It can be tech-related or not. So far we’ve had the .com bubble, Bitcoin bubble, NFT bubble and now AI (probably) bubble. What do you think the next bubble will be?
It can be tech-related or not. So far we’ve had the .com bubble, Bitcoin bubble, NFT bubble and now AI (probably) bubble. What do you think the next bubble will be?
Quantum bubble, next after AI.
Yeah no doubt. It can be pitched as solving all the world’s problems immediately, and fear mongered as “breaking all security instantly”. There’s no defined end product yet, so the goalposts can move.
Like AI, it can be a test of the debt market more than of tech
It can be marketed that way, but mathematically, a LOT of encryption that’s used is already “quantum proof”.
https://signal.org/blog/spqr/
Of course nothing is perfect, but we’re pretty confident that the existence of quantum computers won’t break the internet.
Oh yeah, to be clear, it’ll break incredibly old and weak encryption, which is already not that hard to break.
I think quantum will have some cool specific use cases in science and math modeling, but will be over hyped like the AI bubble as a total game changer.
The UK govt announced £162m in cuts to research council funding last month, then this month they announced £2bn for a massive quantum computing project. I’m all for blue sky research but the field is basically a giant money pit. £2bn would have bought multiple general purpose supercomputers that could have been used for biology, materials science, astrophysics etc. The quantum computing research is inevitably going to yield a quantum processor with less than 1kb of memory that can only run for a few nanoseconds. The government is disproportionately funding this stuff because of the siren song promise that quantum computing will help them break encryption, but the field has taken so long to materialise anything useful that we now have quantum-resistant classical encryption algorithms. Also, plenty of physicists are now skeptical of the idea that quantum computers will be intrinsically faster than classical computers for most tasks.
Tbh, this isn’t really that new of an idea. Quantum computing requires temperatures less than 3 Kelvin. It doesn’t matter how efficient your processor is, getting anything down to that temperature requires a lot of cooling equipment, so much that it’s utterly impractical for general use.
It’s kinda like analogue computing, aka comuting with analogue signals instead of digital. You’re able to solve problems extremely fast, on par with (if not superior to) quantum computing. The downside is that the circuits have to be custom designed for the use case, making it impractical for most tasks.
At the time people thought that you might build new supercomputers with an on-site cryostat (or something like that) housing a bunch of QPUs.