On the 30th of October, the “Outlook Report on Quantum” by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission was released ahead of the Quantum Act, expected to be released mid-November.

The report contains key insights on the development of quantum information technologies across sectors and how the EU positions itself within the global geopolitical (and commercial) landscape.

Next to that, the Report also contains the idea, elaborated together with ex colleagues in the JRC’s Directorate S on Innovation in Science and Policymaking, especially the Policy Lab, that the still much-debated philosophical implications of quantum mechanics – what in my book with Derrick de Kerckhove we call Quantum Ecology – can supply an onto-epistemological framework and conceptual toolbox to rethink Cartesian-Newtonian reality, what we can know of it as an observer-dependent phenomenon, and how we can do policy differently (especially for quantum information technologies), starting from a complexity-informed standpoint.

This “alternative” standpoint is, in fact, something we can no longer disregard, insofar as classical approaches, often based on linear extrapolations and economic-only assumptions of efficiency, have long shown inherent limits in modeling today’s complex sociotechnical contemporaneity. We need to think and act within reality positing a I-world entanglement that inevitably positions us – any agent, indeed – under a regime of “observership” characterised by fundamental uncertainty and open-endedness as far as its unpredetermined evolution is concerned.

Hopefully, the insights we provide will inform the upcoming EU’s Quantum Act, expected to detail the strategy and governance roadmap of the EU’s quantum information technology’s ecosystem.