Quantum computers are coming - do we need ethical guidelines?

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1:08Hello and welcome to Tech Life on the BBC World Service, the program about technology and how it affects the world around us and beyond. I'm Chris Vallance. On today's show, quantum computing promises revolutionary new discoveries, But tech revolutions can be messy things. While the full potential of quantum remains years away, is now the time to start thinking about how we ethically use it. And how do we preserve our data for posterity? Could glass be the answer to keeping important data and unimportant selfies and insta-reels safe for thousands of years?

1:44Chris Vallance:We create tiny little bubbles, these nano-sized bubbles, about 250 nanometres in size. we create them deep inside of the few silicon we create billions of these bubbles and with one foot in science and another in science fiction writer alistair reynolds helps us look at the future of humanity as a space-faring species the sort of thing about the starship i mean when i first saw it i thought it just looks like sort of tintin's rocket doesn't it you know if you painted it red and white it would look right at home on a on the cover of a sort of 1950s pulp magazine

2:34There's a saying that's become associated with Silicon Valley, move fast and break things. With AI, things have certainly moved fast, and we've seen governments scramble to deal with the impact of the tech that looks set to change all our lives, whether you're a programmer or a painter. Quantum computing promises a similar revolution. The mind-boggling machines have the potential to solve problems conventional computers can't. From medicine to cryptography, they might change our world. Britain's National Quantum Computing Laboratory is trying to get ahead of that change and has published its own plan for thinking about the ethics of the tech before anything, including potentially the protections on your bank account, gets broken.

3:19Dr Natasha Orton has a background in philosophy and physics and is the principal author of the National Quantum Computing Centre's Responsible and Ethical Quantum Computing Action Plan. So why do we need to be thinking about quantum ethics now? I think we're getting to the point where we're seeing lots of positive progress in quantum computing, where we're approaching the point where quantum computing might be useful or might have an impact on society. We know that there's a possibility for a transformative impact across multiple sectors, so from pharmaceuticals and healthcare, from the financial sector, from energy.

4:00And it's really important that at this point of development we start to think about how we can shape the trajectory towards societal good. You're doing this at quite an early stage in the development of quantum, and we've seen lots of exciting progress, But I think everybody says it's, you know, really useful. Practical quantum computers are still a few years away. But we've also seen, you know, with AI, how, you know, suddenly all these ethical questions, almost like they came out of nowhere. You know, the tech took leaps and bounds ahead. And, you know, we're suddenly asking ourselves questions about, you know, for example, currently about military use of AI.

4:41We're asking questions about employment, all these sort of things. So are you trying not to be caught out, as it were, in doing this now? Yeah, absolutely. So I think we've seen from other examples of emerging technology and not just AI, although that is, I think, a really good example, but also nanotechnology, other bioengineering technologies that often these ethical considerations aren't brought in until too late. And where we want to be with quantum computing is that we're making these considerations at the point where we can still influence the direction, build in safeguards and mitigate harms and also shape things towards societal benefit as well.

5:22So identifying applications that could have the most positive impact as well as avoiding those that might have negative impact. So you mentioned harms. What are the potential harms that could be caused by quantum computers that we should be sort of thinking about and factoring in the ethical considerations about now? I think firstly, it's really important to address potential unintended consequences. So we might be setting out with the best intentions, but we might still be coming up against potential harms. And we've seen examples of those, as you mentioned, in things like AI. So things like algorithmic biases, things like who has access and who's prevented from having access, and how do we make quantum computing as accessible as possible.

6:05but we also need to think about questions around for example the one that's raised most often is around cryptography one of the things that we think quantum computing might be able to do is to undermine the ways that we do modern cryptography which is what protects much of our data and obviously some of this data is very sensitive but I think actually the response to that has been a really good example of responsible innovation in action. So industries are taking steps now, governments are taking steps now to address this potential threat. Is there a debate around, if you like, who owns quantum computing power?

6:47Is that one of the ethical considerations? Yeah, absolutely. So quantum computers are very expensive, very time consuming, require lots of interdisciplinary expertise. And so it's actually really difficult and you need a huge amount of resource behind you to be able to build a quantum computer. And one way that this is being addressed is via accessing computes on the cloud, so remotely. And we at the NQCC work with partners across industry to be able to offer this. I mean, is there a risk that you have a sort of a global divide between the haves, those countries that are able to and can afford to exploit quantum technology, and the have-nots, those that can't.

7:30Yeah, that's, again, a very real possibility. And you can look at recent maps that have been published that show national investment into quantum computing and quantum technology. And there is definitely, I think, the possibility of a divide. And one of the risks that we can think about, as well as the possibility of that divide being exacerbated, if we expect quantum computing to bring about significant economic benefits that countries that have that capability can then reinvest into further technological development, that gap risks widening further. And again, there are organisations that are working to address this.

8:10So for example, the Open Quantum Institute, which is currently based at CERN, works with organisations, non-growth organisations across the world to provide access to address some of the problems facing humanity. It's part of the challenge that when we're thinking about the ethics here, we don't really know what quantum will deliver yet. Yes, so definitely. And I think that's why acting now and setting up these frameworks and principles that are sufficiently general, I suppose, to be applicable to across applications is so important. We want to train ourselves to think this way. We want to train our scientists and the future quantum workforce to think this way now so that they're ready to tackle those ethical challenges as they arise.

8:59So how are we going to come up with, if you like, ethical principles and whose job is it going to be to ensure that everybody abides by them? So I think at this stage, and there's already work going into this. So for example, at the NQCC, we developed our own set of principles, the quantum states principles, which really reflect our commitment as a national lab, as a trusted authority, and as a publicly funded body to make sure that the work that we do is responsible and ethical. We also work to convene a responsible quantum industry forum. And then multilaterally as well, we're seeing efforts.

9:39So the World Economic Forum has published a set of quantum computing governance principles. OECD is working on a set of principles. So we're seeing these principles pop up. I think the next step really is putting them into practice. And that was Dr Natasha Orton from the UK's National Quantum Computing Centre.

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11:11You're listening to Tech Life on the BBC World Service with me, Chris Valance. On last week's show, Shona McCallum interviewed Yvonne Johnson and Richard Cave. Yvonne lives with motor neuron disease, and it's taken away much of her ability to speak. But now she's able to communicate using an AI clone of her voice, thanks to help from Richard, a speech and language therapist. The programme's a great listen, and don't just take my word for it. Robert Oliver emailed us from the UK to say it was inspiring. He writes, Thank you for such a lovely story and sharing Richard Cave's work to create a better life for those for whom this technology is vital.

11:51Our third February edition on driverless cars is still generating responses too. Isaac Chongo from Zambia sent us a WhatsApp message with his thoughts on self-driving cars. He says, they're not safe at any speed. Anand from Bangalore in India also WhatsAppped us. He writes, hi team, interesting podcasts. I'm wondering how we plan to introduce driverless cars in India. Most roads have no lanes, there are minimal to no traffic rules, and people don't follow those rules. That does sound a challenge, and if you're listening in from India and you know of a driverless car project being introduced near you, we'd love to hear from you.

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12:59Now, a few years ago, I was lucky enough to visit a building where I was shown a storage medium that could preserve information for thousands of years. The building was the British Museum in London, and the storage medium was a clay tablet from Mesopotamia that was still readable 5 ,000 years after someone pushed words into it with a reed stylus. But we've learned through experience that more modern data storage methods have issues when it comes to the long term. When is the last time you were able to access a floppy disk or a VHS tape or found that a favourite CD was starting to jump or skip?

13:39So it's interesting that several companies have been looking at a form of storage which could last not for decades but for thousands of years. And it involves storing data inside glass. I've been speaking to Ilya Kazansky from S-Photonics that's hoping to offer its storage tech to data centres. I asked him if their glass or fused silica technology is similar to that featured recently in the latest Mission Impossible movie.

14:07Chris Vallance:Yes. So as many people may have seen in the latest Tom Cruise film Mission Impossible, you have the 5D memory device, which is able to store up to 360 terabytes of data, which is the theoretical maximum of our technology. and Fused Silica is a material which is known for its durability. It is melted sand. It is resistant to heat over a thousand degrees Celsius. It is resistant to data being lost due to water or due to humidity or due to scratching. One of the unique capabilities of our technology is that we write data inside the bulk of the Fused Silica. So we create tiny little bubbles, these nano sized bubbles, about 250 nanometers in size.

14:57Chris Vallance:We create them deep inside of the few silicon. We create billions of these bubbles, which gives the really high level of density, as you see in a lot of the science fiction. You're essentially engraving with lasers in the glass storage medium. Exactly. So the way that our technology works, we have a source of energy, which is light. The light is being produced by a laser and we are shooting that energy at the glass substrate. Now, when that energy enters the glass substrate, that causes a tiny little explosion. Imagine like dropping a stone in a piece of sand and you have a little pit which is created from dropping that stone.

15:36Chris Vallance:So that's effectively what we're doing. We're creating these tiny explosions inside of the glass. Billions of these explosions are being created every second. And the void, which is created by the explosion, that's where the data is stored for thousands of years. And presumably you need a laser or something like it to read this. No, actually, a read device is much simpler compared to the right system. Imagine a camera like your phone camera or any other digital camera device. We have a camera with a set of specific polarization optics attached, and we are effectively photographing inside of the glass.

16:18Chris Vallance:And we're capturing the state of these bubbles, how they're positioned, where they're positioned. And that is what enables us to retrieve the data. So you're storing all the information in glass and you can store information very densely. You can pack a lot of information into a not very big space. How much can you get into something about the size of a grain of sand? So our technology enables to store up to 10 gigabytes per millimetre cubed of substrate. So a millimetre cube of substrate is something akin to a grain of sand. And we can store up to 10 gigabytes of data in a millimetre cubed of the substrate.

17:03And your commercial offering, the kind of storage medium you're going to be giving to data centers, which is a prime market for you, that's something about the size of a beer coaster, if I get it right.

17:18Chris Vallance:Exactly. How much can you store in that? The flagship data storage media, which is five inches by five inches length and width and three millimeters thick, that theoretically can store up to 360 terabytes of data as per that Mission Impossible film. But in our roadmap, we're currently aiming to release a data centre product into the market within the next two to three years commercially available. And that will be able to store 250 terabytes of data in a five inch platter of glass. That's Ilya Kazansky from S Photonics. And they're not the only company working on storing data within glass. Experts at Microsoft have been working on Project Silica and recently released details of their work.

18:06They also use a laser to cause nano explosions in glass, but they say they don't need pure fused silica. They can work with a more common glass used for oven doors and cookware. Richard Black is the research director for Project Silica at Microsoft Research in the UK. He told TechLife what their glass storage technology could be used for. So this type of storage is for archival data storage. And there's really three kind of groups or buckets for that. So one is just the long-term storage that we all need as a result of the digital transformation of society and business. So that's our personal photographs and videos that are kept for our whole lifetime, maybe for our children's lifetime as well.

18:50Medical records that are kept to patients whole life. Business records, legal records. All of this stuff is increasing in volume and it's all digital these days. So that's a huge increase in the amount of archival data. The second bucket is scientific archival data. So there's a huge amount of science measurements, whether it be photographs of the sky or underwater data scans of the seabed, all this type of stuff. And then the third application space is what we call preservation archive. So that's organizations like National Archives, National Libraries, National Museums and the media and entertainment industry and so on, who have data, high value data that they really have want to keep for very long time periods.

19:31And of course, the problem with standard archival storage systems today is they tend to be based on magnetic media, but they have a limited lifetime of a handful of years. And so that means for over the course of the lifetime of archival data that you end up doing this thing of buying and copying and buying and copying and buying and copying. And of course, that's not great financially from an e-waste point of view, from an energy point of view. Ideally, you want to look for media that will have a lifetime that's good enough for the data lifetime. That's Richard Black from Project Silica at Microsoft Research.

20:13SpaceX's Starship vehicle is an impressive technological achievement. It even looks like the future. Watching it take off, it's easy to believe humans can become a multi-planetary species. T minus 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

20:40Starship is part of Elon Musk's plan to transport humans beyond Earth orbit and build long-term settlements further out into the solar system. But Elon's thinking has apparently evolved and the priority is now the moon, not Mars. The idea of a moon base and interplanetary travel has fuelled science fiction for more than a century. And it got us thinking, has science fiction had an impact on real-life space missions? Who better to ask than Alastair Reynolds? He's a writer of science fiction novels and short stories and used to be a scientist working for the European Space Agency. But I started by asking Alistair for his vision of how we can become interplanetary travellers.

21:25Well, there's always been this kind of grand narrative in science fiction, a kind of shared vision, I think, that emerged probably in the sort of post-war American science fiction, when people began to get a sense that human spaceflight might be something that might happen within their lifetime. And it was this kind of sort of shared vision that we would maybe build a space station, a giant wheel in space, and then we'd go to the moon, and then we'd go to Mars. and take rockets out into the further reaches of the solar system, probably all within the 20th century. And then, of course, we start turning our eyes to the stars and then we start sort of thinking about starships, whether they're forced to travel below the speed of light or whatever.

22:03But there was always this sense that even colonising the whole solar system was but just a step on the path to sort of galactic civilisation, where I sort of part slightly with some of the sort of proponents of that is the idea that it's kind of like a civilizational mandate you know we must spread our presence into the galaxy it's our sort of our birthright to do so I love the idea of exploration for exploration's sake and if if that's something that's better done with human beings than robots then then I think it would be great if we can send people into into deep space I mean it's interesting isn't it because in science fiction, there are all these sorts of systems that make travel across the inconceivably vast distances of space possible.

22:51I mean, it's in your books, it's in pretty much every science fiction writer's book, some kind of fantastic fast than light drive or something that manipulates momentum so that we don't have to worry about that. I mean, there's the, you know, new physics seems to be at the core of any kind of, you know, interplanetary travel as envisioned by science fiction. Yes, I think if it turns out we're stuck with only the physics that we know today, then interstellar travel will be quite difficult. I'm not saying it will be impossible, but the sort of engineering challenges will be really, really enormous.

23:26You're probably aware of this initiative about a decade ago called Breakthrough Starshot, which had some backing from various tech people. I think Stephen Hawking was involved in it, the idea that maybe within the next few decades, we could send little instrument packages to the nearest star. And they would be like basically the size of silicon chips, you know, just tiny little chips that would be sent on their way by lasers, maybe up to about 10 percent of the speed of light. But that's about as good as we could possibly imagine doing with the sort of technology that we have at the moment. So, you know, it's a very far cry from the Starship Enterprise.

24:05Do different cultures and nations have different visions of the future of space? I mean, you know, in a way, a lot of, you know, the US culture around space, for example, you can see parallels with the sort of the narrative of the Wild West and the frontier. I mean, do different cultures and countries have different approaches to science fiction, different visions of science fiction? I think the dominant voice in science fiction has been that American voice, at least since the war and probably earlier. But we are seeing, particularly in the last sort of 10 years or so, a real sort of opening up of science fiction to other voices from around the world, different perspectives, a sort of post-colonial way of thinking about things.

24:47And I think that's really refreshing. And to be honest with you, the dominant conversation in science fiction now probably has nothing to do with space exploration. It's much more about things like, you know, climate change, inequality, sort of navigating the challenges that are going to face us on Earth in the next century, rather than sort of worrying about colonizing Mars or going to Alpha Centauri. And indeed, you know, the cast of characters in science fiction, you know, has to change, doesn't it? Because it can't be just, you know, Americans and Russians or whoever has been in the past. And now you'd be flying in the face of any reality if you didn't include China, India and a host of new nations.

25:33Absolutely. I mean, one of the one of the things that was good and progressive about Star Trek when it appeared in the 60s was that Gene Roddenberry did lean into that as hard as he could. I mean, I think there was quite a bit of resistance from the networks. But he did have this vision that the Starship Enterprise would be a place of equality and equality, where you'd see people from different nations represented on the deck of the Enterprise. That's something that science fiction has taken on board and has tried to embrace much more recently. Let's come back to Musk to finish on, to Elon Musk to finish on.