The Role of Community Building and Education as Key Pillar of Institutionalizing Responsible Quantum

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of community building and education in ensuring responsible development of quantum computing, highlighting strategies to foster diverse stakeholder engagement and mitigate potential societal harms.

Contribution

It reviews existing proposals on responsible quantum computing and presents IBM's strategies for fostering a diverse community to support responsible development.

Findings

Community collaboration is essential for responsible quantum development.

Diverse stakeholder engagement helps anticipate and mitigate societal impacts.

IBM has developed strategies to build inclusive quantum computing communities.

Abstract

Quantum computing is an emerging technology whose positive and negative impacts on society are not yet fully known. As government, individuals, institutions, and corporations fund and develop this technology, they must ensure that they anticipate its impacts, prepare for its consequences, and steer its development in such a way that it enables the most good and prevents the most harm. However, individual stakeholders are not equipped to fully anticipate these consequences on their own it requires a diverse community that is well-informed about quantum computing and its impacts. Collaborations and community-building across domains incorporating a variety of viewpoints, especially those from stakeholders most likely to be harmed, are fundamental pillars of developing and deploying quantum computing responsibly. This paper reviews responsible quantum computing proposals and literature, highlights the challenges in implementing these, and presents strategies developed at IBM aimed at building a diverse community of users and stakeholders to support the responsible development of this technology.