Quantum International Relations
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Abstract
The contributors to this volume are motivated by a common apprehension and a common hope. The apprehension was first voiced by Einstein, who lamented the inability of humanity, at the individual and social level, to keep up with the increased speed of technological change brought about by the quantum revolution. Before it was the atomic bomb. Today it is the advent of advanced quantum systems, which is already the object of intense geopolitical and commercial competition. Meanwhile, as quantum science and technology fast forward into the twenty-first century, the social sciences remain stuck in classical, nineteenth-century ways of thinking. Can such a mechanistic model of the mind and society possibly help us manage the fully realized technological potential of the quantum? That’s where the hope appears, that perhaps quantum is not just a physical science, but a human science too. This is the potential implication of dramatic recent discoveries in cognitive science and quantum biology, which suggest that subjectivity itself may be a quantum phenomenon. If so, then there will be a need for a new “quantized” human science, including international relations. At the centenary of the first quantum Gedankenexperiment in the 1920s, the book offers a diversity of explorations, speculations, and approaches for understanding geopolitics in the twenty-first century.