Quantum for Social Good : Ethical Qubits and the Regulatory State

For this panel on the ethics of quantum technologies, I offer provocations that imagine the future of policy and governance, specifically regulation. In this talk I ask : How will we evaluate quantum computing outcomes in social contexts? Regulatory and policy regimes rely on stable measurements that quantum technologies destabilize. Governments create many such boundaries that separate legal from illegal based on quantitative thresholds, like a speed limit. Society is alerted to problems through measurements that allow for common statistical and mathematical methods to make comparisons. Quantum technology outcomes are not reducible to their inputs which seriously limits the ability of governments to identify ethical or operational problems. If we are going to have quantum for social good, I suggest that we push our thinking and vocabulary further. My second provocation calls for a theoretical leap into this new realm with an ethical qubit, or quantum bit. This could move beyond binary thinking linked to Newtonian physics and limits to moral imaginations. If a bit is based on 1s and 0s, and a quantum bit is the probability of 1s and 0s, could we imagine probabilistic assessment of the potentiality of beneficence? Maybe a quantum ethical turn dispels the governing compulsion to control through binary categories. Quantum for the social good is waiting for developments in social theory.