Italia third in the world in supercomputing, but there are challenges: here are the challenges

"An impact comparable to the discovery of fire". Instead, prefect Alessandro Pansa resorted to a metaphor. The president of Sparkle defined the scope of artificial intelligence: not yet another wave of innovation, but a threshold of civilisation. The scenario moves on three levels: the generative AI, dominant today but more adept at language than numbers; the general AI, expected within a decade, with human-like cognitive capabilities but "infinitely more powerful"; and the quantum computing, where a 1,000-qubit computer (or quantum bit, it is the fundamental unit of information in quantum computers, capable of representing 0, 1 or a superposition of both simultaneously) will solve problems in a hundred seconds that would take a supercomputer a million years. To these, Pansa recalled recalling the Wall Street Journal, are added the five innovations destined to reshape the next quarter century: brain-computer interfaces, space mining, autonomous robots even in the military, private weather control and nuclear fusion.

But the stakes are not just technological, they are geopolitical. Pansa evoked the 'techno-feudalism' denounced by former Greek Economy Minister Yanis Varoufakis: the power of big tech, which has grown with the privatisation of the internet, erodes the sovereignty of states in a market without competition, conditioning governments and democracies.

It is within this framework that the decisive question arises: where is Italia? "We are second to none" in intelligence, he claimed, "but we buy everything outside". A contradiction that demands a industrial answer, not just an academic one. The way out passes through three levers to be activated together: 'industry, governance and investment', to make the best use of these systems without being slaves to them. And on quantum computing, the race is still on: 'we can compete'. The central theme of Pansa's speech was the risk of technological subordination of Italia and the need to develop autonomous capabilities, especially in quantum computing where the race is still open.

Pansa pointed the way with a virtuous example: the birth of QTI, today the only Italia and European operator in quantum communications, the result of the encounter between five researchers from the CNR and the University of Florence and big industry. "We have united the science of excellence of our universities with the commercial strength of industry," explained the president of Sparkle: a best practice to be replicated.

That the race is on is confirmed by the numbers brought to the conference by Professor Francesco Ubertini, president of Cineca, the entirely public inter-university consortium that runs Italy's leading supercomputing centre, now number one in Europe in terms of research impact.

One figure above all: Italia is third in the world in terms of declared computational power, behind the United States and Japan, and 'at the end of the year it could be second', with Germany close behind and China as the great unknown, because it does not disclose its numbers.

A result, it is explained, achieved thanks to a billion euro infrastructure investment, half European and half Italia, with a decisive contribution from the Pnrr. In the Bologna laboratories, traditional supercomputers, machines optimised for AI, cloud computing systems and two new-generation quantum computers, produced by the Finnish IQM Quantum Computers and the French Pasqal, now coexist.

To give an idea of the leap, one need only turn to Leonardo, the supercomputer inaugurated in November 2022 by the President of the Republic: 250 million billion operations per second. "One hour of Leonardo's work is equivalent to 920 years of my computer," said Ubertini.

The big Italian and European question remains open: turning innovation into products and services. Along the value chain, Europe is lagging behind in almost all segments except infrastructure management. And yet, he stressed, 'we have not lost the challenge of artificial intelligence. We are behind, yes, but above all we cannot lose it'. Referring to the Draghi report, he recalled that the future of Europe depends on the ability to seize the opportunities of this new digital revolution. In this context, Ubertini finally brought good news: quantum technology is not energy-intensive, unlike other technologies currently in use.

On the level of political and philosophical analysis, Marco Emanuele, SIOI senior researcher and editor of The Global Eye, raised the stakes. "We are not in a phase of change, we are inside a real transformation": to the speed of the technological revolution is added radicality, a discontinuity that affects individual identity, international relations, and the balance of power. There are three challenges. The first concerns global competition: the pattern 'United States innovates, Europe regulates, China copies' no longer holds, with the entry of powers such as India, which hosted the last summit on artificial intelligence, and Brazil. Hence the theme of technological sovereignty, 'an expression to be handled with care, because the first to use it was Putin'. More solid, he noted, is the concept of strategic autonomy, now also at the centre of the NATO debate.

The second challenge is ethics. Not values 'lowered from above', but 'pragmatic ethics' arising from governance, along the lines of the 'containment' proposed by Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind.

The third is the most challenging: we need a new 'visionary intelligence' based on four pillars, spiritual, relational, connective and planetary. Because if states are in danger of taking second place to big tech, "borders are perhaps even less meaningful".

Getting to the technical heart of the second quantum revolution was Tommaso Calarco, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Bologna, who placed Italia in a leading position. 'We are stronger on quantum than on artificial intelligence,' he began, dismantling a cliché. The world leader in quantum telecommunications is a Swiss company, but the two companies chasing it on the European market are Italian: ThinkQuantum and QTI (Quantum Telecommunications Italy), whose combined turnover exceeds that of the leader. "We don't tell ourselves that," he stressed, "we have numbers that document our industrial strength".

The basic difference, explained Calarco, lies in the transition from the first to the second quantum revolution: no longer the manipulation of millions of electrons in a circuit, but of a single electron, a single atom, a single photon. Hence the applications that will change the face of security, sensors and medical diagnostics. Quantum cryptography, already adopted by banks and public institutions, guarantees inviolable communications: 'a quantum cannot be broken in half,' he summarised. If someone tries to intercept a single photon, tampering is detected immediately. On sensor technology, he mentioned the system developed in Leonardo labs that can 'see' through a wall using single photon detectors: a dual-use technology that raises ethical questions, but which, he noted, can also save lives in defensive scenarios.

Closing the circle was the speech by Diego Brasioli, central director for cyber diplomacy and technological innovation of the ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, who traced the face of diplomacy 4.0. "The human being is the only living being that has integrated technology into its evolutionary process," he began, recalling that the first written documents in history are Assyro-Babylonian diplomatic tablets. Today, he said, 'those who control standards and infrastructure actually wield power': artificial intelligence, cyber, quantum, space and data are now central to international relations, and diplomacy cannot stay out of it.

Hence the reform of the Farnesina that came into force on 1 January: a new Directorate General dedicated to cybersecurity, technological innovation and combating hybrid warfare, divided into two central directorates. The first protects strategic assets and the 305 Italian diplomatic offices around the world; the second, headed by Brasioli himself, oversees international negotiating tables, regulation and the internationalisation of Italian companies. In the wake of the first Danish Tech Ambassador sent to Silicon Valley in 2017, Italia opened the Innovit incubator in San Francisco two years ago, with a new foreign hub coming soon. Brasioli also claimed an educational paradigm shift: the diplomatic competition is now open to graduates in all disciplines, including Stem subjects. "The rigid division between STEM disciplines and the humanities is losing meaning," he emphasised. Today, more than ever, the diplomat's toolbox cannot lack technical skills and knowledge.