Techno-Nationalism

Chapter 14Quantum Technologies

Nestled between the Santa Ynez mountains and the mesmerising blue of the Pacific Ocean, Santa Barbara is a beach town known for its laid-back California vibe. But it was from here, in 2019, that scientists at Google’s AI campus announced that Sycamore, a quantum-based processor, needed only 200 seconds to solve a numeric computation that would have taken the world’s most powerful supercomputer 10,000 years to solve.¹

This was a monumental achievement in computer science.

Less than a year later, a team of Chinese researchers published a study in the Journal of Science that claimed their photonic quantum computer, named Jiuzhang, solved a well-known problem involving ‘boson sampling,’ in 200 seconds—an operation that would have taken a classical supercomputer 2.5 billion years to do.²

Quantum science seems destined to drive the evolution of super-computing and artificial intelligence (AI) especially as Moore’s Law, as we have discussed, reaches its size thresholds. Simply put, when geometry is on an atomic scale, there is a finite number of transistors that can be stacked upon a chip. The most advanced 2-nanometre chip, for example, with hundreds of billions of transistors the size of a human genome—possibly up to a trillion—cannot physically get much smaller. At some point, then, Moore’s Law must come to an end.

What comes next is quantum computing, which, as we will see, could be to supercomputing what the atomic bomb was to a single kilogram ...