology use in society are really broad, and that's what makes them so exciting. It spans multiple areas—healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, weather modelling. But the conversation that we're not having at the moment is really around the public good of those technologies. So breaking down the motivations for investment beyond just talking about national security and economic gain—which, you know, those are not surprising motivations for any national policy in technology. They're kind of the default reasons for investment, but I think we need a little bit more. So starting to look into more grounded case studies about individual technologies. So we're thinking about those near-term options, looking at something like quantum sensors and thinking about how we see them in different areas like civil engineering, in resource recovery and in autonomous systems—three very diverse use cases. Then delving into who will be impacted by that development and use, and taking our lead from the examples from other novel technologies. Most prominently we've got artificial intelligence and machine learning, where our understanding of the peoples and the environments that were going to be most impacted by those technologies came a bit late, and we had to be quite reactive in our responses and mitigating ongoing problems. We've also seen that a bit in energy efficient technologies.

So Shobita Parthasarathy in the US pointed out to Congress that research and development can be really focused on feasibility and economic gain, and inequities and innovation are then addressed retrospectively with limited success. So in the report, the idea was that there's a bit of a call for us to be proactive as a nation about what we're going to do with novel quantum technologies and thinking about how we can really benefit from it—maximising the benefits of the technologies and bringing in stakeholders to make it better. There are different tools that we can use for that, like inclusive design and responsible innovation. The policy recommendation was really about making use of different expertise in dialogue with government and policy and industry, as well as everyone in quantum, to approach technologies from different viewpoints and then establish a framework of some principles for best practice creation and use, so that we can prepare the tools and processes that we need for governing their introduction and use in our society.

Thanks Tara. I wish you were here with us on stage today. Gavin, I'm going to turn to you now. There appears to be this global race to build quantum technologies happening in real time. How is this race playing out around the world and what strategies are different countries employing when it comes to quantum, whether it's our allies or partner countries or countries that are not our partners or our allies? And a chaser to that, which really makes yours unfortunately a three-part question, is that in the report, you all argue that this is not just a race about science and commerce, but it's a race for geopolitical leadership. What does that really mean?

Yes, it's a great question—questions. There is a real race and you can actually see it played out. A couple of years ago, Google announced a quantum supremacy experiment where they demonstrated in a 53-qubit device, the Sycamore chip, which performed a computation which would be extremely hard to do on our classical computers, even including supercomputers. Not long after, there was a response from competitors—a response from IBM saying, well, let's think about that a little more carefully, and Alibaba had a response in China. Then, of course, there was an actual experimental demonstration by the Chinese of another problem that's very hard to solve on classical computers. I should mention that both of these problems, the ones by the Chinese and by Google, are completely useless as actual computational problems. But in terms of demonstration, it's a very big technical and scientific advance in demonstrating control of quantum devices at the single level to a point where we could do something that just could not be done on classical computers in a reasonable time. You're going to see this race playing out a lot more. There are some big players on the scene for quantum computing—Google, IBM, Microsoft, and then some less well-known companies, but they're no longer really startups but actually large companies like PsiQuantum, which works on photonic quantum computing, co-founded by two Australians, an experimentalist and a theorist. There's IonQ, based in the US, working with trapped ion quantum computers. There's another company in Toronto, Xanadu, which was founded by an Australian experimentalist, again on photonic quantum computing. We don't know who's going to be the winner. We don't even know what technology is going to win, but you really see it as a very competitive race and people aren't releasing all their results. A few years ago, people were quite open about saying what their technology can do. Now it's much more secretive. You learn as you go, because it's a big payout.

When I started out, my first postdoc fellowship was funded by DARPA to work on quantum computer architectures, and that was in the US at NIST. The intelligence communities were a big part of getting the program started in the US, because they actually worked closely with the scientists. This is another thing we pointed out in our report—that it's important to open up these levels of communication between the scientists and the intelligence communities. That was largely spurred because quantum computers could be used to crack public-key cryptography, which, of course, is used for everything from credit card transactions to attorney-client privilege documents, which are secured using public-key cryptography that you want to have secure for a long time. If a quantum computer comes out, then you've completely lost the privacy associated with those kinds of documents. So it was a big risk, and people wanted to spend a lot of money. But now, yes, it's really unsure whether the US is going to have this kind of dominant position that they initially had because of the initial investment, because of these big infusions of cash in Europe, and in China, South Korea, and Japan. We believe that Australia should be one of these players because we have the intellectual capital. People want to come here. We just need the political will and the investor interest.

To get into the third question, yes, there are a lot of consequences for quantum technologies beyond just cracking codes and just doing things faster. For example, there's quantum sensors—everyone has a phone, which oftentimes has an accelerometer and a magnetometer. These devices help you navigate, and if you're in a situation of a GPS-denied environment because of some attack, then quantum technologies can provide you a way to efficiently and accurately navigate your craft. They can also use quantum sensors for mining. If you have a much better way to determine where precious minerals are, you will have a strategic advantage over your competitors, which will certainly play a role, for example, in mining activities in Africa and other nations where you need to be the best team around to get the advantage of having access to those minerals. There are a lot of geopolitical consequences as well to movement towards digital currencies, because suddenly you're going to have power of computation determining the value and integrity of currencies. Who has access to the best computing devices, which will be quantum, will have an advantage in that sector. All these things become quite interlinked in sometimes ways we didn't anticipate years ago.

It also sounds incredibly multi-sector, like this isn't just a defence issue. It'll be agriculture and healthcare, as you said, strategic minerals—a whole bunch of areas will be really impacted.

Peter, lucky last, and again, I think I've got a two-header here for you. I wanted you to come in on what specifically are the opportunities and threats when it comes to quantum tech from the national security, defence and intelligence space. We have a whole section that zooms in on that in the report. And then a follow-up—for the Australian government, what are the urgent or really critical gaps that you think need to be filled here from a policy recommendation perspective?

In terms of opportunities and threats, some of them were alluded to before—things like the ability to crack codes, which is a significant intelligence threat but also a huge boon to anybody who possesses it. You can immediately see that there are some strategic considerations here. It's not just about developing this technology and having it; we also need to be mindful of who we don't want to have it. At the same time, some of these technologies also offset one another. Another big area of quantum technology is quantum cryptography, where we can make cryptographic codes that even quantum computers can't break. So there's a potential method to bypass the threat of quantum computing in compromising our codes of the past. But at the same time, these things naturally progress into one another. Currently, we're able to demonstrate quantum cryptography quite well over short scales, and the Chinese have done it by satellite over almost 2,000 kilometres within mainland China. That is the type of technology that later on will be utilised when we build full-fledged quantum computers. You can't just deny single-use abilities of quantum technologies—they all feed into one another, and there's a complex interplay. But the dominant one, of course, is the economic interplay, because ultimately, economics is what determines strategic strength. We want to be able to have mutual benefit from others in the advancement of these technologies in the same way that we're all better off by the fact that the whole world is connected on the Internet. That's undeniably mutual benefit. But at the same time, with classical supercomputing, there are certain countries that we deny access to for supercomputing facilities because of potential malicious uses. So there's a very complex dynamic here, which is why it's not just as simple as pumping more money into research and making sure that this is advanced as quickly as possible. There needs to be unified consideration in the same way that there is with many other dual-use technologies. What is our place in the world? We're a medium-sized economy. We're not a superpower. We don't get to dictate the path here. We have to acknowledge where we sit in the world, and from that, also make diplomatic decisions. How are we going to form alliances in the future, given the huge political influence that this kind of technology could have?

And the second question, if you're up in Parliament or you're a senior policy maker across a range of departmental agencies, and they're suddenly told, okay, we really need to focus on quantum, where do you think the most urgent gaps are?

The gap is that we don't do exactly what you just said, which is having a unified umbrella that oversees all of these things at this very high level. At the moment, our approach is we pump a certain amount of money into research and development in this sector. There are lots of people that approach people like us for advice on how this might affect their future business operations, financial optimisation, whatever the case may be. All these different interests involved and money being pumped into it, but not with any sort of cohesive long-term vision of what's the ultimate goal here. It's not just throwing money at things. It's about creating a domestic ecosystem which satisfies the needs of the country as a whole. In the same way with anything that has strategic importance, it's not just you throw money at it wildly. You need an overall goal of how this fits into our place in the world as a medium-sized economy and alliances that we have. How does this affect our future alliances and diplomatic considerations? Because we don't get to dictate the path. We're part of the global economy, and we're a relatively small player in that, but we can't just go it alone.

What about just from a defence, intelligence, and national security perspective? What do you see as the key policy makers there? Feel free to come in on this across all four of you.

That is, from a national security perspective, certainly one of the most important ones, defence and intelligence, for the sorts of reasons that we've discussed. That's exactly why it shouldn't just be allowed to be a free-for-all, because obviously some of these technologies, just like back in the Cold War—the obvious parallel is nuclear technologies—are hugely advantageous for certain applications, hugely detrimental for others if they go into the wrong hands. Like any sort of dual-use technology, it needs to be thought of in that kind of framework—how does this affect our alliances and our global diplomatic position?

I will just add to that that in comparison to, say, the United States or countries in Europe, the defence and intelligence sector in this country has not engaged in the same way. As Gavin said, when this got started in the 90s and the 2000s, the US intelligence and defence sectors were heavily involved in funding the research and supervising the research and talking to scientists. I don't know if you guys know, I don't know anyone in our community that holds high-level security grants that can even have these discussions with members of defence or intelligence and say, okay, where do you see the threats being and how do you think quantum's going to help you or how do you think quantum's going to hurt you in the long term? I don't know anyone who has that level of engagement.

And it's also, they're difficult shoes to fill, those ones, because people in that kind of position can't just be your everyday intelligence or defence type of people. They need to be people with an intimate understanding of the nuance of this technology. It's very different to conventional technologies that we're all familiar with, and there's an enormous amount of nuance and subtlety to it. So people in those sorts of strategic decision-making positions need to have a clear understanding of the nuances of the technology as well, which is a difficult thing to fill.

I'm going to ask one more question and then we've got quite a few questions coming in online and I'll also open it up. Before, you guys were talking about heads of these quantum start-up companies which really aren't start-ups anymore. And I don't know if you did this deliberately, but almost everyone you mentioned was an Australian citizen who had co-founded the company, started the company. Are any of these people in Australia, is the brain drain all happening to the US and Europe? What does it take to get people back here?

Well, yeah, so the drain is to where the money is and also where the big fabrication facilities are, which is Silicon Valley. The investors, they're willing to make that risk because it's a big payout. And it's proven technology, it's built up, it's taken time, but the principles are correct and it's passed the test. There really is no fundamental obstacle to getting these things built. In Australia, it does take a national initiative, but it's not just about the government spending money, it's also about fostering a culture with investors here who are willing to make the leap. Australia is recognised as being a really great country to come to. I mean, I was attracted to come here. I know many people around the world, in Europe and North America, who very much like Australia and would live here, but if they're involved with start-up companies, it's just easier to go elsewhere. It's just that the investment is available there.

We have a question from Mark who's watching online, and he's asked, when you postulate a strategic race, you have to consider not only how useful the tech could be, but also how likely it is that a competitor will gain that capability far enough in advance of you doing so that they will be able to use that advantage. How likely is a major strategic surprise that ends up making a difference? Who would like a turn at that?

Certainly, it can't be denied the Chinese level of investment in quantum technology has spurred a lot of the other investment in quantum technology. The Americans did get spooked a little bit and got caught a bit on the back foot with their initiative. That sort of came on the back of the Chinese announcements in regards to their push to heavily industrialise and commercialise their quantum technology. They have spent a lot of money in that space. Whether or not you want to say we're at the stage now where somebody is pulling ahead, we're not quite there yet in the sense that you could say, you know, Chinese technology is significantly better than the Americans or significantly better than the Europeans. But I suppose that is something that's going to happen in the next five or six years, depending on whether it's the start-up space or the corporate space or the sovereign space. Now, just also to be clear, people see the money that comes into Google and comes in from IBM and the VC community. But sovereign investment still dwarfs all of this. The amount of money that governments are spending onto their national initiatives and their national research programs is still much, much larger than what's coming in from the private sector at this stage. So have we gotten to the point where there could be a strategic surprise in an adversary or a non-friendly nation pulling too far ahead? No, not yet. In fact, everyone's somewhat level, I would say. As Gavin mentioned, there's multi-platforms for quantum computing, which in and of itself is hard to explain, because people, you know, if it says there's different types of computers if it was just a standard laptop, you know, people would think, oh, okay, it's Intel versus Power PC or it's Mac versus Windows, but it's all still silicon-based technology. In the quantum computing space, we have seven, at least, systems that are completely different from each other. Some are based on particles of light, some are based on atoms, some are based on all kinds of different things. So we haven't yet filtered that out yet. Everything's sort of about the same. Most of these systems can reliably produce qubits. We can fabricate them. We can control them quite well. But during the 2020s, that's going to change. By the end of the 2020s, I think we're going to have a much cleaner outlook of what's going to happen both in the computation, sensing, and communication space.

Do you think that cleaner outlook is going to attract more funding from medium-sized governments once they realise the potential? Certainty is always an attractor for business. Nothing a business likes more than some sort of predictability. But the fact that we can't predict it at the moment does mean that it's a blue sky investment for most.

All right, let's open it up to questions. I've got a few more coming online. Does anyone want to jump in?