Jessica Wade: belief

Transcript context

…Now, I can pick up popular science magazines, and they will tell me, sometimes, we have quantum computing now. How accurate is that? Well, I think you’ve got some kind of systems with a very primitive number of qubits that can do some calculations, these quantum bits. They can do some kind of mathematical calculations much more efficiently and quickly than their nonquantum counterparts. I think getting enough — and I’m really not an expert in this — but getting enough of those qubits to work in harmony to actually do anything that’s computationally useful for you or me is way, way off where people are currently at. At the moment still — and I’m not sure if you’ve visited any labs that are doing this or any companies that are doing this — but they have these isolated molecules trapped in vacuum chambers, or they have these cryogenic chambers where they’ve got a hundred different qubits in a room the size of a football stadium, each there trying to connect and interact with each other. I think that’s a long way away from what we can imagine happening in our own personal homes or in our companies or in our lives. Whilst people have demonstrated that quantum computation is possible, we’re really, really far away from it being societally relevant or useful. And maybe we don’t need it right now for the types of things that we’re going to need to do. Let’s say we put you in charge of science funding in the UK.…

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