Prof. Mauritz Kop Teaches Quantum-ELSPI Overview to TUM Students with Urs Gasser and Fabienne Marco

By our Editor

Munich, Germany – On August 24, 2026, Mauritz Kop taught an overview session on the Quantum-ELSPI framework for students at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), together with Urs Gasser, Rector of the Hochschule für Politik München and Dean of the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology, and Fabienne Marco, Head of the Quantum Social Lab at the TUM Think Tank. The session's teaching materials gave the students a working map of the ethical, legal, socio-economic, and policy implications of quantum technology, and of the governance tools that turn those implications into daily practice for regulators, standards bodies, and industry.

Mauritz Kop Teaches Quantum-ELSPI Overview to TUM Students with Urs Gasser and Fabienne Marco

Three Munich Encounters: the Festival of Ideas 2023, the International Quantum Forum 2025, and the 2026 Teaching Session

The teaching session continues a collaboration that took shape in November 2023, when the inaugural Festival of Ideas at TUM's Science & Study Center at Raitenhaslach Monastery convened scholars, technologists, and policymakers to sketch a new operating system for society in the age of generative AI and quantum computing. Gasser moderated the closing session on quantum, AI, and immersive technology use cases; Kop contributed a World Café input statement and a live quantum-art demonstration that made fractal geometry and quantum concepts audible and visible. In January 2025, the International Quantum Forum at TUM — organized by the Quantum Social Lab under Marco's direction, with Gasser as Principal Investigator — hosted Kop's keynote on responsible quantum governance during the UN International Year of Quantum Science and Technology.

The three educators also share published ground. Gasser and Kop co-authored, with Eline de Jong, "A call for responsible quantum technology" in Nature Physics, which carries the interdisciplinary agenda the TUM students now study into the physics community itself. Teaching that agenda to the next generation follows a pattern Kop set earlier at Stanford, where he taught the Quantum Computing Association students at Stanford Electrical Engineering. Sessions like these serve the goal Kop argued for at Raitenhaslach: a double-educated quantum workforce, fluent in the physics of the technology and in its governance.

What the Quantum-ELSPI Framework Covers: Four Pillars for Quantum Technology Governance

The Quantum-ELSPI framework, co-developed by Kop and philosopher Luciano Floridi, structures the study of quantum technology around four pillars: Ethical, Legal, Socio-economic, and Policy Implications. It extends the ELSA model (Ethical, Legal, and Social Aspects) that guided earlier technology waves, because the physics of quantum systems raises questions that the older lens leaves out of frame. The framework works on two levels at once. Normatively, it guides the responsible design and deployment of quantum systems. Descriptively, it sets an interdisciplinary research agenda that scholars across Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and TUM pursue together, with the foundational papers preserved in the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology collection at the Stanford Law Library.

The socio-economic pillar received emphasis the students will recognize from the labor market they are entering. Quantum technology arrives amid a winner-takes-all dynamic in the broader tech economy, sharpened by artificial intelligence, and the framework treats the distribution of quantum's benefits as a design question for policy, education, and industrial strategy — a question to answer while market structures are still forming, on the way to broadly shared prosperity and abundance.

Why Quantum Technology Needs Its Own Governance: Dual-Use Capabilities, Harvest-Now-Decrypt-Later, and Fragile Supply Chains

The session set out the three systemic risks that set quantum apart. The first is the dual-use dilemma: the same advances in quantum simulation, sensing, and computing that accelerate drug discovery also sharpen military capability, so every export-control and research-security decision cuts both ways. The second risk follows directly from the physics. A sufficiently large fault-tolerant quantum computer running Shor's algorithm factors the large integers behind RSA and solves the discrete logarithms behind elliptic-curve cryptography, which means an adversary can copy encrypted traffic now and read it years later once the hardware matures. That harvest-now-decrypt-later threat starts the migration clock today, while the decrypting machine remains hypothetical: NIST's finalized post-quantum cryptography standards are deployable now, and quantum cryptography adds physics-based protection for the links that warrant it.

The third risk sits in the industrial base. Quantum supply chains concentrate in a small set of rare materials, cryogenic systems, and photonic components, and a single failing node can stall an entire national program. The teaching materials introduce the Quantum Criticality Index, which scores supply-chain nodes on their vulnerability horizon, their substitutability, and their systemic bottleneck risk, so that industrial policy targets the dependencies that genuinely matter.

From Metaparadigm to Practice: RQT Principles, Quantum Impact Assessments, and the LSI Test

Quantum-ELSPI forms the foundation of Responsible Quantum Technology (RQT), which joins the four pillars to the dimensions of Responsible Research and Innovation: anticipation, inclusion, reflection, and responsiveness. The ten principles for responsible quantum innovation, published in IOP's Quantum Science and Technology, give that foundation its operational form. On top of the principles sit the working tools of the curriculum: Quantum Impact Assessments, dual-use controls and compliance audits, technical standards, and certification metrics.

Two analytical instruments anchor the practice layer. The LSI test asks whether a security measure is least-trade-restrictive, security-sufficient, and innovation-preserving at the same time — closing real military capability gaps while keeping allied markets open and the research ecosystem breathing. And Kop's legislative blueprint "Towards a European Quantum Act", published by Columbia Law School, shows what the framework looks like in statute form: agile product regulation balanced with industrial policy and supply-chain security.

Anticipatory Stewardship: Acting on Known Quantum Risks Before Commercial Lock-In

A central lesson in the materials concerns timing. With the internet and with artificial intelligence, society let the technology proliferate, waited for harm, and legislated after the fact. Quantum technology offers the chance to reverse that sequence: identify the harvest-now-decrypt-later threat today, deploy standardized post-quantum cryptography now, and embed democratic values and human rights into system architecture while designs remain malleable. The session materials place this anticipatory governance posture in the emerging global landscape, sketched in three deliberately broad strokes — a market-first United States, a regulation-first European Union, and a more state-directed Asia-Pacific — and ask where shared interoperability standards can still prevent a quantum splinternet.

Mapping Quantum Use Cases with the Students: Medicine, Defense, Finance, Automotive, Logistics, and Cleantech

The teaching notes end in an assignment of method for the students: map quantum use cases sector by sector — medicine, defense, finance, automotive, logistics, cleantech — and build sector-specific governance on top of the horizontal principles for responsible quantum innovation. The societally beneficial use cases gathered during the UN International Year of Quantum Science and Technology offer a natural starting point for that mapping, from quantum sensing in early diagnostics to optimization in clean energy grids.

Kop's message to the students doubles as a message to policymakers and practitioners: those who understand where quantum technology is heading — scholars, elected officials, advisors, inventors, and investors — carry the responsibility to steer it toward broadly shared prosperity, and the governance tools to do so exist today.

Last updated: August 31, 2026