Quantum Futures

It's been a while since we saw "Wegman Reading Two Books". This is one of my favorite pictures ever; I thought it made sense here.

I'm reading about quantum computers on the commute home from work. It's not the computers I'm interested in, and it's not the quantum part either. I'm not a computer scientist, or a quantum scientist. But I do like to think about the future, and if anything says "future", it's quantum computers.

There's a strong theme running in these articles though, the kind of thing I look for in articles about technology. In this case, the problem with quantum computing is that it works so differently from a classical computer, that we kind of don't even know what to do with it.

When tasked with devising a test to evaluate the performance of a quantum computer, a moment is revealed:

"I quickly ran into trouble trying to figure out how to run these [scripts] on the D-Wave machine. You need a huge shift in the way you think about problems, and I am a very straightforward thinker."
-Chris Lee for Ars Technica, 2019

It's a casual statement in a casual popular science article, but it's the unassuming bits like this that may be revealed as prescient in years to come. Like in 1890, "Why the heck would you want to screw anything else besides a lightbulb into this electrical light bulb socket??"
It's true, stuff like washing machines would be plugged into the 'light socket' via a cord designed specifically for a light socket; the dual-pronged plug that we are used to, in the US at least, didn't come until much later, and required a drastic paradigm shift in order to see electricity as serving anything but electric light.

Back to quantum computers. Things like this, when the technology forces us to reshape not only our thinking and not only the answers, but more importantly the questions that we ask, and the way we ask, and then ultimately the things we want and the things we care about, are what Kuhn was writing about in his Structures of Scientific Revolution.

Notes:
D-Wave 2000Q hands-on - Steep learning curve for quantum computing
Mar 2019, Ars Technica

Post Script:
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas Kuhn, 1962

Science does not progress via linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called "paradigm shifts" in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed.

Thomas Kuhn - the man who changed the way the world looked at science
John Naughton, The Guardian, 2012