Leverage Weekly #12 - Dispatches from the Quantum Innovation Summit in Dubai
…or disentangling reality and hype in quantum
This week I (Geoff) went to the Quantum Innovation Summit in Dubai which was mostly focused on quantum computing. Clarice would’ve been on a panel about quantum biology but unfortunately got sick and wasn’t able to attend. The whole experience was very interesting and very unfamiliar. There was one person from the UN, government-adjacent folks working in tech transfer, quantum computing companies, an ex-professor playing electric guitar and a finale award ceremony where dozens of awards were given out while spotlights flashed over the stage, ending with “We are the champions” played over the sound system.
This was very different from what I’m used to. Early Leverage primarily interacted with intellectual and ideological groups; I’m not very familiar with what are effectively trade conferences. At such things people are friendly, eager to tell you about their thing and listen carefully to you in case there’s a chance for collaboration. This made it a particularly refreshing experience. There was however, some uneasiness given that some % of these people were unconsciously misleading people and others were doing it… a bit more consciously. Luckily with 2 days of talks, panels and conversations, a picture of who was real and who wasn’t started to emerge.
One important question when assessing anything that’s being funded, whether it’s a scientific field or a research project or even art, is whether it’s being funded for the stated reason. In the case of quantum computing, there are very few legitimate commercial applications at the moment. Quantum sensing is real; quantum random number generators are more random than classical random number generators. But most of the proposed applications are either not close to materializing or actually aren’t quantum; “quantum” sometimes is just a cool brand.
In the case of quantum computing, one crucial thing to take into account is that there is a serious national security-related motivation driving interest in the field. In 1994, Peter Shor showed that quantum computers could, if fully operational, break various types of encryption. That creates a problem later, if quantum computing advances enough. But it also creates a problem now, since adversaries can store information now and crack it with quantum computers later… if they become advanced enough. It’s hard to say exactly *how* these facts convert into funding, but they certainly convert into persistent interest from people who are connected to extremely large funders.
For more thoughts on how military interest and science funding relate, people may be interested in a piece I recently wrote on this in my personal capacity. It’s called The Nuclear Lockdown, Part 1, and it’s on my substack.
Overall, this summit was extremely useful for understanding how the research and commercial areas operate and develop in the early stages of a field. There are strong signals that there’s something real going on but progress is also being overtaken by enthusiasm and hype (sometimes consciously but often not). I think what we’ll learn from this will help us navigate the same challenge in quantum biology which is less well known than quantum computing but also closer to commercial application. In fact, there’s already at least one unicorn startup ($1b+ valuation) with an FDA-approved product that (if the Quantum Biology Hypothesis is true) likely works through quantum biological mechanisms. We’re looking forward to a time when there’s enough interest for a quantum biology trade conference like this to be possible. It may not be that far away.
We’ll have more to say about quantum computing by itself and the relation to quantum biology, and more about what we learned, but my plane is about to take off!
Until next time,
Geoff
P.S. Forward our stuff to your friends who might be interested!