Export Controls as Innovation Marketing? Sociotechnical Imaginaries in the Ringfencing of Quantum Technologies
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why are a host of states, such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands, imposing export controls on quantum computers with technical specifications (e.g. 2000 qubits) that are not yet realisable? No full-fledged ‘useful’ quantum technology (QT) exists yet; instead, the regulatory object of export controls is the network of technological artefacts (equipment, prototype, proof-of-concepts), people and labs (the ‘assemblage’ of quantum innovation) endeavouring to make quantum a reality. Thus, export controls serve mainly as a tool of knowledge regulation over critical knowledge and R&D exchanges taking place to realise the quantum ambition. This article contends that it is not the material reality of quantum innovation – which is still mired in major engineering challenges – that informs export control efforts surrounding QT, but rather the ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ of quantum that serves as the ‘muse’ for law- and policy-makers. Quantum imaginaries are pivotal to understanding the rationales of QT export controls and the narratives in which they are entrenched. It is not necessarily the ‘2000 qubits’ in and of themselves, their technical (non-)feasibility or (non-)realisability, but rather the imaginaries told and believed about their technological possibilities and power that are decisive in the ringfencing performed by export controls on QT.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it