Well, it seems the AI bubble’s nearing its end - the Financial Times has reported a recent dive in tech stocks, the mass media has fully soured on AI, and there’s murmurs that the hucksters are pivoting to quantum.
By my guess, this quantum bubble is going to fail to get off the ground - as I see it, the AI bubble has heavily crippled the tech industry’s ability to create or sustain new bubbles, for two main reasons.
No Social License
For the 2000s and much of the 2010s, tech enjoyed a robust social license to operate - even if they weren’t loved per se (e.g. Apple), they were still pretty widely accepted throughout society, and resistance to them was pretty much nonexistent.
Whilst it was starting to fall apart with the “techlash” of the 2020s, the AI bubble has taken what social license tech has had left and put it through the shredder.
Environmental catastrophe, art theft and plagiarism, destruction of livelihoods and corporate abuse, misinformation and enabling fascism, all of this (and so much more) has eviscerated acceptance of the tech industry as it currently stands, inspiring widespread resistance and revulsion against AI, and the tech industry at large.
For the quantum bubble, I expect it will face similar resistance/mockery right out of the gate, with the wider public refusing to entertain whatever spurious claims the hucksters make, and fighting any attempts by the hucksters to force quantum into their lives.
(For a more specific prediction, quantum’s alleged encryption-breaking abilities will likely inspire backlash, being taken as evidence the hucksters are fighting against Internet privacy.)
No Hypergrowth Markets
As Baldur Bjarnason has noted about tech industry valuations:
“Over the past few decades, tech companies have been priced based on their unprecedented massive year-on-year growth that has kept relatively steady through crises and bubble pops. As the thinking goes, if you have two companies—one tech, one not—with the same earnings, the tech company should have a higher value because its earnings are likely to grow faster than the not-tech company. In a regular year, the growth has been much faster.”
For a while, this has held - even as the hypergrowth markets dried up and tech rapidly enshittified near the end of the ‘10s, the gravy train has managed to keep rolling for tech.
That gravy train is set to slam right into a brick wall, however - between the obscenely high costs of both building and running LLMs (both upfront and ongoing), and the virtually nonexistent revenues those LLMs have provided (except for NVidia, who has made a killing in the shovel selling business), the AI bubble has burned billions upon billions of dollars on a product which is practically incapable of making a profit, and heavily embrittled the entire economy in the process.
Once the bubble finally bursts, it’ll gut the wider economy and much of the tech industry, savaging evaluations across the board and killing off tech’s hypergrowth story in the process.
For the quantum bubble, this will significantly complicate attempts to raise investor/venture capital, as the finance industry comes to view tech not as an easy and endless source of growth, but as either a mature, stable industry which won’t provide the runaway returns they’re looking for, or as an absolute money pit of an industry, one trapped deep in a malaise era and capable only of wiping out whatever money you put into it.
(As a quick addendum, it's my 25th birthday tomorrow - I finished this over the course of four hours and planned to release it tomorrow, but decided to post it tonight.)
Which tech stocks? Google ($GOOG, $GOOGL) is up over 5% YTD; Netflix ($NFLX) is up over 30% YTD! Your link mentions Palantir and ARM, but I don't see any signs of their respective businesses (selling database software to authoritarians, selling microchip designs) slacking off. I think that it's more useful to think of the current AI summer as driven by OpenAI and nVidia specifically. Note that nVidia ($NVDA) is up 30% YTD too. The bubble is still inflating and is not yet bursting; the pop will be much quicker than you expect.
I think that you ought to figure out whether you're a quantum-computing denier. Folks have been saying that quantum computing is impossible since the 70s, implausible since the 80s, lacking applications since the 90s, too energy-intensive since the 2000s, and requiring too many exotic materials since the 2010s. This decade, it's not clear what the complaint is. I'm not sure what you're imagining in terms of real-life intrusion, but IBM has been selling access to their quantum computers and simulators for several years now and I don't think that you've substantiated any evidence of harms.
(An anti-IBM argument will not work due to a very specific analogy: the reason that we have ubiquitous Linux today is because IBM was its biggest corporate booster, fighting an important series of court cases and plastering pro-Linux advertisements which vaguely argued that Linux was the buzzword of the future. IBM spray-painted "Peace, Love, Linux" graffiti on San Francisco sidewalks in 2001.)
It is true that we know only two useful algorithms for quantum computers. One is a generic speedup for any search and the other is a prime-factoring algorithm that happens to break certain specific encryption algorithms. Given that it is an open question whether cryptography works in the first place, though, we don't have any better plan than to avoid those broken algorithms. The entirety of post-quantum cryptography is about moving away from those specific algorithms which are broken, not about using quantum computers to perform encryption. Fortunately, the post-quantum movement has been active ever since Shor's algorithm was discovered, beginning work in the late 90s, and the main obstacle has been our inability to discover provably-good cryptographic primitives. It is crucial to understand that we cryptographers know that progress in maths and engineering will obsolete our algorithms; we know that the Internet only stays secure because people update their computers every few decades.
I'm not asking you to understand P vs NP vs BQP. I'm not asking you to know KS, PBR, Hardy's or Holevo's theorems, or even Bell's theorem. You didn't make any technical claims other than the common-yet-sneerable skepticism of Shor's algorithm, easily cured by a short video by e.g. minutephysics or Veritasium. But I am asking you to be aware of the history before making historical claims.
(Also, if any motherfucker starts repeating 't Hooft anti-quantum arguments then they're going to get the book thrown at them.)
Unrelated to the topic at hand, but I read the article and now I’m curious if you could point to any good replies. From my understanding, the issue of interpretation is still not definitively solved, and attempts to reduce QM down to classical physics have been going on at least since Einstein.
The issue of interpretation is wildly unresolved. Scratch any question in "quantum foundations", and you end up in the territory of debates like whether mathematics is invented or discovered. Lovely fuel for online discussion threads, but by the same token, also exactly the kind of thing that many physicists try to ignore whenever possible. Even so, there are views that are very hard to argue for. The implication of Bell's theorem (and a host of related results: Gleason, Kochen--Specker, ...) is that you can't find a consistent layer beneath quantum mechanics, not without something like a conspiracy of hidden causes propagating backwards in time. In other words, the hidden layer you postulate has to look baroquely nonclassical itself in order to be consistent with the real experimental data. 't Hooft occupies a position way out on the fringe, one that many people (including me) would say amounts to giving up on science and declaring that everything happens the way it does because Amon-Ra wills it.
Superdeterminism is literally just the idea that humans should be understood as quantum mechanical systems as well and thus should also be subjected to quantum mechanical laws. If those laws guarantee that the evolution of physical systems is such that certain correlations are always maintained, it then follows that a human should not be able to make the choice to break those correlations as they, too, are bound by physical laws, whereas the "free will" axiom states that we should assume humans are capable of making decisions that are statistically independent of any physical laws.
There is no good argument against the idea that human decisions should be considered to be dependent upon physical laws other than vague metaphysical arguments about how it is somehow the "end of science" and trying to perform huge mental gymnastics to equate it to a religious belief. None of these arguments are even relevant. Even if I were to concede entirely that somehow including the human experimenter within the physical description of the system would be an inconvenience for science... so? Do we just believe things that are convenient for us? That is not an argument.
It is sort of like Christians who try to use philosophy to "prove" God exists. That's just not how it works. Metaphysics never gets you to physics. You cannot demonstrate something is true about physical reality with a strong enough metaphysical argument. You need empirical evidence. If we are to rule out possibilities regarding the natural world, that would be because we have mathematical models which are empirically verified that disallow that possibility, not because of some vague metaphysical argument about how it wouldn't be convenient for us if it were true.
Any attempt to use metaphysics to make definite claims about what is or is not physically real is just entirely mistaken from the get-go.
Einstein also made the same exact argument but not against superdeterminism but against "spooky action." If two particles at a distance have no "awareness" of each other, then by mathematical necessity their behavior would have to be statistically independent of one another, and so entanglement would be impossible, but we know it's possible, the random values they take on are statistically dependent upon one another. If this is not due to a local signal, then it necessarily has to be nonlocal. Throwing out hidden variables doesn't get you out of this; the two particles at a distance have to be "aware" of each other nonlocally.
Einstein had also stated that nonlocality would be the end of science because the scientific method is driven by the ability to isolate phenomena, yet nonlocal phenomena is by necessity not isolatable. He also saw as essential to the scientific method that two statistically independent things do not become dependent upon one another unless it is through local interactions.
Anyone can make the argument that "X point of view destroys all of science." I mean, take the multiverse belief. If a medication has a 75% chance of curing people and 25% of failing, and nobody knows why, do you consider it "scientific" to just assert that maybe the universe splits into a vast multiverse where 75% of the branches the person is cured and 25% of the branches they are not whenever someone takes the medication? "But it's the simplest explanation: the branching is right there in the mathematics!"
That obviously is quite diametrically opposed to how we typically conceive of the scientific method, and we can give such an "answer" to any mystery. Yet, supposedly I am supposed to take that kind of "answer" more seriously than just suggesting that humans are quantum mechanical systems too?
None of these kinds of arguments are particularly convincing, but we can make one from all sides. Anyone who supports any interpretation can argue that the assumptions being abandoned in the other interpretations are a detriment to the scientific method.
No, that's not what superdeterminism is. You are importing a whole lot of baggage about what it means to understand things "as quantum mechanical systems". You are also making the same mistake that Tim Maudlin does about the implications of Bell inequality violations. He thinks that the EPR criterion of reality is "analytically" true, and he's wrong. Since you have recommended Maudlin elsewhere on Lemmy (as well as promulgating the myth that a singular "Copenhagen interpretation" exists), I'm going to do something else than try conversing with you further.
You are correct, I'm just thinking they are going to push quantum like the next big thing to drive up stock prices/investments and use it to restart the hopes for AGI. (the LLM method didn't work, lets talk about quantum and hope that will eventually give us something to latch more capabilities, hope and stock hype on). Just to put my own comment into perspective.
the key problem is they're selling Facebook and showing the investors a few broken vacuum tubes
you know that a VC tech bubble doesn't require the tech to be anything, it's just the excuse for a bubble party
extremely little of this has anything to do with a technology, six paras of ranting about "quantum deniers" notwithstanding
We literally have a generic speedup for any search. On one hand, details of Grover's algorithm suggest that NP isn't contained in BQP, so we won't be solving the entirety of maths with it. On the other hand, literally any decidable mathematical question for which you would have had to search for years for a witness, Grover can search for in days, as long as you have enough qubits. I don't claim that this is attractive to the typical consumer, but there will be supercomputing customers who are interested.
Who is "they", specifically? Neither of you actually want to talk about who's in this space for some reason. It's IBM and Google. It's incumbents that have been engineering for about two decades. It's the maturation of a half-century-old research programme. Your problem isn't with quantum computers, it's with Silicon Valley and the funding model and the revolving door at Stanford, and there's no amount of quantum research you can cancel which will cause Silicon Valley to stop existing. This site is
awful.systems, notawful.tech.BTW the top reply right now starts with "even if quantum computing isn't snake oil..." No evidence. For some reason y'all think that it's more important to be emotional and memetic than to understand the topic at hand, and it has a predictable effect on our discourse, turning thoughtful regular posters into reactionaries. What are you going to do when bullshitters start claiming that quantum computers can do anything, that they do multiple things at once, that they traverse infinite dimensions, that they can terraform the planet and bring enlightenment? You're gonna repeat paragraph 3 of 5 above, the one that starts, "it is true that we know only two useful algorithms for quantum computers," because that's where the facts start.
Also, I think that you don't understand my ultimate goal. I'm trying to push the most promising writer on the site into doing more research and thinking more deeply about history. Quantum mechanics happens to be a crank-filled field and that has caused many of y'all to write as if all quantum research is crankery. They write, "alleged encryption-breaking abilities," and you're irritated that I'm "ranting" because "extremely little of this has anything to do with a technology," while I'm irritated precisely because you think that this is a technology-neutral position and not literally part of why the TLS suite has to be upgraded occasionally.
I didn't get a message like "all quantum research is crankery" from the original post.
I think if you were trying to convince anyone to do things you'd approach it more convincingly.
Even if quantum computing isn't snake oil, I have a hard time seeing how pushing it can be as large a market as social media. Web3/NFTs and LLMs are riding on that particular bizmodel coattail. Investors can see "oh yeah 200M monthly subscribers for ChatGPT" and map that to FB and come up with numbers that translate to VC money. I fail to see how quantum fits into that
Quantum computers are close to doing real useful work better than classical computers, but even then, it's not like most people or companies do enough work that's reliant on NP problems for it to be helpful to do BQP problems faster even if BQP is most or all of NP. Quantum computers will be an industrial tool rather than a household appliance, like an electron microscope. They'll end up used in places we won't expect, but most people will never be in the same room as one.
As far as encryption goes, things based on primes are already being phased out and will be gone before anyone can have their secrets stolen by Shor's Algorithm. The things replacing primes have been chosen because they're about the same difficulty for classical computers, but are expected to be less vulnerable to future algorithms that give quantum advantage. The cybersecurity industry sees quantum computers as a real threat, so proactively developed countermeasures. It'll mainly be historical stolen data that's never been broken that ends up at risk.
interested in details, and an actual claim for closeness
Quantum is very real, it’s not a bubble at the core. The good stuff isn’t being talked about because of national security.
Yeah it's all being developed in area 51, trust me bro
You're the second person I've seen this week asserting this without any evidence. That tells me that if a bubble like OP is talking about does develop, then superficial links to government labs on the part of company founders will be a big driver of it.
In the netherlands we had a big cybersecurity grifter (who was invited onto talkshows while anybody with actual cybersecurity exp/knowledge went 'wtf is she talking about' it was really bizarre), who also claimed all her stuff was being done secretly and she wasn't allowed to talk about it so think of that when people claim these secret national security claims. (And remember talking about you having a secret which you aren't allowed to reveal is revealing something, so if people say this about quantum they are already a bit sus).
Who said that I won’t talk about it, they cracked all encryption, there ya go. Don’t believe it? You’re not paying attention then.
Oh yeah, upgrade to quantum resistant algorithms now.
User has been escorted to the egress.
That was a masterclass of missing my point. If they dont talk about it for natsec reasons they will not talk about it at all, not even hint. Because the hinting leaks the metadata. Leave the other side in unknown unknown. Pretty basic stuff tbh.