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Six experts are featured in a 13-minute video titled “ Quantum Ethics: A Call to Action,” which goes live Monday on YouTube and the Quantum Daily, a free online source for quantum computing news.

The goal of the video, which features a former quantum chief at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, is to kick off conversations with other quantum computing industry leaders about the ethical implications of the technology.

“Whenever we have a new computing power, there is potential for benefit of humanity, [but] you can imagine ways that it would also hurt people,” said John Martinis, professor of physics at University of California, Santa Barbara, and former chief scientist of quantum hardware at Google.

While quantum computers are still in their early stages, it is important to begin discussing the potential benefits and drawbacks of the technology and find a way to balance the two, he said. “You want to think ahead,” he said.

Dr. Martinis and others such as Ilana Wisby, chief executive of quantum computing company Oxford Quantum Circuits, and Nick Farina, founder and chief executive of quantum computing hardware company EeroQ Corp., are also featured in the short video.

Quantum computers have the potential to dramatically speed up drug and materials discovery as well as complex calculations related to finance. Companies such as Visa Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., Roche Holding AG and Volkswagen AG are all experimenting with early-stage quantum technology.

By harnessing quantum physics, quantum computers have the potential to sort through a vast number of possibilities in nearly real time and come up with a probable solution. While traditional computers store information as either zeros or ones, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, which represent and store information as both zeros and ones simultaneously.

A commercial-grade quantum computer hasn’t been built yet, but startups and tech giants including Google, Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. are racing to commercialize the technology.

“This is the equivalent of a whole new industrial revolution,” said llyas Khan, founder and chief executive of Cambridge Quantum Computing, which develops cybersecurity products, software and algorithms that companies can use when experimenting on early-stage quantum computers. That power, in the wrong hands, could also be used to create harmful materials or to manipulate the human genome in a harmful way, he said. “We ought to have those conversations today,” said Mr. Khan, who was also featured in the video.

Though it will likely take years to come up with ethical guidelines for quantum computers, Mr. Khan said he is beginning to speak with government officials in the U.K. about those ethical issues now. There may have been certain ethical controls on technologies such as social media and data privacy if conversations about ethics were had in the mid-1990s, he said. “We were asleep at the wheel,” said Mr. Khan.

Experts are already bracing themselves for some of quantum computing’s potential challenges. For example, financial services companies are preparing for a time when a powerful quantum computer could break some of the most widespread cryptographic methods currently used in cybersecurity. Hundreds of the world’s top cryptographers are involved in a competition to develop new encryption standards for the U.S. that would guard against both classical and quantum-computing cyberattacks.

Matt Swayne, an editor at the Quantum Daily who co-produced the short video along with Publisher and co-founder Evan Kubes, said he aims to create an advisory group of experts to discuss the topic of quantum ethics. The video is the first step, he said. “We want to raise concern but we don’t want to cause fear,” he said.

A series of bets on disruptive tech companies has allowed the New York firm’s inflows to soar

Ark Investment Management outgunned established Wall Street titans BlackRock and State Street last month, as the asset manager founded by a longstanding Tesla bull reaped the rewards of its bets on disruptive tech companies.

In a fevered market that is drawing comparisons with the internet boom of the late 1990s, Ark’s actively managed exchange traded funds have attracted $8.2bn this year, outstripping BlackRock’s iShares division and State Street’s ETF business, according to data from Morningstar. It was bettered only by Vanguard.

The performance in January caps a remarkable 12 months for New York-based Ark, cementing its position as one of the biggest winners in a stock market whose exuberance has jarred with the economic damage wrought by the pandemic.

Founded and run by Cathie Wood, a former investment officer at AllianceBernstein, Ark’s assets under management hit $46.7bn in January, according to Morningstar. Last year, they surged from $3.4bn to over $30bn.

Launched in 2014 with an investment strategy aimed at identifying “disruptive innovation”, Ark has ETFs focused on innovation, genomics, fintech, autonomous tech and the next generation internet.

Its flagship fund, the Innovation ETF, which is dominated by holdings in electric car maker Tesla, streaming company Roku and biotech Crispr Therapeutics, appreciated by 150 per cent last year. After climbing sharply earlier in January, Ark’s ETFs retreated in the past week.

The Innovation ETF has a gain of 10.4 per cent so far this year. With a weighting of more than 9 per cent, Tesla remains the fund’s largest holding.

“The ARK line-up of actively managed ETFs has delivered mind-bending returns and mind-bending flows from investors in recent months,” said Ben Johnson, director of global ETFs and passive strategies research at Morningstar. “Narratives sell at the end of the day.”

In contrast with much of the ETF universe, Ark actively manages its holdings, tilting its portfolios towards companies it believes can outperform the market. Rather than passively tracking an index, Ark functions more like an old-style mutual fund manager. It charges an expense ratio of 0.75 per cent. 

Analysts say the investment firm’s ability to tap into the market’s zeitgeist has been helped by regular videos from Ms Wood discussing market and economic trends, as well as webinars.

“Something interesting and different has happened with Ark,” compared with other actively managed ETFs, said David Nadig, chief investment officer at ETF Trends. Alongside taking “aggressively concentrated bets”, the firm is “very good at taking complex stories about companies and explaining them to investors,” he added.

However, Ark’s stunning record has drawn uncomfortable comparisons with a group of thematic funds that were popular as the dotcom boom reached a peak in the late 1990s. It has also set a high bar for the group’s future performance.

Ark’s Innovation ETF has, on an annualised basis, returned 45.47 per cent for the past five years, according to Mr Johnson at Morningstar. Between 1995 and 1999, only four funds produced higher returns than Ark. All fell sharply between 2000 and 2003, and eventually closed.

“History shows that the odds of expecting that success [of the past five years] being replicated in the next five years are infinitely small,” said Mr Johnson.

Working trips between the EU and UK will still be possible — but with more planning and paperwork

My last column on the thicket of new visa rules facing UK business travellers when they resume trips to the EU prompted three recurring questions from FT readers. How, if these visas are such a problem, have so many Americans and other non-EU nationals managed to travel to the EU on business? What do EU business travellers have to do to come to the UK? And what can employers and business travellers do to alleviate these restrictions?

The answer to the first question is that Americans and others have been travelling to the EU as “third-country nationals”, meaning they have to comply with each member state’s visa requirements. Post-Brexit, UK citizens are now outsiders too and must comply with the rules imposed on them. For unpaid visits to the EU, such as to attend a meeting or conference, they can spend 90 in every 180 days in the Schengen area without a visa.

To do paid work, they now generally need a visa, as well as complying with each country’s additional rules. In some cases, whichever EU company is paying them will have to demonstrate they can’t find an EU citizen to do the work. Like Americans, many Brits will no doubt find ways to comply with the new rules. It’s not impossible; it’s just a hassle that didn’t exist before.

On the second question, EU business travellers to the UK have to comply with Britain’s entry rules. That there are now travel restrictions in both directions is the result of British choices — to leave the EU and the single market — but the UK’s post-Brexit policy towards EU business travellers is slightly more welcoming than vice versa.

EU business travellers can come to the UK for unpaid meetings or conferences for six months. They can then leave and come back for another six months (no minimum time between visits is stipulated, though, as Lauren Pullen-Stanley, a lawyer at Norton Rose Fulbright, warns, anyone doing this too often may be turned back).

To do paid work in the UK, EU citizens can come for a month, visa free, for a few activities, such as giving a university lecture, providing legal advocacy or taking part in an entertainment or sporting event. For other business activities they need a visa and a certificate of sponsorship from the company they are working for, and can stay for up to 12 months. For those EU citizens who have come to the UK to do paid work in the past, Gülçin Kashano, an immigration lawyer at Clifford Chance, advises looking at whether they qualify to be “frontier workers”, which will give them a renewable permit of up to five years to continue coming to the UK.

Can anything be done to make business UK-EU travel easier? There is little political support in the UK. Keir Starmer, the Labour opposition leader, is not advocating a return to freedom of movement. Two EU law professors say the UK should try to conclude bilateral agreements with individual EU countries to ease movement. Dimitry Kochenov of Groningen university and Alberto Alemanno of HEC Paris, say that, just as the UK and Ireland have agreed free movement between their countries, the UK could do the same with, for example, the Netherlands. The European Commission would object but has no legal power to intervene.

In the meantime, business travel between the EU and UK will resume post-Covid. It’s just that it will now require the advice of lawyers and HR departments, the filling in of application forms, and proof of hotel bookings, return tickets and funds to support yourself — whereas before it just involved throwing some clothes in a bag and bringing your passport.