Quantum leap into oblivion

America's counterculture seems to have run amok. And it manifests a unique case of cognitive dissonance. Arguably, you could say that this is what counterculture is for, but not like this. After handing a billionaire populist like Donald Trump a complete and decisive electoral victory with the trifecta, it appears to be celebrating the murder of a corporate CEO by Luigi Mangione. Stick to one lane, buddy. Are you for big business or against it? How much of this is organic or manipulated by vested interests is yet to be known.

The actual consequences of Trump's second victory are yet to be felt. The mass deportations do not take place before January 20. The deconstruction of the administrative state, once promised by Stephen Bannon and later championed by the Heritage's "Project 2025", which is now Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's domain, has not begun. The Department of Government Efficiency, which is supposed to cut regulations and bureaucracy and is to be spearheaded by these two gents, hasn't been born after all.

Cutting regulations when two of this year's three Nobel Laureates for Economics, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, penned an impassioned defence of government oversight during technological transformations is yet another sign of the times and may cost the human race heavily.

People and social media keep crediting the Simpsons' creator, Matt Groening, for accurately predicting the future. Who am I to dispute this claim? You must possess some gifts if your show has successfully run for thirty-six seasons. But I think there is another underrated case of second sight that we overlook. If you haven't seen Mike Judge's Idiocracy, I strongly recommend you make time to watch it. But it is his comedy series, Silicon Valley, which is on my mind right now - the series finale in particular. I must put out a spoiler alert here, but if you still haven't seen the series, what are the odds that you will? So, in the final episode of the series, it is revealed that Richard and his team's ambitious project, a compression software by the name of "Pied Piper", has been abandoned. Then we are told why. The software had become so powerful that it could unlock all encryptions without the owner's consent. Everything, from warfare to banking, runs on encryptions in the high-powered world. The team realises that this breakthrough could destroy human society and, therefore, dismember it.

Come year 2024, and in the real world, something happened that already turned your world upside down without you noticing it. As you debated the alleged occult powers of the wife of a former premier, discussing a retired general's military trial, and obsessing about Syria or Trump's cabinet picks, Google just changed the game with two disruptions. It is a good news, bad news situation but you be the judge of that.

Before we delve into these two disruptions, let me give you a refresher. My regular readers will remember that a few weeks ago, in my piece on complexity, I quoted Ray Kurzweil's recent book The Singularity is Nearer, where he talks about technological acceleration. He believes this progress is exponential and unforeseeable. Despite his prescience, his statement on exponential growth has got nothing on what is happening now.

Google just introduced its quantum computing chip, Willow. While its previous version, Sycamore, was fast, the new chip takes computational power to a whole new level. Those unfamiliar with the technology should know that we have squeezed as much efficiency as possible from the silicon chips that power your smart devices. In 1965, Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, predicted that the number of transistors on a microchip would double every two years while their cost would be halved. This is called Moore's law. The distance between transistors on a silicon chip also called a process node, is between six and ten atoms. Slightly further, and these chips become unusable. Looks like Moore's Law has hit a wall.

When you thought your smart devices couldn't be smarter along came quantum computing. Instead of binary bits used by silicon chips, these computers use qubits based on quantum mechanics, which exist in superposition and entanglement (please look it up if this is getting dense). Because of this technology, parallel processing is possible, which gives them exponential power. How exponential? Willow completed the "random circuit sampling" task in 5 minutes. For a silicon-based computer, it will take, get ready for it, 10 septillion years to finish. Remember that a billion has nine zeros after one to understand the scale. Ten septillion has 25. Our universe's known age is 13.8 billion years. In comparison, ten septillion means 724 trillion times the universe's age.

Of course, there are trade-offs. Quantum computers can currently operate only in cryogenic temperatures. Due to qubits' delicate nature, they suffer from errors and scalability issues. Willow seems to have resolved the latter two. The former remains a challenge to widespread use. But imagine having such overwhelming power. Breaking all encryptions and codes must be a child's play. No wonder then that the cryptocurrency world is worried sick.

The second disruption was the launching of Google's multimodal AI Gemini's version 2.0. The new version comes with autonomous AI agents. If AI is the primaeval soup, AI agents are the life forms that emerge out of it. Other AIs also have agents, but Gemini agents' seamless performance is breathtaking. These agents can accomplish any task you assign them independent of your supervision. There are plenty of demo videos on the internet. Just watch them and figure out the future of work on your own. We are already debating whether with ChatGPT's o1 artificial general intelligence (the likes of which you see in movies) has been achieved. This changes everything. And yet, the technology is still in its infancy.

What I am humbly trying to posit here is that the human race is being made obsolete work-wise before our eyes. And we keep bickering over irrelevant minutiae.

Tired of being a passive observer, I must confess that for many years, I have dreamed of being an active part of research on the future of humanity. The plan was simple. I thought I would find a way to work under Dr Francis Fukuyama, who, with his Our Posthuman Future in many ways, was ahead of the curve, whose judgment I trust and who heads the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies these days. But what with work and life, every time I look, I seem to have missed the deadline to apply. And let's face it. I am not getting younger. The young ones among you should definitely research this topic.