The need is high... for bad people doing bad things to everyone else (trying to de-secure the world)?
There's some hypothetical travelling salesperson style questions we might ask. But we don't seem incapable of doing this work today. 98% the needs seem like: can we break the world's crypto. How is this anything beyond a chaotic evil mis-use? How will this do anything but de-secure & instigate risk across the planet?
At least when 99.5% of the engineers were working on ads, they were just wasting their time doing amoral shit. This seems actively immoral.
I really struggle to understand what this all is good for. There probably are some valid & good uses. But it's all hyper-abstract, with little grounding. The attempt to hipster-ize the facilities, to make the physical systems themselves look cool, to present an impressive front: it all works counter to the very essence that made computing cool for so much of my growing-up period: computing in my era was personal. It empowered people. I don't see how this will help actual people at all. It seems mostly like a big hard problem for which the winner reaps some eventual explotative spoils. At likely cost to general world order & peace. Hiss boo.
The advent of SPICE [1] meant that with the right models electrical engineers could simulate complex electrical systems, do sensitivity analysis and make integrated circuits that had a high probability of working.
Imagine a (quantum) simulator that can rapidly simulate all or part of the human body. The effects of medicines could be rapidly simulated, or the simulation could guide the design of treatments. Eventually, if the simulation becomes as accurate as SPICE can be today, it would be possible to go directly from the design of a treatment to its administration, secure in the knowledge that it is unlikely to cause problems.
Why do you believe a quantum computer can actually solve that problem? The whole point of the article is that quantum computers are not and can never be general-purpose computers. And something with as many inputs as "simulate the human body" seems like the exact opposite of what you can encode in qubits, evolve as a state vector, and usefully read out.
Because at the lowest level quantum mechanics is at work. My feeling is that a full simulation will be a hybrid system. The lowest "microscopic" levels will be done on a quantum computer, but the higher "macroscopic" levels, where decoherence kicks in, will be done on a classical computer. Maybe the future of quantum computers is as co-processors to classical computers?
The point is that for these sort of simulations you don't want a general purpose computer. Ideally you have a "equivalent" of the quantum mechanical Hamiltonian that you can manipulate/design and read effects out from. Now to simulate the human body probably requires a prohibitively large number of qubits, however for many very useful things you don't need that.
So my actual knowledge of quantum computing is mostly limited to what I remember from seminars in (physics) grad school, and from listening to my classmates who were actually doing quantum computing research complain about why things weren't working... but this side comment [0] is totally on the money with what I remember. I don't believe we will ever be able to run quantum simulations of interestingly-sized things, though that is certainly an opinion rather than a statement of fact and has a good chance of being inaccurate.
However, any way you look at it, "[quantum] simulating the human body" is complete batshit science wingnut nonsense (though I tried to be diplomatic about it above). There isn't even any way to measure the input state there! It's ill-defined, it's subject to measurement uncertainty, it's just plain chaotic. As an actual former scientist, it would help my blood pressure if science wingnuts who do not understand the first thing about what they're talking about could please stay quiet.
> I really struggle to understand what this all is good for.
Defence?
If your secrets (or more likely, your nation's secrets) might be exposed by a quantum attack, then you'd better understand how such an attack might work, so you can defend against it. Nations (some) do research into chemical/biological weapons to learn how to defend against them (purportedly).
That's a "devil's advocate" answer. I lean to the view that, for very big secrets, it's better not to have a secret at all. At least, don't have secrets that need to be kept long-term. That sounds glib and handwavy, and it is; but most secrets seem to get out, sooner rather than later, and usually not as a result of someone cracking the cryptography.
The need is to understand quantum systems and advance our understanding of theoretical computer science.
We do not dissuade particle physicists from performing physics because some bad people want atomic bombs; We do not dissuade Archimedes from doing his thing, for the fear of better siege engines;
Breaking a coin's crypto doesn't sound all that amoral to me. People holding those coins have specifically chosen to put their financial faith in tech, instead of society (which they are arguably undermining).
A have less respect for those hacking the minds of the general public.
There's some hypothetical travelling salesperson style questions we might ask. But we don't seem incapable of doing this work today. 98% the needs seem like: can we break the world's crypto. How is this anything beyond a chaotic evil mis-use? How will this do anything but de-secure & instigate risk across the planet?
At least when 99.5% of the engineers were working on ads, they were just wasting their time doing amoral shit. This seems actively immoral.
I really struggle to understand what this all is good for. There probably are some valid & good uses. But it's all hyper-abstract, with little grounding. The attempt to hipster-ize the facilities, to make the physical systems themselves look cool, to present an impressive front: it all works counter to the very essence that made computing cool for so much of my growing-up period: computing in my era was personal. It empowered people. I don't see how this will help actual people at all. It seems mostly like a big hard problem for which the winner reaps some eventual explotative spoils. At likely cost to general world order & peace. Hiss boo.