As university labs, big tech and major powers race for supremacy in new quantum technologies, Project Q travels in space and time, asking who will win, what are the risks, what will it mean for war and peace?

From atomic fission and the nuclear revolution to semiconductors and the information revolution, the ideas of quantum mechanics triggered profound shifts in scientific paradigms, altered philosophical realities and reconfigured global power. A third quantum transformation, in computing, communication, simulation, sensing and artificial intelligence, is now on the horizon.

A philosophical travelogue, scientific investigation and cautionary tale, Project Q journeys from Q Station, Sydney’s former quarantine site, to Berlin, Copenhagen, Singapore, Silicon Valley, Shanghai and New Delhi, in search of the origins and consequences of the next quantum revolution. Project Q explores how quantum could mitigate climate change, create new materials and optimise the flow of people, goods and money – and warns how it could also break encrypted messages, take surveillance data-mining and face-recognition to Orwellian levels of omniscience, change the nature of warfare on land, air and sea, and produce an artificial intelligence that is superior to humans, and learns to know it.

Project Q originated as a Global Media Project at the University of Sydney and is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade under the Australia-India Cyber and Critical Technology Partnership (AICCTP), and the Sydney Quantum Academy.

A 20 minute Q&A moderated by Stan Grant, follows film.