I have a PHD on computational quantum chemistry (ie, using conventional computers to simulate quantum systems). In my opinion quantum technologies are unlikely to be a worthy cause area. I have not researched everything in depth so I can only give my impressions here from conversations with colleagues in the area.
First, I think the idea of quantum computers having any effect on WMD’s in the near future seems dodgy to me. Even if practical quantum computers are built, they are still likely to be incredibly expensive for a long time to come. People seem unsure about how useful quantum algorithms will actually be for material science simulations. We can build approximations to compounds that run fine on classical computers, and even if quantum computers opens up more approximations, you’re still going to have to check in with real experiments. You are also operating in an idealised realm: you can model the compounds, yes, but if you want to investigate, say, it’s effect on humans, you need to model the human body as well, which is an entirely different beast.
The next point is that even if this does work in the future, why not put the money to investigate it then, rather than now, before it’s been proven to work? We will have a ton of advance warning if quantum computers can actually be used for practical purposes, because they will start off really bad and develop over time.
From what I’ve heard, theres a lot of skepticism about near-term quantum computing anyway, with a common sentiment among my colleagues being that it’s overhyped and due for a crash.
I’m also a little put off by lumping in quantum computing with quantum sensing and so on: Only quantum computing would have an actually transformative effect on anything if actually realised, with the others being just a slightly better way of doing things we can already do.
Thanks for sharing this! I agree with some of the things namely
effect on WMDs in the near future dodgy
Scepticism about near-term quantum computing: I worked on NISQ algorithms (basically near-term quantum computing—Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum) for a little bit, and agree with your impression that there have been negative results, with quite a bit of pessimism in the community about near-term prospects (and maybe a “quantum winter”, a hype correction like you mentioned). It’s why I didn’t include quantum machine learning and cautioned about “quantum jobs”. However, on the other side of the spectrum, my impression is that some people are really positive on recent hardware progress and advancement with error correction (towards fault-tolerant quantum computing). On this side, I have talked to someone who believes there could be some kind of GPT-moment in the next decade when a “killer app” is demonstrated. Would be curious to hear your thoughts on this.
I tried to stress the early state of the technology and large uncertainty, but your comment makes me realize that I should have front-loaded more heavily that nearly all the things I mentioned are long-term concerns.
On the “why now rather than later”, I partly disagree:
Once (if ever) dangerous applications are around the corner, we will also have economically meaningful applications at least equally close. I think that would make it much harder to put in place guardrails.
I am not sure we will have a lot of advance warning (although I agree that most likely we will): I read a good commentary which agrees with you, but I think it neglects that some approaches to quantum computing (e.g. photonics) could face very different scaling challenges than those currently dominant (i.e. superconducting). (There is a DARPA project “Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing” which looked at this.)
I think for the bifurcation/great power competition part (which I personally think deserves most attention), there is a strong case that action now would be most effective in addressing them. I will put up a separate post on this.
In the case of cryptography the need to act is clearly now (see the section in appendix), although I do agree with you that a lot of actors are already incentivized to do so (even though I personally believe more should be done).
Finally, on the “lumping”, it is motivated by the possible future of quantum networking for distributed quantum sensing and interconnecting quantum computers with quantum sensors. Maybe I should have made more explicit in the post that right now, quantum sensors are, as you said, just a slightly better way of doing things we can already do.
I have a PHD on computational quantum chemistry (ie, using conventional computers to simulate quantum systems). In my opinion quantum technologies are unlikely to be a worthy cause area. I have not researched everything in depth so I can only give my impressions here from conversations with colleagues in the area.
First, I think the idea of quantum computers having any effect on WMD’s in the near future seems dodgy to me. Even if practical quantum computers are built, they are still likely to be incredibly expensive for a long time to come. People seem unsure about how useful quantum algorithms will actually be for material science simulations. We can build approximations to compounds that run fine on classical computers, and even if quantum computers opens up more approximations, you’re still going to have to check in with real experiments. You are also operating in an idealised realm: you can model the compounds, yes, but if you want to investigate, say, it’s effect on humans, you need to model the human body as well, which is an entirely different beast.
The next point is that even if this does work in the future, why not put the money to investigate it then, rather than now, before it’s been proven to work? We will have a ton of advance warning if quantum computers can actually be used for practical purposes, because they will start off really bad and develop over time.
From what I’ve heard, theres a lot of skepticism about near-term quantum computing anyway, with a common sentiment among my colleagues being that it’s overhyped and due for a crash.
I’m also a little put off by lumping in quantum computing with quantum sensing and so on: Only quantum computing would have an actually transformative effect on anything if actually realised, with the others being just a slightly better way of doing things we can already do.
Thanks for sharing this! I agree with some of the things namely
effect on WMDs in the near future dodgy
Scepticism about near-term quantum computing: I worked on NISQ algorithms (basically near-term quantum computing—Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum) for a little bit, and agree with your impression that there have been negative results, with quite a bit of pessimism in the community about near-term prospects (and maybe a “quantum winter”, a hype correction like you mentioned). It’s why I didn’t include quantum machine learning and cautioned about “quantum jobs”. However, on the other side of the spectrum, my impression is that some people are really positive on recent hardware progress and advancement with error correction (towards fault-tolerant quantum computing). On this side, I have talked to someone who believes there could be some kind of GPT-moment in the next decade when a “killer app” is demonstrated. Would be curious to hear your thoughts on this.
I tried to stress the early state of the technology and large uncertainty, but your comment makes me realize that I should have front-loaded more heavily that nearly all the things I mentioned are long-term concerns.
On the “why now rather than later”, I partly disagree:
Once (if ever) dangerous applications are around the corner, we will also have economically meaningful applications at least equally close. I think that would make it much harder to put in place guardrails.
I am not sure we will have a lot of advance warning (although I agree that most likely we will): I read a good commentary which agrees with you, but I think it neglects that some approaches to quantum computing (e.g. photonics) could face very different scaling challenges than those currently dominant (i.e. superconducting). (There is a DARPA project “Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing” which looked at this.)
I think for the bifurcation/great power competition part (which I personally think deserves most attention), there is a strong case that action now would be most effective in addressing them. I will put up a separate post on this.
In the case of cryptography the need to act is clearly now (see the section in appendix), although I do agree with you that a lot of actors are already incentivized to do so (even though I personally believe more should be done).
Finally, on the “lumping”, it is motivated by the possible future of quantum networking for distributed quantum sensing and interconnecting quantum computers with quantum sensors. Maybe I should have made more explicit in the post that right now, quantum sensors are, as you said, just a slightly better way of doing things we can already do.