Not Replacing, Enhancing!

Long article appearing on CNNmoney written for Fortune magazine on quantum computers. My favorite quote from the article:

But quantum computing scientists are surprisingly bullish, for scientists. “This is the most exciting time of my life, and I’m not young,” says Eli Yablonovitch, professor of electrical engineering at UCLA. “We’re looking forward to a direct impact on everybody in the world.”

And the most interesting quote is

Granted, changing the spin of an electron is a long way from building a circuit out of the same, and history is littered with promising technologies that didn’t pan out. Intel CEO Paul Otellini is one major quantum skeptic, increasingly reluctant to fund R&D for it. Reports of the death of silicon have been greatly exaggerated, he says

What is interesting, I think is that the article makes it sound like Paul Otellini thinks that quantum computers are somehow meant to be computers “beyond Moore’s law,” i.e. as a technology that moves beyond today’s Silicon based transistor technology. I think this is kind of crazy. The point of quantum computers is not that they will be “beyond Moore” but that there is an entirely new form of computing beyond the form of computing we are executing today. I’m skeptical of quantum computers as devices “beyond Moore’s law” too, mostly because I figure there is always a factor in the error correction needed to achieve quantum error correction over classical error correction. Thus any quantum computer I design, say from the single spin up, could probalby be put to use as a classical computer with less overhead needed for error correction. I think this view of quantum computers comes about because an argument made for quantum computing is usually to put up Moore’s law and point out that if it continues, it will eventually make atom sized transistors. This is kind of a silly argument and hides the idea that the reason you build a quantum computer is because it is an entirely new form of computation.