Bulletins and News Discussion from September 9th to September 15th, 2024 - Viva Sandino! - COTW: Nicaragua

That was a funny response because shortly before the debate there was a Hexbear post about a report that compared China's rate of technological progress to the US's and found that the US was behind China in all technologies but two. Guess which ones? Someone on Kamala's team must have also seen it.

I tried to find the post but I'm not sure where it went.

To preface this, I'm not an expert in it, it's not my particular field, but I do have a bit background than most in adjacent stuff. I'm not by any means up to date in the literature on this though.

Quantum computing isn't a dead end I'd say. While the mixture of the word quantum, long term hype, and lack of big results does tend to ping that "fraud" part of the brain, there is solid scientific basis for it, and there has been small scale systems built for them. The big caveat to that is that they aren't really useful at the moment, and scaling it up will be a challenge.

In a lot of ways it's similar to fusion in that sense. It's vaporware in the sense that it's continually being hyped and still little apparent progress is being made, but it is something that I do think will be achieved some day. That day might be quite a ways in the future, but progress is being continually chipped away at here. Also, for both cases, a lot of the big challenges is in engineering. This isn't like string theory or supersymmetry, where the underlying foundations are sorta uncertain. This is solid science at the core. The question is just of course how to scale it up to a meaningful and useful level, which tends to be slow and very incremental research.

Also like fusion, I think it's something that will be continued to be researched, simply because the potential gains are massive should it succeed. A quantum computer isn't just like a faster CPU. Fundamentally quantum computation allows you to calculate problems that non-quantum computers can't, because the physics of calculation is so different. One basic example is Shor's algorithm. It's an algorithm, a set of calculation instructions basically, that would let you trivially crack one of the biggest encryption setups we currently use. This is an case that sounds bad lol, but it's a relatively easy to see example of how it opens up new computing spaces, some for more positive applications. Most of these applications will likely be less focused on end user aspects. It's not so much about making a fancy GPU for video games, and more about heavy scientific computation.

Capitalists are inevitably going to hype this up however, in the same ways they do stuff like machine learning (which also has good aspects and applications separate from the capitalist swill, but I'm digressing), because it appeals to several easy things. It's a tech solution that the average person knows almost nothing about beyond vague hype, it could hypothetically be used in ways to make the line go up harder, and the potential promise of it lends to fearmongering. If we don't do X or Y, maybe China will crack it. If we don't fund the tech billionaires, the enemy could crack super AI's etc. It's all the same bullshit.

Which is both ironic and unfortunate, aside from the obvious imperialist aspects, because stuff like Quantum Computing and Fusion are never going to reach the results people dream up without international cooperation. They are inherently big and hard problems, not the sort of thing one genius can solve. These big things that could fundamentally better humanity require humanity to work together to achieve them.

I don't know about vaporware, but it's going to take a lot longer than 4 years before I expect to see anything groundbreaking out of it.

Funding QC research in the near term is going to be spent on things like materials science and engineering imo, which could have many use cases outside QC even if QC itself never pans out.

I think the MIC wants more money for aircraft research and that she's trying to sell it as a non-militarized thing.

oh damn, that "reliant... on the technology improving at an unrealistic pace".... not to give too much info on myself, but i have a background of research in aerospace in the West. The amount of academic cope that exists around hypersonic rockets and commercial supersonic jets is astounding, and it feels exactly like that. Every article about how close we are just says "we just need materials to maintain the exact benefits of current ones and be 60% lighter, then we are there, so we are basically already there". I wrote one of those papers with that conclusion and just felt like I was just lying for the credit, then everyone was excited like it mattered at all lol

I think this is just a super broad phenomenon when it comes to slowed research held back by other fields. But I also dont think western capitalist countries have many methods to get around this except for secret and centralized organisations, but those have dwindled to almost not existing in the context of scientific and technological creation

It's a smokescreen, we can't credibly claim to have a stronger or healthier industrial base or social system, all we can do is pretend we're ahead in imaginary tech arms races.

It’s not yet clear QC is even really possible.

There exist toys that prove it works in concept but it’s proving extremely difficult to scale these up to actually meaningful systems.

My understanding is that the core of the issue is the collapse of the wave function. QC works by exploiting quantum uncertainty and if the state collapses then the computation is over (or something like this, I’m not a physicist or QC expert.)

And the problem they’re facing is how to make systems that are much larger and therefore capable of computing more, but the larger a system is the sooner it will collapse.

It could be that it’s simply impossible or uneconomically difficult to make systems large enough to actually be of use and value.

Maybe this is a solveable problem, maybe it’s actually not. But QC is in the same bucket as cold fusion as a technology that would be extremely useful and we have reasons to believe it might be possible to actually do based on theory but it’s proving impossible to implement in practice.

Remembering when Trudeau managed two sentences on QC and everyone sucked him off for being a learned himbo.

Beyond curiosities/threats like breaking cryptographic protocols or solving long-running mathematical puzzles, is there an actual use-case for quantum computing which current computing can't reasonably do? Especially given how resource-intensive it is compared to current computing.

Not that I think a definite purpose is required for these kinds of technologies to be worthy of pursuit, I'm just wondering if this is actually as critical as people like Harris are implying; if there's some short or medium-term goal that quantum computing is needed for. Could countries that don't develop quantum computing for years after the first couple advanced countries get it still do relatively well and not be left in the dust?