And the rich get richer.
See: How to Think About Companies: "Advantage Flywheels".
From Wired, May 18:
Quantum computers used to be an impossible dream. Now, after a decade of research by some of the world’s biggest tech companies, they’re on the verge of changing everything
On June 4, 2019, Sergio Boixo gathered his colleagues on Google’s quantum research team together for an urgent meeting. The group, split across two sites in southern California, had spent the better part of a decade trying to build a working quantum computer – a revolutionary type of device that works according to the laws of quantum mechanics.
For months, Google had been inching closer to a milestone known as quantum supremacy – the point at which a quantum computer can accomplish something beyond even the world’s best classical supercomputers. But there was a problem.Boixo, a tall Spaniard with a greying beard, had designed an experiment that was meant to be virtually impossible for a classical computer to solve, but easy for Google’s Sycamore quantum chip. The simulations looked good, and by the end of April 2019, Google seemed on the verge of achieving quantum supremacy. But then, on May 31, a parallel team inside Google discovered that the task was actually a million times easier for a classical computer than had been thought. Their quantum chip wasn’t going to be able to beat that. “I was panicking a little bit,” Boixo says. “But everyone was very understanding.”Seven months later, Boixo – smartly dressed in chinos and a pink sweater – is sitting on a picnic bench outside Google’s Santa Barbara lab, joking with his colleagues about the brief setback. Anthony Megrant, a quantum hardware engineer who fell into the field after a stint in the US army, had returned from paternity leave in early June to find the lab in a fluster. “I was like, really? I’ve been gone a week!” he laughs.The team went back to the drawing board, and by June 7 they had redesigned the task, which they programmed into the Sycamore quantum processor. The chip, no bigger than a thumbnail, sits at the bottom of a huge cryostat that keeps it chilled to a temperature colder than outer space. There are five of these inside the squat, beige building behind us. We walk past surfboards hanging on the wall and a group of men playing Super Smash Bros in a meeting room named after Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, to the fridges – suspended from the ceiling like chandeliers: gold-plated copper discs and intricate wiring narrow to a point inside nested canisters, each painted in one of Google’s corporate colours.Under the microscope, the Sycamore chip looks like any other – bewildering silver patterns on black. But on June 13 it achieved what had once been thought impossible. A Sycamore chip inside the green cryostat performed Boixo’s task – which would have taken the world-leading Summit supercomputer approximately 10,000 years – in three minutes and 20 seconds. When the news leaked in September 2019, it made global headlines and sparked huge controversy within the growing field. “There are people that literally think that the thing we did or the next steps are not possible,” says Megrant.
n May 6, 1981, Richard Feynman gave a lecture at Caltech, in Pasadena, about the challenge of simulating nature. Feynman was a leading voice in quantum mechanics – the study of the strange things that start to happen in physics when you get down to a really small scale. At the subatomic level, nature stops obeying the laws that we’re familiar with. Electrons and photons sometimes behave like waves, and sometimes like particles. Until they’re measured, they can even appear to be in both states simultaneously, or in two places at once – a phenomenon known as quantum superposition. Nature has uncertainty baked into its core.
Feynman was the first to realise the implications. If you want to accurately simulate physics, chemistry, or anything else both complex and minuscule, you need a simulation that can adhere to the same, probability-based laws of quantum mechanics.That’s a problem for classical computers. They work using bits – tiny switches that can either be in the on position, represented by a "1", or in the off position, represented by a "0". Every website you visit, video game you play and YouTube video you watch is ultimately represented by some combination of these ones and zeroes. But bits are black and white, either/or – they’re not very good at coding for uncertainty, and that means that some seemingly simple problems can become exponentially more difficult for normal computers to handle....
....MUCH MORE
Some of our prior posts on quantum computers.
There are quite a few.
And for more on the rich getting richer:
Flywheel Effect: Why Positive Feedback Loops are a Meta-Competitive Advantage
A Very Smart Look at Income Inequality: The Claremont Institute Book Review of "Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned its Back on the Middle Class"
"Facebook, Google And Amazon Wield Power Over Us All, And Everyone Should Be Worried" (AMZN; FB; GOOG)
HBR: Corporations in the Age of Inequality — Inequality isn’t just about individuals — it’s risen between companies, too.
"Why Do the Biggest Companies Keep Getting Bigger? It’s How They Spend on Tech"
The decline of US business dynamism and declining knowledge diffusion in the economy.
These incremental advantages add up.
As noted in the outro from a 2017 post:
...Much more important than the direct monetization of big data is the strategic advantage it can bestow over time.
In a winner-take-all economy, as in a horse race, small differences in superiority are rewarded all out of proportion to the actual advantage. A top thoroughbred may only be a couple fifths of a second faster than the field but those two lengths over the course of a season can mean triple the earnings for #1 vs. #2.
In commerce the results can be even more dramatic because rather than the 60%/20%/10% purse structure of the racetrack the winning vendor will often get 100% of a customer's business.Outro now intro. Here at Climateer Investing WE RECYCLE
(now outro!)
