On Qubits and Such

Johnny Clack

HRL Laboratories, LLC, has published the first demonstration of universal control of encoded spin qubits. This newly emerging approach to quantum computation uses a novel silicon-based qubit device architecture, fabricated in HRL’s Malibu cleanroom, to trap single electrons in quantum dots. Spins of three such single electrons host energy-degenerate qubit states, which are controlled by nearest-neighbor contact interactions that partially swap spin states with those of their neighbors… and the configurable insensitivity of the encoding to certain error sources combine to offer a strong pathway toward scalable fault tolerance and computational advantage, major steps toward a commercial quantum computer. (First demonstration of universal control of encoded spin qubits (Phys.org)) 

(Full disclosure: I do not know what the hell I’m talking about.) 

Standard computing at its most basic level consists of bits, which can only exist in a state of on or off. The Off position has a numerical value of 0; the ON position has a numerical value of 1. That is all a damn computer does; endlessly flip switches on and off. These bits are clustered in a series of eight bits, called bytes. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is. Each byte is assigned a value and … well, blah blah blah. Get a pencil and write down every possible combination of 0s and 1s in an 8-bit byte between 00000000 and 11111111. Go ahead, I’ll wait. 

Back already? I know, it hurts.  

But what is a qubit? A qubit can exist simultaneously in both states of 0 and 1 and it spins. And it is degenerate too (see above). I know, your headache is now a migraine. Skipping over the incomprehensible subatomic physics stuff, the takeaway is the use of qubits can vastly expand computational power over traditional on/off switch computing. This is called quantum computing and is based on Quantum Mechanics (itself another mindfuck).  

But it is tricky business getting quantum computing to work right. The article above posits that the discovery (whatever it is, do not ask me) by HRL Laboratories LLC is a major step to solving the mystery and making quantum computers commercially viable. In my lifetime, computing has gone from the massive EINIAC computer taking up a whole floor and operating on vacuum tubes in the early 50s to mainframes to desktop computers to servers to that damn smartphone that controls our lives nowadays. When’s the last time you looked at it? How many times a day? 

As amazing as that progress has been – well, brothers and sisters, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet once quantum computers become commodified.  

Now think of Artificial Intelligence and how far it has come in text and image generation in just the last year. With the arrival of ChatGPT, you cannot throw a stick without hitting a news story about it. Speculation about what it means for us and where it is headed runs rampant – from it is sentient to something called the “textpocalypse” to it is just a fancy-schmanzy way of predicting what the next word in a sequence in response to a prompt is – it has no capacity for thinking, reasoning or feeling, the things humans do however poorly. 

All this rampant speculation for something that has only been released to the public for four months as of this writing! Slow down everybody! Take a valium! 

It is my uneducated consideration that it is way too early to make any definitive statement about where all this will, or will not, lead to. The capability of innovative technology almost never goes backward. It just continues expanding and getting more powerful. Think – from one massive computer taking up a whole floor with limited capability to quantum computing soon, likely, in the space of seventy years. 

So – combine AI with quantum computing and round and round and round she goes, and where she stops nobody knows! 

The history of technology is the history of the shrinking of the human ego. We used to think that the sun and the planets revolved around the earth with us at the center, then came along Copernicus and the telescope. We used to think the solar system was the universe then discovered the universe is almost infinite and expanding, consisting of billions of galaxies and ours is just one of them. We used to think God created us and then along came evolution and natural selection – muscle and blood and skin and bone. We used to think visual history could only be preserved by paintings, then came cameras.  And so on and so on. 

We used to think only we can compose sentences and paragraphs and create art and tell jokes and now AI can do all of that and more. (Tell a joke, AI: Why don’t scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything! I mean, sheesh.) 

Why is it that some very bright people think AI and computing have reached a steady state and will not continue to evolve in ways we cannot conceive of now? 

“The broader intellectual world seems to wildly overestimate how long it will take A.I. systems to go from ‘large impact on the world’ to ‘unrecognizably transformed world,” Paul Christiano, a key member of OpenAI. 

Intuition is just a more dignified way of saying pulling something out your wazoo. It is my intuition that it is just a matter of time until AI combined with quantum computing achieves the status of AGI – automated general intelligence when machine intelligence equals or exceeds human intelligence on the way to The Singularity where it all becomes unpredictable. And then what? 

In the early days of the internet, when web browsing made it a pervasive commodity, the technogeeks and deep thinkers were all but wee-weeing in their pants about how we were entering some kind of Nirvana of leveling of social strata where everybody shares knowledge and everybody just gets smarter and smarter with all that information at our fingertips and where discourse is kept civil because everybody keeps everybody in check. 

Well … 

I just hope I am dead before AGI is achieved. I am getting too old for this shit. 

*I used ChatGPT to do research for this, but I wrote all the text myself. Or did I? How would you know one way or the other?