Well today is my first day of my new job. As of today I’m Design Futures Lead at Arup. I’ll be working in the Foresight team at the global HQ in central London. The next two weeks have already filled up with meeting new people which is really exciting. Alongside this, don’t forget that Natalie and I are doing an online free event on 09.03 with some tech wizardry for Kara Chin’s Show Real show at Humber Street.
DS065
This is by far the quickest sketch I’ve ever done. I had twenty minutes between getting home and going out again to do it. It’s literally just a cube and a cylinder with a bunch of modifiers chucked on. More geo nodes next week maybe.
Quantum fluctuations.
Quantum computing and fusion power are, as yet, mostly untouched by the hysteria, marketing and hypemanship of mainstream coverage. If Web 3.0/Metaverse/Crypto has vastly accelerated into the foreground over the last six months, being more hype than actual substantive application and AI continues to hover around behind them, balancing actual innovation and application with consumer hysteria then quantum computing and fusion power are even further back, quietly ticking away at complex but useful science. They’re too distant to be a useful distraction for Meta et al to use to offset their daily fire-sale of social reality and so some really interesting actual work is being done.
Just the other week, JET made a significant breakthrough in sustainable power output at its fusion reactor and I’ve mentioned before the hugely significant increase in funding for fusion since 2020. Quantum computing which has been making similar levels of advances may however be on the verge of a ‘quantum winter’ akin to the AI winter of the 70s, 80s and 90s. Two articles recently grabbed my attention: What if quantum computing is a bust? in Slate suggests that quantum computing currently bears many of the hallmarks of AI research of the early 70s right before the AI winter. It is practically inapplicable, expensive and limited but is being explored with zealous commitment by investors and researchers convinced the next breakthrough is around the corner:
Many of the elements that obscured the dead-end truths about other technologies are present in quantum technologies. Quantum technologies’ complexity, the elite nature of the field’s scientists, secrecy mandates, incentives to maintain funding, incentives to appear innovative and profitable, and lack of third parties in a natural position to inspect and report on performance—together, they all could combine to obscure the prospects of quantum technologies.
What if quantum computing is a bust?
The other – Experts warn of a quantum apocalypse in The Byte – suggests that the implication of quantum computing might see it snarled up in regulation-enforced development hell because of the direct security implications. The encryption-busting possibilities of quantum computing are deployed as both carrot and stick in conversations around the technology as a perfect opportunity and threat and there are beginning to be public discussion and writing around the policy and legal implications. I’m not convinced of a sudden ‘quantum apocalypse’ any more than the millenium bug, the singularity or the AI apocalypse. It’s useful for people to put a distinct date and event on a threat but it rarely happens that way. Technology insidiously creeps into life with a whimper rather than a bang.
Unlike Web 3.0, quantum computing, if it can be made efficient, affordable and practical does have significant implications for absolutely everything and in that sense is an incredibly exciting prospect. Beyond the productive applications to medicine, planning, policy, engineering and so on, the challenge to the computational imagination structured around procedural, binary machines is incredible. It’s difficult to even consider imagining what worlds might be made by computers that can work outside of macro-level physics but it all relies on critical, diligent, thoughtful and open discovery and experimentation to avoid falling prey to the mistakes of its predecessors.
Short Stuff
- There’s not much more that can be said about NFTs that isn’t done in Line Goes Up. 2.5 hours of history and analysis. They deploy this cunning tactic of actually using evidence and examples to generate conclusions. I’ve had a couple of exchanges with crypto evangelists over the last few weeks and they to tend to wrap up quickly when you ask for actual evidence and examples where someone isn’t just making disgusting amounts of cash.
- Also Tim Maughan has a new, similarly named short story out about this Web 3 future; Line Go Up in Noemag. As per Tim’s style it weaves together a bunch of different threads into one funny, sad, personal story about a possible near future.
- Continuing the quantum theme, a very presumptive article with the click-baity lede that your brain could be a quantum computer than hallucinates maths. The writer strings together a couple of logical fallacies to get these but the underlying thing is that maths seems to happen across the brain simultaneously. At an incredibly large leap, this might mean quantum entanglement.
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- My interests start to align in this example of machine learning being used to model and optimise a fusion reaction. There you see, ML has many applications which are great. No one’s using NFTs to model fusion reactions.
- Too much capture? We Live in The Uncanny Valley Now.
Alright, love you as you know. I’m inching closer to getting a PS5 because Forbidden West looks so damn tasty. At the moment I’m slowly replaying XCOM2 which is like a board game really; I can do a twenty-minute mission in the evening and call it quits which is a nice pace. Games don’t have to be immersive. Don’t clog up the algorithms this week. Wish me luck.