Speaker 1: Imagine for just a second that the machine you're listening
on right now, your phone, your computer, the very core
of your digital life, is already.
Speaker 2: Obsolete, fundamentally obsolete.
Speaker 1: Right the device that handled every financial transaction, every global communication,
the very foundation of modern wealth and power.
Speaker 3: It's a tough thing to wrap your head around because
we're so used to this constant forward march of technology.
Speaker 1: We're conditioned for it. We expect things to get faster, small,
or better every single year without fail. But what if
that whole foundation, the entire digital age, built on simple
zeros and ones. What if it's about to hit a hard.
Speaker 3: Physical wall, and not a wall that we can engineer
our way around, a wall built by the fundamental laws
of physics itself.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling threads. Today, we are diving into a
revolution so profound it will eventually make our current supercomputers
look well as our source material says like a common.
Speaker 3: Advocus that abocust analogy is so important? Is this not
is just the next step, but as a complete paradigm
shift in what computing even is.
Speaker 1: We're talking about the quantum revolution, and for this we're
drawing heavily from the work of physicists and futurist doctor
Michio Kaku, specifically.
Speaker 3: We're pulling from excerpts of a transcript of his video
how Quantum Computers Could Turn the Impossible into Reality, which
was uploaded on the Big Think YouTube channel, and.
Speaker 1: Kaku doesn't mince words. He calls this the next great revolution,
and the stakes for you, for everyone are well, they're everything.
We're talking about reshaping the entire global.
Speaker 3: Landscape, economically, politically, medically, it's all on the table. This
is a search for what he calls the ultimate computer.
Speaker 1: A machine that doesn't just simulate the world with zeros
and ones, but computes directly on the building blocks of reality.
Speaker 2: Itself, on atoms, on their electrons.
Speaker 3: If you can compute on that level, you can perfectly
model the molecular world.
Speaker 1: And the molecular world is where everything happens. It's the
source code for life, for chemist street, for new materials,
for energy.
Speaker 3: But before we get to the really mind bending stuff,
we have to start with the crisis that's forcing this
revolution in the first place. We have to talk about
the collapse of Moore's law.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack that, because our entire modern civilization really
has been built on this one idea, Moore's law exactly.
It's been the sacred text of Silicon Valley for fifty years.
The idea that computer power, essentially the number of transistors
you can cram on a chip, doubles roughly every eighteen months, a.
Speaker 3: Law that has held remarkably steady for decades.
Speaker 1: We've just internalized it. You expect your phone to be
twice as powerful every couple of years. The AI models
that run the world get exponentially more complex.
Speaker 3: It's the engine, it is the primary engine of modern
economic growth. And that is precisely why doctor Kokhu's warning
is so so dire.
Speaker 2: He says, Moore's law.
Speaker 3: Isn't just slowing down, it's about to flatten out completely.
Speaker 1: And the economic implication of that is huge.
Speaker 3: It's a potential catastrophe. The whole consumer economy, especially in tech,
runs on the promise of better. If the next computer
is only a tiny bit better than your old one,
why upgrade?
Speaker 1: You don't And corporations don't upgrade their massive data centers.
Demand just dries up, and that.
Speaker 3: As Cocky points out, could cascade into a deep depression
for the entire computer industry and everything that relies on it.
Our prosperity has been based on acceleration.
Speaker 1: So when that acceleration stops, the whole system just seizes up.
It's a fascinating and frankly terrifying thought. It's a shift
from innovation to just maintenance. Right, So let's get into
the why. Why is this ceiling unavoidable? What's the actual
physical limit we're slamming into.
Speaker 3: It's purely a question of size of scale. For decades,
engineers have performed miracles shrinking those little on off switches
transistors down to microscopic level.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about things measured in nanometers.
Speaker 3: Now we are the most advanced chips today have transistors
that might be say, twenty atoms across in their critical parts,
which is all already unbelievable engineer. But the real point
of no return, the hard physical stop, is around five atoms.
Speaker 1: Across five atoms. That is just it's hard to even
picture something that small. Why five? Why is that the
magic number where it all falls apart?
Speaker 3: Because that's where the digital world dies and the quantum
world takes over.
Speaker 1: What do you mean by that?
Speaker 3: In our normal classical world, we think of an electron
as a tiny dot right, little billiard ball that you
can reliably contain. Digital computing depends on that reliability. The
electron is either here making a one, or it's over
there making.
Speaker 1: A zero, clean, definitive exactly.
Speaker 3: But when the wall separating your one from your zero
is only five atoms thick, you enter the quantum realm.
And in that realm, as Cocker really emphasizes, the electron.
Speaker 2: Is not a dot.
Speaker 1: It's a wave.
Speaker 2: It's a wave.
Speaker 3: It's a cloud of probability, and waves don't respect tiny
little walls.
Speaker 2: They can leak.
Speaker 1: So you're talking about quantum tunneling, the idea that the
electron can just phase through the barrier.
Speaker 3: That's it, exactly. The electron wave just leaks out. It
has a non zero probability of just appearing on the
other side of the gap, even without enough energy to
go over it.
Speaker 1: So your perfect one can suddenly become a zero or
something in between.
Speaker 3: It creates short circuits, it creates noise, randomness, instability, Your
clean digital signal gets corrupted. And on top of that,
all that leakage generates an incredible amount of heat.
Speaker 1: Which is already a massive problem for chip designers. They
can barely cool the things we have now they can't.
Speaker 3: So the solution isn't better engineering in the digital sense.
The only way forward is to stop fighting quantum mechanics
and start using it. We have to go beyond zero
in one.
Speaker 1: So the failure of our tiniest component forces us to
embrace the wildest rules in all of physics. That is
a powerful idea. We need a new way to compute.
We need to use the atoms themselves, and.
Speaker 2: That's the fundamental difference.
Speaker 3: Digital computers take smooth reality and you know, they force
it into these rigid little boxes of zeros in one.
So approximation, very very good approximation, but still an approximation.
But the natural world, molecules, biology, energy, it's all based
on electrons, which are inherently, as CaCu says, smooth, They
exist as a continuum of possibilities.
Speaker 1: In a quantum computer or an atomic computer is designed
to work with that smoothness directly exactly. Okay, So this
is where people listening might need to take a deep breath,
because the concepts get pretty weird and they defy our
everyday logic. The core power source here is a principle
called superposition.
Speaker 3: Right in our world, a light switches on or it's off.
A bit is a zero or it's a one, there's
no in between.
Speaker 1: Superposition says that a quantum bit equibit can be a
zero and a one at the exact same time.
Speaker 3: And I know for a lot of people hearing that,
the reaction is that's ridiculous, that's stupid. But this is
what quantum physics demonstrates again and again. It's just how
reality works at that scale, and.
Speaker 1: That simultaneous existence is where the exponential power comes from.
Speaker 2: Right, that's the key.
Speaker 3: If you have say two normal bits, you have four
possible states.
Speaker 2: Zero, zero, zero, zero, one, ten.
Speaker 3: Eleven, but you can only be in one of those.
Speaker 2: At a time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, have to check on one by one.
Speaker 2: But with two.
Speaker 3: Quibbits, because of superposition, they can exist in all four
of those states at the same time.
Speaker 1: And as you add more quibbits, that power just explodes.
Speaker 2: It explodes.
Speaker 3: The numbers get astronomical fast. You know, a quantum computer
with just fifty or sixty stable quibits could be more
powerful than the biggest supercomputer on the planet today.
Speaker 1: I've heard Kaku say that with a few hundred quibuts
you can encode more information than there are atoms in
the known universe.
Speaker 2: It's a different kind of scaling.
Speaker 3: A digital machine explores one path through a maze at
a time. A quantum machine explores every single possible path simultaneously, Which.
Speaker 1: Brings us to the most incredible analogy from the source material,
the idea that these machines are computing across parallel universes.
Speaker 2: I mean, it sounds like science fiction.
Speaker 1: It sounds exactly like something from Marvel comics.
Speaker 3: And Kaku points out that's where Marvel got the idea.
From quantum physics. Each of those simultaneous states in the
superposition can be thought of as its own parallel reality.
The computer is literally exploring all of them at once
to find a solution.
Speaker 1: But if the calculation is happening in all these different universes,
how do you get a single answer back here in
our reality? What pulls it all together? Ah?
Speaker 3: That's the other piece of the puzzle. A phenomenon even
stranger than superposition called.
Speaker 1: Entanglement, Einstein's spooky action at a distance.
Speaker 2: That's the one. When you entangle two kibbutz, they become linked,
inextricably linked.
Speaker 3: Whatever you do to one instantly affects the other and
no matter how far apart they are.
Speaker 1: So they're not just a bunch of independent particles anymore.
Speaker 3: Now they act as a single, massive, interconnected computational object.
That linkage is what allows the system to work in
concert across all those parallel states.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you have this massive parallel computation going on.
How do you get the answer?
Speaker 3: The quantum algorithm, the program you're running, is designed to
do something really clever. It uses a process called quantum interference. Essentially,
it arranges things so that all the wrong answers cancel
each other out.
Speaker 1: Like waves on a pond interfering with each other.
Speaker 3: Precisely, the peaks of the wrong answers meet the troughs
and they just disappear, while the waves for the correct
answer all line up and reinforce each other.
Speaker 1: So when you finally look at the system, when you
perform a measurement.
Speaker 3: The whole system, the whole cloud of possibilities, collapses into
one single definite state, and because of that interference, it's
overwhelmingly likely to collapse onto the right answer.
Speaker 1: So you're not searching for an answer, You're creating a
physical system where the answer is the most probable outcome,
and then you just collapse it into reality.
Speaker 3: You are calculating on reality itself. You're not simplifying the
universe into zeros and ones anymore.
Speaker 1: That is a fundamental shift, and that's what lets us
tackle problems that have been completely impossible until now.
Speaker 3: Right because so many of humanity's biggest challenges in medicine, energy,
agriculture are molecular problems.
Speaker 2: They're quantum problems at their core.
Speaker 1: So let's get into those applications. Yeah, Kaku breaks it
down into health, energy, and food. Let's start with medicine.
Speaker 3: The way we discover drugs right now is, as Kacu
calls it, old fashioned slow.
Speaker 2: It's trial and error.
Speaker 1: You create thousands of chemicals in a lab and you
just test them one by one in a petri dish,
then in animals.
Speaker 3: It can take a decade, cost billions of dollars, and
most of the time it fails. It's incredibly inefficient.
Speaker 1: And it is because we're essentially guessing. We can't really
see what's happening at the molecular level with enough detail exactly.
Speaker 3: Diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinsen's, many cancers, there are problems of
protein folding. A crucial protein in your body folds into
the wrong shape and stops working, or it starts clumping together.
Speaker 1: And trying to simulate how a big protein folds on
a digital computer is famously one of the hardest problems.
Speaker 3: In science because the number of possible ways it could
fold is astronomical. A digital computer has to approximate physics
and it just gets overwhelmed. It can take years to
get even a rough gas.
Speaker 1: So what's the quantum future look like? For this?
Speaker 3: The quantum computer is the perfect protein folding simulator. It
doesn't have to approximate. It can model the electron clouds
and the atomic interactions perfectly.
Speaker 1: So you could run an experiment on a molecule directly
in computer's memory.
Speaker 3: A perfect simulation you can see exactly how a diseased
protein misfolds, and then in the computer you could design
the perfect Kia drug molecule that fits into it perfectly
and deactivates it.
Speaker 1: You could test a million potential drug candidates in an
afternoon simulation instead of decade of lab work.
Speaker 3: And kak who says the goal here is to turn
medicine upside down to finally unlock the secrets of life
itself by tackling these incurable diseases at their source. It's
about curing the incurable.
Speaker 1: That's monumental. So moving from our bodies to the planet,
let's talk about energy. The promise of fusion.
Speaker 3: The holy grail, unlimited clean up energy, almost for free.
Speaker 1: The fuel is just hydrogen, which you can get from seawater.
It creates massive amounts of energy with no long lived
nuclear waste, no risk of a meltdown like with current
nucre fission plants.
Speaker 3: Oh, the problem has always been containment. You're trying to
hold a start of plasma hotter than the sun inside
a magnetic bottle, and it's incredibly unstable.
Speaker 1: It wants to break free.
Speaker 2: It's chaotic.
Speaker 3: The plasma wabbles, it twists, the reaction can just fall
apart in an instant, and modeling that turbulence, that chaos
is another one of those problems that's just too complex
for digital computers.
Speaker 1: They're too slow to predict what the plasma is going
to do in real time and adjust the magnetic fields
to stop it exactly.
Speaker 3: And that's where quantum computers come in. Kaku suggests they
could be essential to stabilize the reaction. They could run
perfect real time simulations of the plasma's behavior.
Speaker 1: So the computer could see an instability forming before it happens.
Speaker 3: And tell the reactor's control system exactly how to tweak
the magnetic fields to contain it. That level of fine
tuning is what could finally make sustained stable fusion power
or reality, which.
Speaker 1: Would solve the world's energy crisis forever fundamentally. Okay, so
health energy. The third pillar is food agriculture. The first
Green Revolution saved billions of people from starvation with the
invention of cheap nitrogen fertilizer.
Speaker 3: But that revolution, as Kaku notes, is slowly coming to
an end. It's incredibly energy intensive.
Speaker 1: The process for making fertilizer, the haber Bosch process, uses
something like one to two percent of the entire world's
energy output.
Speaker 3: It's a brute force method using immense heat and pressure,
and it relies heavily on fossil fuels.
Speaker 2: But nature does it better.
Speaker 1: You mean the bacteria in the soil, right.
Speaker 3: Certain microbes can take nitrogen right out of the air
and turn it into ammonia fertilizer at room temperature with
almost no energy input. They have special enzyme that does it.
Speaker 1: And we have no idea how that enzyme works because
again it's too complex to simulate digitally.
Speaker 3: The quantum mechanics of that reaction inside that enzyme are
just beyond our current computers. But a quantum computer could
model it.
Speaker 1: Perfectly, so we could finally understand the.
Speaker 2: Secret and then replicate it.
Speaker 3: We could design a new artificial catalyst that mimics what
that bacteria does. We could create fertilizer efficiently, cheaply, without
the massive energy cost and carbon footprint.
Speaker 1: A second green revolution, as he calls it.
Speaker 3: It would make food security cheaper, more sustainable, and available
to everyone.
Speaker 1: So when you have a technology with the potential to
solve these huge global problems energy, medicine, food, it's no
surprise that it becomes the focus of an intense, high
stakes race.
Speaker 2: An arms race. Really.
Speaker 3: Cucou is very clear that if you're a country or
a company that isn't in this race, you risk becoming
totally irrelevant.
Speaker 1: And we're seeing that play out right now. The big
names are all in.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, Google, IBM, Honeywell, they're all pouring billions into
building the actual hardware, the physical quibots and Wall Street
is just flooding the zone with ventn your.
Speaker 1: Capital right, turning tiny startups from a few years ago
into multi billion dollar companies. Everyone scrambling to put their
flag on the mountain, and.
Speaker 3: The risk for the old garb for Silicon Valley is existential.
Kaku has this chilling line where he says, if they
don't get this right, Silicon Valley could become the next
rust Belt.
Speaker 1: Because their entire business model is built on that assumption
of endless exponential growth from Moore's law. If that's over,
they need the next thing, and this is it.
Speaker 3: It's the only thing on the horizon that offers that
kind of exponential leap. But beyond the economics, the most
immediate and honestly the most terrifying implication is for security,
for code breaking.
Speaker 1: This is the part of the Kaku transcript that really
gave me a knot in my stomach. It's not just
a little better at cracking codes.
Speaker 3: It's a fundamental break. It shatters the entire foundation of
modern encryption.
Speaker 1: So everything we do online, banking, government secrets, military communications,
your private data, it's all protected by something called public
key cryptograph, right.
Speaker 3: And its security relies on a very simple mathematical trick.
It's easy to multiply two huge prime numbers together, but
it's incredibly incredibly hard to take that resulting giant number
and figure out which two primes you started with.
Speaker 1: That's called factoring. And for a normal digital computer, the
time it takes to factor a big number grows exponentially
with its size.
Speaker 3: So we make the number so big that it would
take a classical computer hundreds or even billions of years
to crack it.
Speaker 2: It's safe because it's.
Speaker 1: Slow, and Kaku gives this great concrete example. He says,
imagine a code based on a number that's fifty digits long.
A digital computer might take centuries to factor.
Speaker 3: That, but a quantum computer running a specific program called
Shor's algorithm is uniquely suited to solve exactly this kind
of problem because it can check all the potential factors
at the same time across all those parallel universes.
Speaker 1: So that fifty digit number that takes centuries, a.
Speaker 3: Powerful enough quantum computer could potentially crack it almost instantly.
Speaker 1: That is a world breaking capability. It means every secret
that's ever been sent over the Internet, every encrypted file,
it's all.
Speaker 3: Vulnerable, which leads to the chilling question, are governments right
now just recording and stockpiling huge amounts of encrypted data
from their adversaries.
Speaker 1: Just waiting waiting for the day they can switch on
their quantum computer into crypt at all.
Speaker 3: It's a scenario that intelligence agencies like the FBI and
the CIA are taking very, very seriously.
Speaker 2: It's why there's a.
Speaker 3: Global panic right now to develop what's called post quantum cryptography,
new kinds.
Speaker 1: Of encryption that are safe even from a quantum.
Speaker 2: Attack exactly now.
Speaker 3: The good news, as Kaku is quick to point out,
is that we are not there yet. Today's quantum computers
are too small and too noisy to break anything serious.
Speaker 1: So your bank account is safe for.
Speaker 2: Now, for now.
Speaker 3: But he says that when this capability does arrive, it
will force a major revision of how we code our
most treasured national secrets. It's maybe the biggest security upgrade
the world has ever.
Speaker 2: Had to face.
Speaker 1: Okay, so, whenever we talk about a technology this powerful,
one that can design drugs, create energy, crack any code,
the natural human fear is, well, what about my job?
Speaker 2: Will it put me on the unemployment line?
Speaker 1: Right? If this machine can solve impossible problems, are doctors, chemists, mathematicians,
and engineers just obsolete.
Speaker 3: It's a really important question, and Kaku addresses it with
what I think is a perfect analogy. It completely reframes
the whole issue.
Speaker 1: He says that computer isn't a replacement for the human mind,
not at all.
Speaker 3: He says, the quantum computer is like a powerful hammer
for a carpenter.
Speaker 1: The hammer doesn't replace the carpenter. It just makes them
more powerful. It expands what they're capable of building.
Speaker 2: That's it exactly.
Speaker 3: Your value as a scientist isn't in doing the tedious
math by hand. It's in having the insight the creativity
to ask the right questions. The computer just does the
heavy lifting, the calculation.
Speaker 1: So the computer can simulate a million drug molecules, but
a biologist still has to decide which protein to target
in the first place and why.
Speaker 3: And a physicist still has to analyze the data from
the fusion simulation and figure out how to engineer a
better reactor. The computer is a tool for discovery, not
the discoverer itself.
Speaker 1: And Kaku is very direct about who the real losers
will be in this future.
Speaker 3: He says, the people on the unemployment line will be
the biologists, the chemists, the mathematicians who do not use
quantum computers.
Speaker 1: So the real divide is in between humans and machines.
It's between the professionals who adopt the new powerful tools.
Speaker 3: And those who stick with the old, obsolete ones. The
winners will be the people who harness this technology to
invent the future of medicine and energy and transportation.
Speaker 1: It's a call for adaptation, not a prediction of obsolescence.
It's about freeing up human ingenuity from the shackles of computation.
Speaker 3: A renaissance for the hard sciences.
Speaker 1: What a journey. We started with the physical death of
the transistor, the end of Moore's law, and landed here
in a place where we have to embrace the weirdness
of the electron wave.
Speaker 3: Itself, seeing how that weirdness, superposition and entanglement allows for
computation in parallel realities.
Speaker 1: Which in turn promises to solve some of the biggest
problems humanity has ever faced. Yeah, health, energy, food, it's
all on the table.
Speaker 3: We are really shifting from a technology based on clever
engineering to one based on fundamental physics, harnessing the universe's
own operating system. But that incredible promise, as we've discussed,
it comes with a deep shadow.
Speaker 1: A truly existential threat to our entire digital security infrastructure.
And this isn't science fiction happening one hundred years from now.
The race is on today.
Speaker 3: Governments and corporations are moving at incredible.
Speaker 1: Speed, so we want to leave you with something to
think about. Considering the imminent, mathematically certain threat that quantum
computers pose to all our current digital codes. Do you
think governments and tech companies are moving fast enough?
Speaker 3: Are they creating and deploying these new quantum resistant protections
quickly enough?
Speaker 1: Or is this technological revolution simply outpacing our ability to
secure ourselves. Is that vast encrypted vault of all the
world's secrets just waiting to be cracked open by the
quantum key of tomorrow.
Speaker 3: It's a powerful question to consider.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on this installment of thrilling threads.
We'd love to hear what you think about this monumental
shift