*It looks like conventional Superintelligence is not the only revolution that's going to make our world almost unrecognizable before 2030 or so. Scott Aaronson has been working in the field of quantum computing since the late 1990s but he has always strongly objected to the hype surrounding them, for years he said practical quantum computers might not be possible and even if they were he didn't expect to see one in his lifetime. But I noticed Aaronson's tone started to change about two years ago and he now thinks we will either have a practical quantum computer very soon or we will discover something new and fundamental about quantum mechanics that renders such a thing impossible. He says "Let’s test quantum mechanics in this new regime. And if, instead of building a QC, we have to settle for “merely” overthrowing quantum mechanics and opening up a new era in physics—well then, I guess we’ll have to find some way to live with that".*
*The following are more quotations from Aaronson's latest blog but I think it would be well worth your time to read the entire thing: * *"**If someone asks me why I’m now so optimistic, the core of the argument is 2-qubit gate fidelities. We’ve known for years that, at least on paper, quantum fault-tolerance becomes a net win (that is, you sustainably correct errors faster than you introduce new ones) once you have physical 2-qubit gates that are ~99.99% reliable. The problem has “merely” been how far we were from that. When I entered the field, in the late 1990s, it would’ve been like a Science or Nature paper to do a 2-qubit gate with 50% fidelity. But then at some point the 50% became 90%, became 95%, became 99%, and within the past year, multiple groups have reported 99.9%. So, if you just plot the log *of the infidelity* as a function *of year* and stare at it—yeah, you’d feel pretty optimistic about the next decade too!* *Or pessimistic, as the case may be! To any of you who are worried about post-quantum cryptography—by now I’m so used to delivering a message of, maybe, eventually, someone will need to start thinking about migrating from RSA and Diffie-Hellman and elliptic curve crypto* [which bitcoin uses]* to lattice-based crypto, or other systems that could plausibly withstand quantum attack. I think today that message needs to change. I think today the message needs to be: yes, unequivocally, worry about this now. Have a plan.*" *Quantum Computing: Between Hope and Hype* <https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8329> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> ecc -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0G2Zh95SRq10Q-4hO4rJ61L7UCCzbERrPfJ%2Bk5xdjZJw%40mail.gmail.com.
