The refrigerator of the future

Why the quantum computer will fundamentally change the world we live in — even if not immediately.

Recently, there has been an increase in reports about quantum computers and companies that have been set up to develop quantum computers or individual components of them. If we look at the history of aviation to understand the current state of quantum computing, we could say that we are where Otto Lilienthal flew up to 250 metres with his homemade glider.

So what is it that makes this new computer technology so magical? All of today’s computers work with a machine language that consists of zeros and ones. In the case of quantum bits, or qubits, there are also ones and zeros, but there are also many states in between. Like a coin that has a head and a number, but if you throw it up in the air quickly, there are also many gradations with some heads and some tails. The more of these qubits you add, the more states you can show, and that makes these computers incredibly powerful, beyond our imagination.

Just to get an idea of the power we are talking about: Google has just developed a new chip that can perform a mathematical calculation in less than five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or ten septillion years to complete. That’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.

This incredible achievement will change everything. We are not far from it, even if there are still some problems to be solved. For such computers to work at all, many of these chips have to be cooled to absolute zero. This incredible -273.15°C is necessary to ‘calm down’ the extremely error-prone quantum bits, and despite this refrigerator they still fidget around and are very prone to error.

Quantum computers have the very special potential to fundamentally change our understanding of the world and our possibilities in many areas by breaking the previously insurmountable limits of classical computers. With their ability to solve the most complex tasks in science, technology and society much faster or to make them solvable in the first place, they could lead to groundbreaking discoveries in materials and drug research, advance the development of novel drugs and enable sustainable technologies for energy generation and storage. In logistics and traffic planning, global supply chains, urban traffic management and individual route planning could be made more efficient and environmentally friendly.

But the field of artificial intelligence would also experience an almost unimaginable leap forward thanks to quantum computing power, enabling highly precise predictions, self-learning systems and real-time analyses on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, these new computing capacities will lead to profound changes in security. Traditional encryption methods are threatened by quantum algorithms, which at the same time drives the transition to new, secure quantum cryptographic solutions.

As companies and states race to develop quantum computers, investing enormous financial resources, questions of ethical responsibility arise:

Who will have access to this key technology, and how will social and economic power relations shift? Despite the technical challenges that still exist, such as the stability and scalability of qubits, development is progressing rapidly.

In his time, Otto Lilienthal could not have foreseen that his principle of wing curvature would lay the foundation for aviation. Let us be surprised by what the computer in the refrigerator will bring us.

The original article by me appeared in the Austrian news magazine Profil.at