We are at a turning point in our history, and if we do not act today, it may be too late. President Armen Sarkissian delivered a speech at the University of Bologna

The President of the Republic of Armenia Armen Sarkissian, who is in Italy on a state visit, delivered a speech at the University of Bologna, presenting the main theses of his new book on the quantum world.

"I hope one day, I will be able to come back here to give a scientific lecture to present my theory, and to have a discussion with scientists. This is the preface to the book we have just finished with my son Hayk.

The preface is called "Introducing a Quantum World."

A new world order is taking shape today, but not in the way we all think. Many geopolitical events are taking place to catalyze the repositioning of the chess pieces on the chessboard of geopolitics. These changes lead to new outbreaks of major regional conflicts, establishing a new era of conflicts in trade, cyberspace, and technology, and generating more instability in the international rules-based, post-World War II system.

Unfortunately, one of those recent conflicts, which had tragic consequences, was between my country and Azerbaijan.

The world has become hyper-connected through the internet and smart devices, technology is evolving at a rapid pace, far beyond any regulation or any state oversight. It is much quicker than any state can manage them.

Information has reached a point, where fact and fiction have become extremely subjective, and the way people interact has changed. Our institutions and states have become entirely different compared to the previous century.

What does all this mean?

This fast-changing political and social landscape is something humans have not experienced before. It is the harbinger of a new era. An era of quantum politics. How do these two very distinct concepts of politics and quantum theory overlap with each other to explain where our world and international system is heading today?

In the early 2000s, it became clear that the world was not only becoming more globalized and connected, it also became more sensitive, as small localized events were gaining increasingly asymmetric outcomes due to the changes and changing ways in the interaction of business, politics, and social constructs.

In some cases, they were merging with each other: business, politics, and entertainment, and in other cases, they were creating some new areas merging also with other fields, such as entertainment and gaming.

A big part of politics and political debates has become part of daily entertainment as well. So, people are waiting for daily "episodes" from the series 2021.

I began speaking about this phenomenon in the early 2000s at the World Economic Forum and other platforms, as something I termed then as quantum politics, to explain how politics and politicians will no longer behave or be as before, as they have been in the past, and the same will happen with the businesses and other activities of the humans as well. At the beginning of each talk, I would make sure that the audience would understand what the term quantum politics (or a quantum world) means. It explains how our concepts and relationships have drastically changed, because of how we interact and communicate with each other and with our institutions. Therefore, the term quantum used here should be read both as a metaphor and as an actual change taking place in our real lives. We are rapidly evolving from using only classical mechanics for centuries to using more and more quantum mechanics as the basis of our new technologies, communication systems, and ways of interaction as a global species. Yet it wasn’t until the 2020 pandemic that forced us to change our own frameworks (whether we wanted to do it or not): how we behave, how we live, and how we have to design our institutions. The pandemic has forced us to rethink how we live. A lot of politicians and scientists are speaking about the new era that the pandemic has started. I do believe that pandemic is not a reason. Pandemic is just a consequence of the changed world, because if it would have happened thirty or forty years ago, it would never have the same scale, drama and tragedy. It has this scale, and drama and tragedy because the world has changed dramatically. Crises are always an opportunity as well, an opportunity to see the world differently and make big changes, which may have been impossible before the crises. Thus, the pandemic forced us to revise and to rethink.

Crises are always an opportunity to see the world differently. The humans have always been a species evolving at an unnatural pace. The technologies we developed are part of our evolutionary story. We have our evolution, but we also develop technologies, which are becoming part of our evolution and influence it. We cannot help noting that there are two parallel evolutions: evolution of technologies and evolution of humans. The technologies we created have also had an immense impact on our evolution, and vice-versa.

This also answers a significant question: who exactly have we become? How have the things we have created shaped not just our lifestyles but also our core properties as a human race? Our education, economy, society, and politics shape these qualities.

How have we achieved so much progress in the last two hundred years? And why do we feel like we have more problems now than ever before? This is the feeling that a lot of us live with. How and what have we learned from generations? How do nations and states communicate with each other? How have our social priorities changed in understanding what is acceptable and what is not? This also answers many other questions. Questions that we all ask ourselves and each other every day. Why do we feel like jumping from one crisis to another without a moment to breathe? Why does everything seem to be happening at an accelerated pace and at unexpected moments? Why is it so hard to plan anything beyond one year in our life or in our business? Why are politicians so unreliable and becoming more extreme or sometimes more populist? Why are we having more division in our societies than ever before?

In quantum physics, the questions have always been more important than the answers, as each answer is the path to new questions. So, the most significant thing is to ask a question and then think about the answer. For a better understanding of the world, being ‘quantum’ helps us improve our lives further or solve today’s complex problems more effectively. We are at a turning point in our history, and if we do not act now, it may become too late to solve these problems or grasp the benefits we are seeing more efficiently.

Yet, there is something fundamental holding us back, which could derail our beautiful story of human progress that has taken place over the last two centuries, and especially over the last thirty years. Humanity has never been so effectively interconnected, and global information has never been so accessible. This makes today’s situation unique in our history, and critical for making decisions and understanding. Our increasing progress and problems in social, political and economic spheres, locally and globally, stem from the fact that we are living in a world exponentially influenced by the properties of quantum mechanics, whilst our perspectives, institutions and belief systems are still organized and managed in accordance with classical (Newtonian) mechanics or classical life.

It is the time to change. It is the time for questions and answers."