The Quantum Age and You

The Future is Awesome:

The Quantum Age and You

by Joe Redmond

Your computer is out-dated. No matter how hard you try, your tech will never keep up with ever-changing—and improving—world of computers. In the 1940’s, a computer was someone who did your taxes with a slide rule. Now, it’s the single most revolutionary piece of anything anywhere. There isn’t one aspect of life that the information age has not impacted (save possibly government).

The computer changed stock trading, the classroom, social interaction, the space industry, global culture—the list goes on. Computers provide a place to communicate efficiently, organize logically, and spread ideas to the masses. That’s a revolution.

What if I told you that it isn’t over? What happens when the “digital age” goes down in the history books as nothing more than a transitional period? There’s something more on the horizon, ladies and gentlemen. Something faster. Something a little more confusing.

Traditional digital technology relies on what tech geeks have come to call “Moore’s law,” essentially stating that computer processing power will double every year and a half. What that translates to is this: if your computer is three years old, then the latest computers are four times faster. Except, this isn’t really a “law” as we might understand from science class. “Moore’s law” simply expresses how some guy at Intel expected computers to improve back in 1965. Companies have followed this claim because it’s convenient for predicting where the industry will be in a few years down the road—in essence, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Also, calling something a law is much cooler than calling it a “general guideline,” apparently.

But what happens when silicon, the basis for microprocessors and what makes your computer work, can’t get any smaller? What happens when the size of a chip becomes constrained by the very size of its atoms? That would mean that the digital computer can’t ever get any faster and more powerful without getting bigger, too. Moore’s law has a definite limit as long as we stick with silicon computers because of the way they’re structured.

Digital computers rely on “bits,” or 1’s and 0’s, corresponding to “on” or “off.” Therefore, in order to represent a number or word, digital computers have to rely on strings of 1’s and 0’s. Quantum computers, in theory, would not be restrained to such a simplistic and relatively inefficient view of information. These “qubits” (quantum bits) could be a 1, a 0, or anything in between. Quantum data could be “on,” “off,” or “sorta-on/off, depending on how you look at it.”

So, what does this mean? The human brain is different than contemporary computers in a few ways, the most prevalent being that humans can think about and do multiple things at once. Digital computers, however, are generally constrained to doing one task at a time, dividing up its power between buffering your video, playing your music, displaying your video chat, and uploading your photo to Facebook. That’s what makes it slow down. However, quantum computers will be able do all of that at once, without even breaking a sweat.

The most technically demanding processes we can devise for computers nowadays—playing beautiful video games, downloading large files, or even graphing multi-variable calculus—would be a synch for the computers of tomorrow. Like the human brain, quantum computers will be able to think about many things at once. Some humans possess the remarkable ability to juggle apples while singing (awesome), unlike your computer, which would juggle the apples, and then sing. The computer you’ll get in 20 years, however, would juggle apples, sing, teach you how to juggle apples and sing, all while making your coffee.

Crude example aside, quantum computers actually have the ability to revolutionize the world yet again into what I’m calling the “Quantum Age.” Cars will be able to talk to each other on the fly, avoiding crashes, while driving themselves via GPS. Halo 10 could have hundreds of players facing each other in a single round. Each gene could be hand-picked in newborn babies to ensure a generation of geniuses—or a generation of Coca Cola lovers.

There are still a few obstacles in the way of making commercial quantum computers, namely our understanding of quantum physics. Suffice it to say that we needed a way to measure quantum states, and now we pretty much have it, thanks to some dudes in Switzerland. (For more, look up Nobel Prize in Physics 2012, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

In the future, information will move even faster. Parents will become even more technologically illiterate. Your computer will become even smarter, probably smarter than you. In the Quantum Age, the best computers will be more powerful than anything we can concoct today. But more importantly, in the Quantum Age, your computer will still be out-dated.

The future is awesome.