NorthWestWindWhat will the next bubble be?
jordanlundQuantum bubble, next after AI.
WormFoodThe UK govt announced £162m in cuts to research council funding last month, then this month they announced £2bn for a massive quantum computing project. I’m all for blue sky research but the field is basically a giant money pit. £2bn would have bought multiple general purpose supercomputers that could have been used for biology, materials science, astrophysics etc. The quantum computing research is inevitably going to yield a quantum processor with less than 1kb of memory that can only run for a few nanoseconds. The government is disproportionately funding this stuff because of the siren song promise that quantum computing will help them break encryption, but the field has taken so long to materialise anything useful that we now have quantum-resistant classical encryption algorithms. Also, plenty of physicists are now skeptical of the idea that quantum computers will be intrinsically faster than classical computers for most tasks.
Also, plenty of physicists are now skeptical of the idea that quantum computers will be intrinsically faster than classical computers for most tasks.
Tbh, this isn’t really that new of an idea. Quantum computing requires temperatures less than 3 Kelvin. It doesn’t matter how efficient your processor is, getting anything down to that temperature requires a lot of cooling equipment, so much that it’s utterly impractical for general use.
It’s kinda like analogue computing, aka comuting with analogue signals instead of digital. You’re able to solve problems extremely fast, on par with (if not superior to) quantum computing. The downside is that the circuits have to be custom designed for the use case, making it impractical for most tasks.