📱 Why Quantum Technology Is the Future

Hartmut Neven, Vice President of Engineering at Google and founder of Google Quantum AI lab, recently spoke at TED Talks about the future of quantum technologies.

Key points

🔠 Quantum computing is the first technology that takes the idea seriously that we live in a multiverse. It can be seen as farming out computations to parallel universes.

🔠 Picture a search task by envisioning a very tall closet with a million drawers. I place an item in one of the drawers. How many drawers do you have to open to find the item? On average, it will be half a million, but if you had access to a quantum algorithm, it would only take 1,000 steps to find the item.

🔠 A quantum computer will be a gift to future generations, giving them a new tool to solve problems that today are unsolvable. For example, we made time crystals. Time crystals have amazing physical properties. They change periodically in time without ever exchanging energy with the environment. That's the closest to a perpetual mobile that the laws of physics allow you to get.
 
🔠 We can use quantum technology to learn about the physics of wormholes — space-time tunnels in black holes.

🔠 We are completing the design of a quantum algorithm that performs signal processing to enable new ways to detect and analyze molecules. Envision a device akin to an electronic nose in your phone or smartwatch. Wouldn't it be awesome if your phone could warn you that you step into a room with dangerous viruses? Or if your smartwatch could detect free radicals in your bloodstream or warn you of allergens in food?

🔠 A recent result is a novel algorithm that delivers significant speed up for optimization in engineering, finance, or machine learning. In the future, when an AI plays chess or Go against the quantum AI, the quantum AI will win.

🔠 Quantum information science may enable us to answer one of humanity's deepest questions: what creates conscious experience?

An attractive conjecture is that consciousness is how we experience the emergence of a single classical world out of the many the multiverse is composed of. If our conjecture is correct, this would allow us to expand human consciousness in space, time, and complexity.

▶️ To watch the talk
Viewing time: 12 minutes

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