Quantum Computing: A Sensible Punt on an Unknowable Future?
Every few years, the investment world gets itself into a right tizzy over some new technology. Right now, it’s all about artificial intelligence. You can’t open a newspaper without seeing another headline about how AI is going to change everything from how we order a takeaway to the very fabric of society. Frankly, it’s getting a bit tiresome. While everyone is looking one way, I think the truly interesting, and potentially transformative, game is being played elsewhere. I’m talking about quantum computing.
To me, this feels like the internet in the early 1990s. It was clunky, slow, and most people thought it was a fad for academics and nerds. But a few people saw the potential for it to rewire the entire planet. Quantum computing is at a similar stage. It’s a technology so mind-bendingly complex that it harnesses the strange rules of physics to solve problems that would make today’s best supercomputers weep. We’re talking about calculations that could take thousands of years being solved in minutes. The implications, should they pull it off, are enormous.
