The quantum disruption is coming
To understand where we are in this tale, consider Google’s recently announced breakthrough with the Willow chip. The critical takeaway here is that engineers have successfully built a quantum system that reduces errors as the number of qubits are scaled up. Error checking is essential in all computer systems but it’s especially so in quantum systems, where decoherence is always nipping at particles, threatening to cause them to lose their entanglement by interaction with the macro environment.
It’s also important to note that Willow scaled up to an array of 7×7 physical qubits. That’s still a pretty modest size, even though it does open up impressive capabilities. There will come a moment when quantum computing makes the leap from experimental projects to being a useful computing resource. It probably won’t be 2025, but the quantum disruption is coming. It is such an exploratory area of research that it’s hard to predict its impact.
On the philosophical side, you might wonder what quantum says about the nature of reality. Not only do quantum experiments point to something entirely different from causation as we know it, but it’s possible to build machines that utilize this characteristic. A quantum computer essentially takes an object while it’s in an unknown condition (framed by probabilities) and proposes a question to it. We then decipher the question to back to its known state, where it’s possible to derive useful data from that “trip into the unknown.”
