Google and NASA have demonstrated that quantum computing isn’t just a fancy trick, but almost certainly something actually useful — and they’re already working on commercial applications. What does that mean for existing startups and businesses? Simply put: nothing. But that doesn’t mean you can ignore it forever.
There are three main points that anyone concerned with the possibility of quantum computing affecting their work should understand.
1. It’ll be a long time before anything really practical comes out of quantum computing.
Google showed that quantum computers are not only functional, but apparently scalable. But that doesn’t mean they’re scaling right now. And if they were, it doesn’t mean there’s anything useful you can do with them.
What makes quantum computing effective is that it’s completely different from classical computing — and that also makes creating the software and algorithms that run on it essentially a completely unexplored space.
There are theories, of course, and some elementary work on how to use these things to accomplish practical goals. But we are only just now arriving at the time when such theories can be tested at the most basic levels. The work that needs to happen isn’t so much “bringing to market” as “fundamental understanding.”
Although it’s tempting to equate the beginning of quantum computing to the beginning of digital computing, in reality they are very different. Classical computing, with its 1s and 0s and symbolic logic, actually maps readily on to human thought processes and ways of thinking about information — with a little abstraction, of course.
Quantum computing, on the other hand, is very different from how humans think about and interact with data. It doesn’t make intuitive sense, and not only because we haven’t developed the language for it. Our minds really just don’t work that way!
So although even I can now claim to have operated a quantum computer (technically true), there are remarkably few people in the world who can say they can do so deliberately in pursuit of a specific problem. That means progress will be slow (by tech industry standards) and very limited for years to come as the basics of this science are established and the ideas of code and data that we have held for decades are loosened.
2. Early applications will be incredibly domain-specific and not generalizable.
A common misunderstanding of quantum computing is that it amounts to extremely fast parallel processing. Now, if someone had invented a device that performed supercomputer-like operations faster than any actual supercomputer, that would be an entirely different development and, frankly, a much more useful one. But that isn’t the case.
As an engineer explained to me at Google’s lab, not only are quantum computers good at completely different things, they’re incredibly bad at the things classical computers do well. If you wanted to do arithmetical logic like addition and multiplication, it would be much better and faster to use an abacus.
Part of the excitement around quantum computing is learning which tasks a qubit-based system is actually good at. There are theories, but as mentioned before, they’re untested. It remains to be seen whether a given optimization problem or probability space navigation is really suitable for this type of computer at all.
What they are pretty sure about so far is that there are certain very specific tasks that quantum computers will trivialize — but it isn’t something general like “compression and decompression” or “sorting databases.” It’s things like evaluating a galaxy of molecules in all possible configurations and conformations to isolate high-probability interactions.
As you can imagine, that isn’t very useful for an enterprise security company. On the other hand, it could be utterly transformative for a pharmacology or materials company. Do you run one of those? Then in all likelihood, you are already investing in this kind of research and are well aware of the possibilities quantum brings to the table.
But the point is these applications will not only be very few in number, but difficult to conceptualize, prove, and execute. Unlike something like a machine learning agent, this isn’t a new approach that can easily be tested and iterated — it’s an entirely new discipline which people can only now truly begin to learn.
3. This is a new part of an existing ecosystem, not a completely isolated one.
Quantum computing is like machine learning, however, in that it is not a world unto itself. As we’ve learned over the last few years, ML and “AI” are tools with very specific use cases that build helpfully on areas where more traditional computing techniques are slow or laborious to create.
Your phone or smart speaker may bring ML to bear when it is analyzing your voice, but it sure doesn’t when it’s playing music or controlling the lights as you requested. In a similar fashion, quantum computing will fill a gap in traditional computing where certain problems just yield more easily to that technique.
You won’t sit down at your quantum laptop to do some work and then get up and sit down at your classical laptop to do something else. Leaving aside the fact that your quantum laptop would have to be operating near absolute zero, it’s just not made to do computing we think of as “normal.”
“The future is not about AI or quantum substituting classical computing,” explained IBM’s head of research, Dario Gil, when I spoke to him a few weeks ago. “The future is bits plus neurons plus qubits. It’s about all 3 — each has a very specific form of computing that takes advantage of their strength.”
Notably, IBM has been making its own quantum computers available for researchers to test on for some time now, and of course, is using a completely classical interface. Like everything else these days, you’ll access quantum computing rather than deploy it.
And like any other *aaS-type business, quantum won’t just be about the people who own the hardware, but about the people who add value between the hardware and the customer.
4. There will be quantum-related changes that don’t involve you using a quantum computer.
One of the few practical applications currently being explored is the generation of what appear to be truly random numbers as a side effect of quantum computing operations, and their use in encryption.
On the other hand, one of the potentially threatening applications currently being panicked about is the use of quantum computers to make current encryption algorithms obsolete.
What in the world are you, a small business owner or entrepreneur, supposed to do about it? The same thing you do when there are new developments in key generation or encryption algorithms at any other time — pretty much nothing.
Quantum computing is an enabling technology, and as noted before it is almost certain only to indirectly affect the work of most people in the foreseeable future. That’s not the same as having no effect.
What this requires of you is not that you learn the nitty gritty of qubits and trapped photons and Hilbert space, but that as before you simply remain aware and up-to-date of general developments, or hire someone who does. This is especially critical because there’s going to be a lot of snake oil out there.
5. There’s going to be a lot of quantum snake oil.
As soon as a transformative technology gains mainstream attention, bad actors and PR agencies immediately jump on the bandwagon.
Yet as we’ve seen, quantum-enabled services and algorithms are imminent. How can you tell the difference?
Here are a couple quick rules of thumb, which conveniently enough apply to other emerging technologies as well.
- If “quantum” is in the name, it’s probably snake oil. At this point, quantum computing is so young and strange, there isn’t time for a company to have built anything using it at all, let alone built the company or product around it.
- If “quantum” is the only differentiator, it’s probably snake oil. A lot of companies got a lot of mileage out of claiming their product was AI-powered, when really that could mean almost anything. An infinitesimal fraction of their product might have a tiny, inconsequential ML algorithm in it and they’d act like it was HAL 9000. If they can’t back up their claim with numbers, they don’t have a claim.
- If you don’t understand it, it’s probably snake oil. No one should have to understand quantum physics to be able to effectively choose a security provider. It’s the provider’s job to make the client understand what they do, how they do it, and why that matters. If they can’t communicate that to you, either they’re faking it or they’re no good at communication. Either way, you don’t want to do business with them.
Quantum computing is an exciting development for all industries… or rather, it will be eventually. In the meantime you should focus on ignoring the hype and acquiring intelligence as this new ecosystem develops.