The next industrial revolution is here, and it’s ‘spooky’ according to Einstein

It’s an unassuming, four-storey brick building in a quiet campus corner halfway between Sydney city and the airport. It seems an unlikely starting point for the next industrial revolution.

Inside, there are nine alien-looking, stainless steel machines, some the size of a car and some truck-size. To the untutored eye, they have the appearance of a retired submariner’s homemade effort to build a brewery; a confusion of shiny silver cylinders and tubes and periscope-looking things, some wrapped in tinfoil.

Minister for Industry and Science Ed Husic at the quantum labs at Sydney University.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos

In fact, each is a manufacturing system, where information can be coded onto a single atom, an advance towards a computer technology of unimaginable potency, running on physics principles that Einstein famously described as “spooky”.

Once perfected, a single, large quantum computer would be “something more powerful than all the computers in the world connected together,” says Michelle Simmons, head of the Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of NSW and one of the world’s foremost researchers and entrepreneurs in the field.

This is not just possible, says Simmons. It’s inevitable. “Some calculations that would take thousands of years with classical computers you can do within an hour with a quantum computer,” she tells me.

This is why the world’s most powerful nations and many of the biggest companies are racing to establish themselves as leaders in a technology with potential to solve complex problems in everything from agriculture to defence.

But isn’t the big noise artificial intelligence? How does quantum fit in? “AI can only do so much within the limits of current computers,” says Australia’s Minister for Industry and Science, Ed Husic. “Quantum will overpower them all and it’ll crack problems we can’t crack today. It’s the difference between the typewriter and the computer, it’s kind of a gigantic leap.”

Or, as Michelle Simmons puts it, AI and quantum technologies “will turbocharge each other” to power the next industrial revolution. “They work together.”

So how would quantum computing actually help with defence? One application is clear-cut. Militaries protect their secrets by encrypting them. The first country to master quantum computing will be able to decrypt its enemies’ communications while protecting its own. The advantage for the winner could be decisive in war. Indeed, the Australian and US defence departments were among the earliest investors in Simmons’ work.

And agriculture? “Fertiliser is one that a lot of people are looking at,” says Simmons, “breaking down nitrogen, figuring out different catalysts for that is a very big one.”

Professor Michelle Simmons. Credit: AFR

The current process requires heat and high pressure with iron as a catalyst and produces about 3 per cent of global carbon emissions. The process is over a century old and in desperate need of upgrading. But finding a better one could take another century; it’s slow and complex to model the interaction of thousands of possible alternative catalysts. Quantum computers could crack this problem quickly and yield cheaper, low-emissions fertilisers for the world’s farmers.

Quantum computers won’t make all the existing computers redundant: “It will not affect, you know, gaming, writing things in Word, doing PowerPoint presentations,” explains Simmons, who was Australian of the Year in 2018. “It will only deal with certain kinds of complex problems. And solving those problems is just high value for industries with lots of data and complexity.”

Some of the other industries that stand to reap big gains are pharmaceuticals, finance and mobility including automotive. In fact, the computer algorithms to solve their problems are already written, some 60 or so. They await computers with the grunt to run them.

It won’t be long. Simmons founded a start-up, Silicon Quantum Computing, in 2017 to apply her research. It has $133 million in capital from the federal government, the NSW government, the Commonwealth Bank and Telstra.

The company is about to offer its first commercial product – a way of accelerating machine learning – this year. Its ultimate aim is to produce the world’s first “fault tolerant” – or stable – commercial scale quantum computer by 2033. And to manufacture it in Australia.

But Simmons faces a brace of companies, here and abroad, competing for the same prize. Including the firm that is about to receive nearly a billion taxpayer dollars in support to set up in Brisbane.

PsiQuantum was founded by a pair of Australians in Palo Alto, California, in 2016. As Ed Husic tells it, Jeremy O’Brien and Terry Rudolph “left our country because they thought no one in Australia got what they were talking about”.

On Tuesday, Anthony Albanese is to announce that the federal and Queensland governments jointly will provide $940 million in grants, loans and equity to PsiQuantum “to build the world’s first fault tolerant quantum computer in Brisbane”. It’s part of the government’s Future Made in Australia plan.

“If they crack it by 2026-27, it’ll supercharge our economy and it’ll supercharge our quantum ecosystem. We have other people backing Australians in quantum – they have nearly a billion in private capital – why shouldn’t we?”

Australia was a global leader in a whole range of technologies and let them slip away. Husic is determined that it won’t happen this time.

Australia, he says, is “uniquely positioned because of the quality of our people – we have one of the biggest and best-qualified quantum workforces on the planet, building companies that, no doubt, are household names of the future.”

British-trained Michelle Simmons, an Australian resident for the last quarter-century, agrees: “I truly believe Australia is the best place in the world to do this research.”

She credits decades of quantum research in Australia, a collaborative way of working together, and “a kind of ambitious ability to give things a go”, plus a workforce from all over the planet.

“And I truly believe that we’re on the precipice of making fantastic companies. I feel that momentum. But somehow we’re not leaning into it, there’s some holding back.”

Simmons says that in political circles she’ll often hear the comment that “if we invest in this we could be a global leader” and “I have to correct them and say ‘no, we are a global leader and we should absolutely own it’“.

Maybe not so unlikely after all.

Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor.