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Speaker 1: Imagine for just a second that the machine you're listening

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on right now, your phone, your computer, the very core

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of your digital life, is already.

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Speaker 2: Obsolete, fundamentally obsolete.

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Speaker 1: Right the device that handled every financial transaction, every global communication,

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the very foundation of modern wealth and power.

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Speaker 3: It's a tough thing to wrap your head around because

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we're so used to this constant forward march of technology.

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Speaker 1: We're conditioned for it. We expect things to get faster, small,

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or better every single year without fail. But what if

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that whole foundation, the entire digital age, built on simple

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zeros and ones. What if it's about to hit a hard.

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Speaker 3: Physical wall, and not a wall that we can engineer

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our way around, a wall built by the fundamental laws

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of physics itself.

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Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling threads. Today, we are diving into a

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revolution so profound it will eventually make our current supercomputers

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look well as our source material says like a common.

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Speaker 3: Advocus that abocust analogy is so important? Is this not

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is just the next step, but as a complete paradigm

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shift in what computing even is.

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Speaker 1: We're talking about the quantum revolution, and for this we're

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drawing heavily from the work of physicists and futurist doctor

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Michio Kaku, specifically.

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Speaker 3: We're pulling from excerpts of a transcript of his video

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how Quantum Computers Could Turn the Impossible into Reality, which

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was uploaded on the Big Think YouTube channel, and.

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Speaker 1: Kaku doesn't mince words. He calls this the next great revolution,

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and the stakes for you, for everyone are well, they're everything.

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We're talking about reshaping the entire global.

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Speaker 3: Landscape, economically, politically, medically, it's all on the table. This

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is a search for what he calls the ultimate computer.

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Speaker 1: A machine that doesn't just simulate the world with zeros

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and ones, but computes directly on the building blocks of reality.

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Speaker 2: Itself, on atoms, on their electrons.

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Speaker 3: If you can compute on that level, you can perfectly

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model the molecular world.

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Speaker 1: And the molecular world is where everything happens. It's the

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source code for life, for chemist street, for new materials,

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for energy.

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Speaker 3: But before we get to the really mind bending stuff,

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we have to start with the crisis that's forcing this

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revolution in the first place. We have to talk about

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the collapse of Moore's law.

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Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack that, because our entire modern civilization really

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has been built on this one idea, Moore's law exactly.

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It's been the sacred text of Silicon Valley for fifty years.

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The idea that computer power, essentially the number of transistors

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you can cram on a chip, doubles roughly every eighteen months, a.

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Speaker 3: Law that has held remarkably steady for decades.

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Speaker 1: We've just internalized it. You expect your phone to be

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twice as powerful every couple of years. The AI models

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that run the world get exponentially more complex.

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Speaker 3: It's the engine, it is the primary engine of modern

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economic growth. And that is precisely why doctor Kokhu's warning

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is so so dire.

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Speaker 2: He says, Moore's law.

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Speaker 3: Isn't just slowing down, it's about to flatten out completely.

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Speaker 1: And the economic implication of that is huge.

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Speaker 3: It's a potential catastrophe. The whole consumer economy, especially in tech,

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runs on the promise of better. If the next computer

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is only a tiny bit better than your old one,

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why upgrade?

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Speaker 1: You don't And corporations don't upgrade their massive data centers.

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Demand just dries up, and that.

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Speaker 3: As Cocky points out, could cascade into a deep depression

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for the entire computer industry and everything that relies on it.

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Our prosperity has been based on acceleration.

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Speaker 1: So when that acceleration stops, the whole system just seizes up.

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It's a fascinating and frankly terrifying thought. It's a shift

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from innovation to just maintenance. Right, So let's get into

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the why. Why is this ceiling unavoidable? What's the actual

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physical limit we're slamming into.

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Speaker 3: It's purely a question of size of scale. For decades,

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engineers have performed miracles shrinking those little on off switches

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transistors down to microscopic level.

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Speaker 1: Let's talk about things measured in nanometers.

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Speaker 3: Now we are the most advanced chips today have transistors

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that might be say, twenty atoms across in their critical parts,

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which is all already unbelievable engineer. But the real point

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of no return, the hard physical stop, is around five atoms.

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Speaker 1: Across five atoms. That is just it's hard to even

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picture something that small. Why five? Why is that the

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magic number where it all falls apart?

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Speaker 3: Because that's where the digital world dies and the quantum

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world takes over.

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Speaker 1: What do you mean by that?

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Speaker 3: In our normal classical world, we think of an electron

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as a tiny dot right, little billiard ball that you

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can reliably contain. Digital computing depends on that reliability. The

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electron is either here making a one, or it's over

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there making.

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Speaker 1: A zero, clean, definitive exactly.

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Speaker 3: But when the wall separating your one from your zero

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is only five atoms thick, you enter the quantum realm.

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And in that realm, as Cocker really emphasizes, the electron.

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Speaker 2: Is not a dot.

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Speaker 1: It's a wave.

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Speaker 2: It's a wave.

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Speaker 3: It's a cloud of probability, and waves don't respect tiny

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little walls.

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Speaker 2: They can leak.

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Speaker 1: So you're talking about quantum tunneling, the idea that the

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electron can just phase through the barrier.

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Speaker 3: That's it, exactly. The electron wave just leaks out. It

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has a non zero probability of just appearing on the

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other side of the gap, even without enough energy to

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go over it.

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Speaker 1: So your perfect one can suddenly become a zero or

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something in between.

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Speaker 3: It creates short circuits, it creates noise, randomness, instability, Your

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clean digital signal gets corrupted. And on top of that,

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all that leakage generates an incredible amount of heat.

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Speaker 1: Which is already a massive problem for chip designers. They

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can barely cool the things we have now they can't.

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Speaker 3: So the solution isn't better engineering in the digital sense.

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The only way forward is to stop fighting quantum mechanics

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and start using it. We have to go beyond zero

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in one.

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Speaker 1: So the failure of our tiniest component forces us to

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embrace the wildest rules in all of physics. That is

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a powerful idea. We need a new way to compute.

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We need to use the atoms themselves, and.

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Speaker 2: That's the fundamental difference.

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Speaker 3: Digital computers take smooth reality and you know, they force

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it into these rigid little boxes of zeros in one.

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So approximation, very very good approximation, but still an approximation.

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But the natural world, molecules, biology, energy, it's all based

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on electrons, which are inherently, as CaCu says, smooth, They

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exist as a continuum of possibilities.

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Speaker 1: In a quantum computer or an atomic computer is designed

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to work with that smoothness directly exactly. Okay, So this

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is where people listening might need to take a deep breath,

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because the concepts get pretty weird and they defy our

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everyday logic. The core power source here is a principle

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called superposition.

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Speaker 3: Right in our world, a light switches on or it's off.

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A bit is a zero or it's a one, there's

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no in between.

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Speaker 1: Superposition says that a quantum bit equibit can be a

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zero and a one at the exact same time.

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Speaker 3: And I know for a lot of people hearing that,

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the reaction is that's ridiculous, that's stupid. But this is

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what quantum physics demonstrates again and again. It's just how

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reality works at that scale, and.

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Speaker 1: That simultaneous existence is where the exponential power comes from.

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Speaker 2: Right, that's the key.

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Speaker 3: If you have say two normal bits, you have four

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possible states.

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Speaker 2: Zero, zero, zero, zero, one, ten.

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Speaker 3: Eleven, but you can only be in one of those.

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Speaker 2: At a time.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, have to check on one by one.

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Speaker 2: But with two.

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Speaker 3: Quibbits, because of superposition, they can exist in all four

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of those states at the same time.

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Speaker 1: And as you add more quibbits, that power just explodes.

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Speaker 2: It explodes.

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Speaker 3: The numbers get astronomical fast. You know, a quantum computer

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with just fifty or sixty stable quibits could be more

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powerful than the biggest supercomputer on the planet today.

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Speaker 1: I've heard Kaku say that with a few hundred quibuts

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you can encode more information than there are atoms in

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the known universe.

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Speaker 2: It's a different kind of scaling.

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Speaker 3: A digital machine explores one path through a maze at

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a time. A quantum machine explores every single possible path simultaneously, Which.

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Speaker 1: Brings us to the most incredible analogy from the source material,

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the idea that these machines are computing across parallel universes.

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Speaker 2: I mean, it sounds like science fiction.

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Speaker 1: It sounds exactly like something from Marvel comics.

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Speaker 3: And Kaku points out that's where Marvel got the idea.

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From quantum physics. Each of those simultaneous states in the

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superposition can be thought of as its own parallel reality.

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The computer is literally exploring all of them at once

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to find a solution.

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Speaker 1: But if the calculation is happening in all these different universes,

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how do you get a single answer back here in

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our reality? What pulls it all together? Ah?

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Speaker 3: That's the other piece of the puzzle. A phenomenon even

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stranger than superposition called.

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Speaker 1: Entanglement, Einstein's spooky action at a distance.

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Speaker 2: That's the one. When you entangle two kibbutz, they become linked,

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inextricably linked.

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Speaker 3: Whatever you do to one instantly affects the other and

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no matter how far apart they are.

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Speaker 1: So they're not just a bunch of independent particles anymore.

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Speaker 3: Now they act as a single, massive, interconnected computational object.

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That linkage is what allows the system to work in

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concert across all those parallel states.

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Speaker 1: Okay, so you have this massive parallel computation going on.

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How do you get the answer?

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Speaker 3: The quantum algorithm, the program you're running, is designed to

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do something really clever. It uses a process called quantum interference. Essentially,

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it arranges things so that all the wrong answers cancel

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each other out.

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Speaker 1: Like waves on a pond interfering with each other.

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Speaker 3: Precisely, the peaks of the wrong answers meet the troughs

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and they just disappear, while the waves for the correct

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answer all line up and reinforce each other.

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Speaker 1: So when you finally look at the system, when you

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perform a measurement.

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Speaker 3: The whole system, the whole cloud of possibilities, collapses into

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one single definite state, and because of that interference, it's

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overwhelmingly likely to collapse onto the right answer.

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Speaker 1: So you're not searching for an answer, You're creating a

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physical system where the answer is the most probable outcome,

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and then you just collapse it into reality.

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Speaker 3: You are calculating on reality itself. You're not simplifying the

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universe into zeros and ones anymore.

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Speaker 1: That is a fundamental shift, and that's what lets us

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tackle problems that have been completely impossible until now.

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Speaker 3: Right because so many of humanity's biggest challenges in medicine, energy,

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agriculture are molecular problems.

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Speaker 2: They're quantum problems at their core.

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Speaker 1: So let's get into those applications. Yeah, Kaku breaks it

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down into health, energy, and food. Let's start with medicine.

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Speaker 3: The way we discover drugs right now is, as Kacu

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calls it, old fashioned slow.

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Speaker 2: It's trial and error.

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Speaker 1: You create thousands of chemicals in a lab and you

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just test them one by one in a petri dish,

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then in animals.

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Speaker 3: It can take a decade, cost billions of dollars, and

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most of the time it fails. It's incredibly inefficient.

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Speaker 1: And it is because we're essentially guessing. We can't really

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see what's happening at the molecular level with enough detail exactly.

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Speaker 3: Diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinsen's, many cancers, there are problems of

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protein folding. A crucial protein in your body folds into

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the wrong shape and stops working, or it starts clumping together.

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Speaker 1: And trying to simulate how a big protein folds on

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a digital computer is famously one of the hardest problems.

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Speaker 3: In science because the number of possible ways it could

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fold is astronomical. A digital computer has to approximate physics

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and it just gets overwhelmed. It can take years to

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get even a rough gas.

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Speaker 1: So what's the quantum future look like? For this?

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Speaker 3: The quantum computer is the perfect protein folding simulator. It

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doesn't have to approximate. It can model the electron clouds

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and the atomic interactions perfectly.

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Speaker 1: So you could run an experiment on a molecule directly

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in computer's memory.

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Speaker 3: A perfect simulation you can see exactly how a diseased

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protein misfolds, and then in the computer you could design

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the perfect Kia drug molecule that fits into it perfectly

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and deactivates it.

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Speaker 1: You could test a million potential drug candidates in an

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afternoon simulation instead of decade of lab work.

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Speaker 3: And kak who says the goal here is to turn

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medicine upside down to finally unlock the secrets of life

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itself by tackling these incurable diseases at their source. It's

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about curing the incurable.

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Speaker 1: That's monumental. So moving from our bodies to the planet,

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let's talk about energy. The promise of fusion.

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Speaker 3: The holy grail, unlimited clean up energy, almost for free.

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Speaker 1: The fuel is just hydrogen, which you can get from seawater.

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It creates massive amounts of energy with no long lived

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nuclear waste, no risk of a meltdown like with current

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nucre fission plants.

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Speaker 3: Oh, the problem has always been containment. You're trying to

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hold a start of plasma hotter than the sun inside

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a magnetic bottle, and it's incredibly unstable.

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Speaker 1: It wants to break free.

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Speaker 2: It's chaotic.

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Speaker 3: The plasma wabbles, it twists, the reaction can just fall

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apart in an instant, and modeling that turbulence, that chaos

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is another one of those problems that's just too complex

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for digital computers.

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Speaker 1: They're too slow to predict what the plasma is going

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to do in real time and adjust the magnetic fields

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to stop it exactly.

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Speaker 3: And that's where quantum computers come in. Kaku suggests they

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could be essential to stabilize the reaction. They could run

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perfect real time simulations of the plasma's behavior.

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Speaker 1: So the computer could see an instability forming before it happens.

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Speaker 3: And tell the reactor's control system exactly how to tweak

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the magnetic fields to contain it. That level of fine

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tuning is what could finally make sustained stable fusion power

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or reality, which.

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Speaker 1: Would solve the world's energy crisis forever fundamentally. Okay, so

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health energy. The third pillar is food agriculture. The first

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Green Revolution saved billions of people from starvation with the

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invention of cheap nitrogen fertilizer.

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Speaker 3: But that revolution, as Kaku notes, is slowly coming to

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an end. It's incredibly energy intensive.

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Speaker 1: The process for making fertilizer, the haber Bosch process, uses

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something like one to two percent of the entire world's

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energy output.

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Speaker 3: It's a brute force method using immense heat and pressure,

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and it relies heavily on fossil fuels.

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Speaker 2: But nature does it better.

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Speaker 1: You mean the bacteria in the soil, right.

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Speaker 3: Certain microbes can take nitrogen right out of the air

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and turn it into ammonia fertilizer at room temperature with

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almost no energy input. They have special enzyme that does it.

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Speaker 1: And we have no idea how that enzyme works because

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again it's too complex to simulate digitally.

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Speaker 3: The quantum mechanics of that reaction inside that enzyme are

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just beyond our current computers. But a quantum computer could

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model it.

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Speaker 1: Perfectly, so we could finally understand the.

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Speaker 2: Secret and then replicate it.

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Speaker 3: We could design a new artificial catalyst that mimics what

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that bacteria does. We could create fertilizer efficiently, cheaply, without

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the massive energy cost and carbon footprint.

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Speaker 1: A second green revolution, as he calls it.

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Speaker 3: It would make food security cheaper, more sustainable, and available

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to everyone.

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Speaker 1: So when you have a technology with the potential to

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solve these huge global problems energy, medicine, food, it's no

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surprise that it becomes the focus of an intense, high

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stakes race.

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Speaker 2: An arms race. Really.

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Speaker 3: Cucou is very clear that if you're a country or

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a company that isn't in this race, you risk becoming

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totally irrelevant.

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Speaker 1: And we're seeing that play out right now. The big

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names are all in.

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Speaker 3: Oh yeah, Google, IBM, Honeywell, they're all pouring billions into

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building the actual hardware, the physical quibots and Wall Street

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is just flooding the zone with ventn your.

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Speaker 1: Capital right, turning tiny startups from a few years ago

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into multi billion dollar companies. Everyone scrambling to put their

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flag on the mountain, and.

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Speaker 3: The risk for the old garb for Silicon Valley is existential.

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Kaku has this chilling line where he says, if they

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don't get this right, Silicon Valley could become the next

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rust Belt.

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Speaker 1: Because their entire business model is built on that assumption

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of endless exponential growth from Moore's law. If that's over,

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they need the next thing, and this is it.

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Speaker 3: It's the only thing on the horizon that offers that

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kind of exponential leap. But beyond the economics, the most

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immediate and honestly the most terrifying implication is for security,

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for code breaking.

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Speaker 1: This is the part of the Kaku transcript that really

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gave me a knot in my stomach. It's not just

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a little better at cracking codes.

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Speaker 3: It's a fundamental break. It shatters the entire foundation of

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modern encryption.

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Speaker 1: So everything we do online, banking, government secrets, military communications,

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your private data, it's all protected by something called public

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key cryptograph, right.

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Speaker 3: And its security relies on a very simple mathematical trick.

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It's easy to multiply two huge prime numbers together, but

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it's incredibly incredibly hard to take that resulting giant number

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and figure out which two primes you started with.

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Speaker 1: That's called factoring. And for a normal digital computer, the

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time it takes to factor a big number grows exponentially

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with its size.

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Speaker 3: So we make the number so big that it would

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take a classical computer hundreds or even billions of years

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to crack it.

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Speaker 2: It's safe because it's.

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Speaker 1: Slow, and Kaku gives this great concrete example. He says,

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imagine a code based on a number that's fifty digits long.

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A digital computer might take centuries to factor.

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Speaker 3: That, but a quantum computer running a specific program called

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Shor's algorithm is uniquely suited to solve exactly this kind

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of problem because it can check all the potential factors

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at the same time across all those parallel universes.

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Speaker 1: So that fifty digit number that takes centuries, a.

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Speaker 3: Powerful enough quantum computer could potentially crack it almost instantly.

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Speaker 1: That is a world breaking capability. It means every secret

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that's ever been sent over the Internet, every encrypted file,

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it's all.

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Speaker 3: Vulnerable, which leads to the chilling question, are governments right

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now just recording and stockpiling huge amounts of encrypted data

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from their adversaries.

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Speaker 1: Just waiting waiting for the day they can switch on

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their quantum computer into crypt at all.

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Speaker 3: It's a scenario that intelligence agencies like the FBI and

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the CIA are taking very, very seriously.

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Speaker 2: It's why there's a.

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Speaker 3: Global panic right now to develop what's called post quantum cryptography,

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new kinds.

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Speaker 1: Of encryption that are safe even from a quantum.

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Speaker 2: Attack exactly now.

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Speaker 3: The good news, as Kaku is quick to point out,

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is that we are not there yet. Today's quantum computers

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are too small and too noisy to break anything serious.

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Speaker 1: So your bank account is safe for.

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Speaker 2: Now, for now.

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Speaker 3: But he says that when this capability does arrive, it

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will force a major revision of how we code our

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most treasured national secrets. It's maybe the biggest security upgrade

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the world has ever.

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Speaker 2: Had to face.

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Speaker 1: Okay, so, whenever we talk about a technology this powerful,

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one that can design drugs, create energy, crack any code,

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the natural human fear is, well, what about my job?

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Speaker 2: Will it put me on the unemployment line?

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Speaker 1: Right? If this machine can solve impossible problems, are doctors, chemists, mathematicians,

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and engineers just obsolete.

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Speaker 3: It's a really important question, and Kaku addresses it with

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what I think is a perfect analogy. It completely reframes

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the whole issue.

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Speaker 1: He says that computer isn't a replacement for the human mind,

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not at all.

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Speaker 3: He says, the quantum computer is like a powerful hammer

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for a carpenter.

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Speaker 1: The hammer doesn't replace the carpenter. It just makes them

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more powerful. It expands what they're capable of building.

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Speaker 2: That's it exactly.

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Speaker 3: Your value as a scientist isn't in doing the tedious

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math by hand. It's in having the insight the creativity

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to ask the right questions. The computer just does the

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heavy lifting, the calculation.

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Speaker 1: So the computer can simulate a million drug molecules, but

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a biologist still has to decide which protein to target

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in the first place and why.

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Speaker 3: And a physicist still has to analyze the data from

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the fusion simulation and figure out how to engineer a

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better reactor. The computer is a tool for discovery, not

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the discoverer itself.

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Speaker 1: And Kaku is very direct about who the real losers

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will be in this future.

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Speaker 3: He says, the people on the unemployment line will be

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the biologists, the chemists, the mathematicians who do not use

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quantum computers.

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Speaker 1: So the real divide is in between humans and machines.

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It's between the professionals who adopt the new powerful tools.

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Speaker 3: And those who stick with the old, obsolete ones. The

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winners will be the people who harness this technology to

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invent the future of medicine and energy and transportation.

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Speaker 1: It's a call for adaptation, not a prediction of obsolescence.

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It's about freeing up human ingenuity from the shackles of computation.

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Speaker 3: A renaissance for the hard sciences.

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Speaker 1: What a journey. We started with the physical death of

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the transistor, the end of Moore's law, and landed here

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in a place where we have to embrace the weirdness

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of the electron wave.

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Speaker 3: Itself, seeing how that weirdness, superposition and entanglement allows for

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computation in parallel realities.

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Speaker 1: Which in turn promises to solve some of the biggest

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problems humanity has ever faced. Yeah, health, energy, food, it's

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all on the table.

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Speaker 3: We are really shifting from a technology based on clever

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engineering to one based on fundamental physics, harnessing the universe's

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own operating system. But that incredible promise, as we've discussed,

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it comes with a deep shadow.

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Speaker 1: A truly existential threat to our entire digital security infrastructure.

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And this isn't science fiction happening one hundred years from now.

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The race is on today.

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Speaker 3: Governments and corporations are moving at incredible.

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Speaker 1: Speed, so we want to leave you with something to

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think about. Considering the imminent, mathematically certain threat that quantum

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computers pose to all our current digital codes. Do you

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think governments and tech companies are moving fast enough?

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Speaker 3: Are they creating and deploying these new quantum resistant protections

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quickly enough?

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Speaker 1: Or is this technological revolution simply outpacing our ability to

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secure ourselves. Is that vast encrypted vault of all the

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world's secrets just waiting to be cracked open by the

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quantum key of tomorrow.

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Speaker 3: It's a powerful question to consider.

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Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on this installment of thrilling threads.

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We'd love to hear what you think about this monumental

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shift