Now, both Google and D-Wave, a Canadian company, have made some significant progress in bringing quantum computing to life. D-Wave has a commercial quantum computer but it’s not a universal quantum computer. It’s suitable for solving certain kinds of computational problems around optimization. That’s the limit of its capabilities. Will there be a coming revolution in computing power? Will quantum computers one day replace our silicone-based computing devices? That’s some of the stuff that I think would be interesting to explore today, Dirk.

Google is in the process of building this so-called universal quantum computer that it hopes will usher in a new era and making this technology not just lab and research-based but moving out of the labs and into the commercial sphere. What’s exciting is that Google’s universal quantum computer could be revealed or be finished as early as the end of next year, 2017. We’re really waiting with baited breath to see if Google can pull this off. D-Wave, which is this Canadian company that has a quantum computer. Although, as I said earlier, not of the universal kind, is already selling their computers to researchers and to companies like Lockheed Martin. Even if it doesn’t happen in 2017, this is definitely where the future of computing is looking.

What’s really startling is how this technology might intersect with the technologies that we talk about all the time on the show. If you can imagine artificial intelligence and machine learning accelerated by quantum computing. We’re talking about jumps of millions of times. Which means that the advances will happen all that much more quickly. Talk about the genomics research that we discuss all the time, that being accelerated millions of times. I think it’s really in this intersection of quantum computing and some of the other areas of research and technology where this becomes exceptionally powerful. Your thoughts on that, Dirk?

Quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity are basically competing theories to explain all of this stuff. All of the stuff that makes Newtonian mechanics no longer viable or correct. To this day, they both appear to be true and correct and it appears that they should not be able to co-exist with each other. From a theoretical perspective.

There’s this interesting overlay of the world that we’re very familiar with this strange quantum mechanical world and with quantum computing, we’re finding that we can take advantage of the rule sets that govern quantum mechanics without fully understanding or, at least, for the average person not fully understanding what the implications are of these computers. Suffice it say, that’s probably true of the silicone-based computing that we have today. We understand the basics of how it works but by no means do we, at least for myself, understand the depths of the science.

Nonetheless, Moore’s Law, which has dictated the pace of computing and the way in which our technologies have advanced over the past several decades, is now likely to encounter with quantum computing … I don’t know if there’s going to be a corollary to Moore’s Law for quantum computing where, as opposed to doubling in power every eighteen months, all of a sudden this amount of computing power increases a million-fold. I don’t think that we can truly appreciate the numbers. A million times as fast, that is something that I have trouble grasping.

The implications for something like Artificial Intelligence which, fundamentally based on learning systems. All of a sudden, computers are going to be able to learn a million times faster? This is by no means happening tomorrow, of course, but what does that mean? What does that mean for any of the trends that we’re seeing? All the way down to societal acceptance of this kind of rapid innovation. I don’t know, but the fact remains, we’re potentially eighteen months out from a universal quantum computer. Which means that, frankly, we’re sitting right on the edge of what might be one of the more fantastic scientific breakthroughs of this, or any, century.

Beyond that, a lot of it is just theoretical. Which is to say that the potential power of quantum computers is so superior to what we’re accustomed to today. I think a lot of the things are things that will just surprise us and be often, probably, unintended consequences of the better technology.

It does make you think about those initial rockets that went to the moon and how the space program has progressed since then. Seeing this as an early-stage rocket that is going to have a lot of excellent results down the road and may, in fact, enable us to do things that we can only dream of today. I’ll say this, your call that Google was overtaking a lot of its technological competitors and it was really the most exciting tech company today, I think has proven out to be correct. I’m sure Google has been heading down this path for a long time. Just with this particular set of news, really solidifies, for me, that Google or Alphabet, I guess they are now, is really the private company to watch in the tech space.

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