In the fall of 2019, Google told the world it had reached
“quantum supremacy.”
It was a significant scientific milestone that some compared to
the first flight at Kitty Hawk. Harnessing the mysterious powers of quantum
mechanics, Google had built a computer that needed only 3 minutes and 20
seconds to perform a calculation that normal computers couldn’t complete in
10,000 years.
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But more than two years after Google’s announcement, the world
is still waiting for a quantum computer that actually does something useful.
And it will most likely wait much longer. The world is also waiting for
self-driving cars, flying cars, advanced artificial intelligence and brain
implants that will let you control your computing devices using nothing but
your thoughts.
Silicon Valley’s hype machine has long been accused of churning
ahead of reality. But in recent years, the tech industry’s critics have noticed
that its biggest promises — the ideas that really could change the world — seem
further and further on the horizon. The great wealth generated by the industry
in recent years has generally been thanks to ideas, like the iPhone and mobile
apps, that arrived years ago.
Have the big thinkers of tech lost their mojo?
The answer, those big thinkers are quick to respond, is
absolutely not. But the projects they are tackling are far more difficult than
building a new app or disrupting another aging industry. And if you look
around, the tools that have helped you cope with almost two years of a pandemic
— the home computers, the videoconferencing services and Wi-Fi, even the
technology that aided researchers in the development of vaccines — have shown
the industry hasn’t exactly lost a step.
“Imagine the economic impact of the pandemic had there not been
the infrastructure — the hardware and the software — that allowed so many
white-collar workers to work from home and so many other parts of the economy
to be conducted in a digitally mediated way,” said Margaret O’Mara, a professor
at the University of Washington who specializes in the history of Silicon
Valley.
As for the next big thing, the big thinkers say, give it time.
Take quantum computing. Jake Taylor, who oversaw quantum computing efforts for
the White House and is now chief science officer at the quantum startup
Riverlane, said building a quantum computer might be the most difficult task
ever undertaken. This is a machine that defies the physics of everyday life.
A quantum computer relies on the strange ways that some objects
behave at the subatomic level or when exposed to extreme cold, like metal
chilled to nearly 460 degrees below zero. If scientists merely try to read
information from these quantum systems, they tend to break.
While building a quantum computer, Taylor said, “you are
constantly working against the fundamental tendency of nature.”
The most important tech advances of the past few decades — the
microchip, the internet, the mouse-driven computer, the smartphone — were not
defying physics. And they were allowed to gestate for years, even decades,
inside government agencies and corporate research labs before ultimately
reaching mass adoption.
“The age of mobile and cloud computing has created so many new
business opportunities,” O’Mara said. “But now there are trickier problems.”
Still, the loudest voices in Silicon Valley often discuss those
trickier problems as if they were just another smartphone app. That can inflate
expectations.
People who aren’t experts who understand the challenges “may
have been misled by the hype,” said Raquel Urtasun, a University of Toronto
professor who helped oversee the development of self-driving cars at Uber and
is now chief executive of the self-driving startup Waabi.
Technologies like self-driving cars and artificial intelligence
do not face the same physical obstacles as quantum computing. But just as
researchers do not yet know how to build a viable quantum computer, they do not
yet know how to design a car that can safely drive itself in any situation or a
machine that can do anything the human brain can do.
Even a technology like augmented reality — eyeglasses that can
layer digital images onto what you see in the real world — will require years
of additional research and engineering before it is perfected.
Andrew Bosworth, vice president at Meta, formerly Facebook, said
that building these lightweight eyeglasses was akin to creating the first
mouse-driven personal computers in the 1970s (the mouse itself was invented in
1964). Companies like Meta must design an entirely new way of using computers,
before stuffing all its pieces into a tiny package.
Over the past two decades, companies like Facebook have built
and deployed new technologies at a speed that never seemed possible before. But
as Bosworth said, these were predominantly software technologies built solely
with “bits” — pieces of digital information.
Building new kinds of hardware — working with physical atoms —
is a far more difficult task. “As an industry, we have almost forgotten what
this is like,” Bosworth said, calling the creation of augmented reality glasses
a “once-in-a-lifetime” project.
Technologists like Bosworth believe they will eventually
overcome those obstacles and they are more open about how difficult it will be.
But that’s not always the case. And when an industry has seeped into every part
of daily life, it can be hard to separate hand-waving from realism — especially
when it is huge companies like Google and well-known personalities like Elon
Musk drawing that attention.
Many in Silicon Valley believe that hand-waving is an important
part of pushing technologies into the mainstream. The hype helps attract the
money and the talent and the belief needed to build the technology.
“If the outcome is desirable — and it is technically possible —
then it’s OK if we’re off by three years or five years or whatever,” said Aaron
Levie, chief executive of the Silicon Valley company Box. “You want
entrepreneurs to be optimistic — to have a little bit of that Steve Jobs
reality-distortion field,” which helped to persuade people to buy into his big
ideas.
The hype is also a way for entrepreneurs to generate interest
among the public. Even if new technologies can be built, there is no guarantee
that people and businesses will want them and adopt them and pay for them. They
need coaxing. And maybe more patience than most people inside and outside the
tech industry will admit.
“When we hear about a new technology, it takes less than 10
minutes for our brains to imagine what it can do. We instantly compress all of
the compounding infrastructure and innovation needed to get to that point,”
Levie said. “That is the cognitive dissonance we are dealing with.”
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