Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything

by Kelly Weinersmith

So, writing this chapter we found ourselves in the position of trying to explain how an inanimate sequence of on and off switches can run a video game or play a song or operate an eerily human-seeming chatbot (really, it’s weird, isn’t it?), while also explaining all sorts of quantum oddities, like generalized rules of probability involving negative and even complex numbers. We had this tortured explanation about building a Schrödinger’s cat setup, then daisy-chaining it to more Schrödinger’s cats, where if cat A was alive cat B was dead, unless cat C . . . you know . . . et cetera. After writing about two thirds of the chapter, it was already far longer than the others, and that was before we added what we optimistically call “humor.” Thus, unlike Schrödinger’s cat, this chapter definitely became dead. The shame of it is that we absolutely fell in love with this field of study. When quantum computing is publicly discussed, it’s mostly because a quantum computer could crack the most common method of digital data encryption. Quantum computing has other applications, like certain forms of database searching or calculating the behavior of atomic-scale objects, which would be very important for research science.

“So, writing this chapter we found ourselves in the position of trying to explain how an inanimate sequence of on and off switches can run a video game or play a song or operate an eerily human-seeming chatbot (really, it’s weird, isn’t it?), while also explaining all sorts of quantum oddities, like generalized rules of probability involving negative and even complex numbers. We had this tortured explanation about building a Schrödinger’s cat setup, then daisy-chaining it to more Schrödinger’s cats, where if cat A was alive cat B was dead, unless cat C . . . you know . . . et cetera. After writing about two thirds of the chapter, it was already far longer than the others, and that was before we added what we optimistically call “humor.” Thus, unlike Schrödinger’s cat, this chapter definitely became dead. The shame of it is that we absolutely fell in love with this field of study. When quantum computing is publicly discussed, it’s mostly because a quantum computer could crack the most common method of digital data encryption. Quantum computing has other applications, like certain forms of database searching or calculating the behavior of atomic-scale objects, which would be very important for research science.” Reference Weinersmith, Kelly, & Zach Weinersmith (2017, Oct. 7). “Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything.” Kindle Edition. Chapter 12 Conclusion, Grave 4: Quantum Computing, pp. 329-330 of 358, 81%.