this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2024
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Because quantum physics. A qubit isn't 0 or 1, it's both and everything in between. You get a result as a distribution, not as distinct values.
Qubits are represented as (for example) quantumly entangled electron spins. And due to the nature of quantum physics, they are not very stable, and you cannot measure a value without influencing it.
Granted, my knowledge of quantum computing is very hand-wavy.
Which, to me, kinda defeats the whole purpose. I'm yet to wrap my head around this whole quantum thing.
It's important to how they operate. The idea is that when you measure the value, it collapses into the right answer.
I do get that, yes it's more complicated than I can fully wrap my brain around as well. But it also starts to beg the question, how many billions of dollars does it take to reinvent the abacus?
Again, I realize there's a bit of a stark difference between the technologies, but when does the pursuit of over-complicated technology stop being worth it?
Shit, look at how much energy these AI datacenters consume, enough to power a city or more. Look at how much money is getting pumped into these projects..
Ask the AI how to deal with the energy crisis, I'll only believe it's actually intelligent when it answers "Shut me and all the other AI datacenters off, and recycle our parts for actual useful purposes."
Blowing billions on quantum computing ain't helping feed, clothe and house the homeless...
Contrarian much, you have multiple answers for exactly the answer you asked for.
As a species, the one thing that defines us is the pursuit of technology to overcome our natural physical ability. We are currently hitting a wall in regard to electron based computing.
I think you're confusing technology with politics to the point you're just making a point unrelated to the topic.
All tech raises the standard if that's then used by people to horde resources and have an unbalance in quality of life that's a policy issue not one of the technology.
What a sad view of humanity to think that our one defining characteristic should be pursuit of technology rather than the ability to intelligently collaborate and thereby form communities with a shared purpose.
I can assure you that the success of human survival throughout the history of our species has had far more to do with community and resourcefulness than with technological advancement. In fact it should be clear by now technological advancement devoid of communal spirit will be the very thing that brings an untimely end to our entire species. Our technology is destroying the climate we depend on and depleting the soil that we need for growing food, to say nothing of the nuclear bombs that could wipe us out with the wrong individuals in positions of power.
You've kind of whiffed what I said, at no point did I talk about tech over all else like some kind of Adeptus Mechanicus :D
My take here is that our grasp of tech is what allowed us to surpass other animals. Again, looking at "technology" in some really shallow one dimensional way. There are tons of environmental and communal benefits we've gained through our technological pursuits, the sad view is maybe thinking all tech things are bad and viewing that part of our world only in its moral inferiorities. Our domestication of fire being a prime example of a technology benefitting our social and communal enrichment.
Good job moving the conversation further away from the post
I'm directing my criticism specifically on the technological advancement which is devoid of communal spirit, not on all technological advancement categorically.
Crediting human achievement to technological advancement is a mistake in my opinion. Technological advancement is not inherently good or bad. Communal spirit is what determines whether technology yields positive or negative outcomes. That's the real ingredient behind everything humans have achieved throughout history.
Sadly techno-optimism has become a prevailing mindset in today's world where people and institutions don't want to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions because of belief that as-yet-unknown technological advancement will bail us out in the future, even when there's no evidence that it will even be physically possible.
But what I said is that your view is a sad one, not an incorrect one. The truth is, technological advancement may truly end up being the defining characteristic of humanity. After all, when we think about extinct species, we tend to associate them most strongly with what made them extinct. Just as we associate the dinosaurs most strongly with a meteor, maybe an outside observer will some day associate humanity most strongly with the technology that sent us out in a blaze of glory.
The Voyager 1 is still (mostly) ticking after almost 50 years with basically ancient technology by today's standards, and it's been through the hell of deep space, radiation and shit all that time.
What's wrong with old technology if it still works? I don't care what all magical computations a quantum computer can do, a mere hour of data retention just sounds pathetic in comparison.
You know we're going to lose contact with V1 this decade, and as of last year the data stopped making sense? Which tied into my criticism of your other comment, we're getting close (in the grand scheme) to how small we can make a transistor so we just make clusters of electron based compute models each running its own resources or do we invest in finding a better more efficient way?
Yes, I'm aware. ~50 years is a little over ~438,000 hours of service time, with no ability to even perform physical hands on maintenance.
How is a pathetic one hour memory of any sort somehow progress? By the time it cures cancer or whatever, the data is still that much more likely to be corrupt by the time they check it and try to save it.
1 hour < 438,290 hours
I tend to agree with this. It's why I've become less and less interested in the advancement of technology and more interested in ways to use the tech we have to build community.
Thank you, at least someone gets the gist of what I mean 👍
Your problem is capitalism, not QC.
"AI" as it stands now is unrelated to quantum computing
No, they both very much share something in common. Money and resources, that could otherwise be invested in trying to actually fix the world's problems.
What are they gonna do with a quantum computer, cure cancer? Then by the time the scientists get to check out the results, the results done got corrupted because of pathetic memory integrity, and it somehow managed to create a new type of cancer with the corrupted results..
Well yes, quite possibly, through protein behavior modeling. Do some reading !
https://builtin.com/hardware/quantum-computing-applications
Ya know, as much hype as there has been for the idea of quantum computing, I haven't even so much as seen a snippet of source code for it to even say Hello World.
Even if that's not exactly what these machines are meant for, seriously, where's even a snippet of code for people to even get a clue how (and if) they even work as they're hyped to be?
Nobody sees what they don't look for. This is seven seconds of using duckduckgo with the following query : "what does code for a quantum computer look like?"
https://medium.com/rigetti/how-to-write-a-quantum-program-in-10-lines-of-code-for-beginners-540224ac6b45
https://github.com/Qiskit
https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/9381/what-would-a-very-simple-quantum-program-look-like
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517340#sec-3
I don't pretend to understand this, as I'm not a computer scientist, even less so a quantum scientist. Quite honestly, if you allow me a bit of criticism, I think you're interacting with this whole topic in bad faith. Moving goalposts, obviously not doing any kind of documentation effort before criticizing an entire field of research, claiming that development efforts should go towards some vaguely defined "fixing the world problems"...
Your first link is paywalled, fuck that.
Pulling a serious comment from your third link only reinforces practically everything I've been getting at..
"The problem of showing a 'hello world' of quantum computing is that we're basically still as far from quantum computers as Leibnitz or Babbage were from your current computer. While we know how they should operate theoretically, there is no standard way of actually building a physical quantum computer. A side-effect of that is that there is no single programming model of quantum computing. Textbooks such as Nielsen et al. will show you a 'quantum circuit' diagram, but those are far from formal programming languages: they get a little 'hand-waving' on the details such as classical control or dealing with input/output/measurement results."
Yea, fuck paywalls, except there isn't one here. Not sure what you're on about.
See, this is an example of the bad faith I mentioned above : cherrypicking examples that suit your preconceived ideas, ignoring the truckload of examples, frameworks and code snippets (which you asked for) I provided with a brief search on a free search engine. You have shown no will to communicate in good faith, so I am ending my interaction with you here. Just for the record, this is disrespectful of my time, as well as yours.
Okay, you have a good day too.
I'm not about to create an account with miscellaneous sites that require my email.
But this is not just any abacus, it's one that calculates all the results at once. That is a disruptive leap forward in computing power.
The computers we have today help to do logistics to "feed, clothe and house the homeless". They also help you to advocate to do more. How much of that would be comprehensible to someone living in 1900?
I'm not sure that homelessness is a problem quantum computing or AI are suitable for. However, AI has already contributed in helping to solve protein folding problems that are critical in modern medicine.
Solving homelessness and many other problems isn't resource constrained as you think. It's more about the will to solve them, and who profits from leaving them unsolved. We have known for decades that providing homes for the homeless in a large city actually saves the city money, but we're still not doing it. Renewable energy has been cheaper than fossil fuels for almost as long. Medicare for all would cost significantly less than the US private healthcare system, and would lead to better results, but we aren't doing that either.