Looking back at Moore's
Law, so many of us
could not have
imagined an end to that
and what it might
look like after.
And now we have your work.
And it is so big and
so vast, and it just
seems that the futures and
possibilities are endless.
Have you ever given
any thought to what
might come after,
if that is all,
all good exponentials
come to an end?
Right.
I was just about to say what you
said, that looking back, yeah,
exponentials can only run
for a very short time.
To be honest, I haven't
given it any thought.
I mean, it is
important to realize
that quantum processes
are not necessarily
general purpose processes.
Everything that computers
that you touch today can do
can also be done by
quantum processing,
but you would not necessarily
enjoy a huge benefit.
For example, something
like you take video,
you upload it to YouTube,
we serve it out to YouTube.
This is us today done
with classical processors.
And you could do this with
quantum processors and quantum
computers, but it would
take about the same time
and might even be a little
bit slower than doing it
with classical processors.
But a quantum processor
you should think more of
as a special purpose tool,
what computer scientists would
call a co-processor.
It's good at accelerating
certain tasks.
And for those tasks
which you can accelerate,
there you have something
that Neven's Law,
where you get this upward
exponention that will speed up.
You want to set the boundaries.
And my colleagues or
competitors who would say this
is not even established
yet, that it
would be truly the case.
So it would probably
involve the inclusion
of yet more exotic
physics, in the sense
that a quantum computer,
as the name suggests,
draws on the resources that
quantum mechanics offers us.
And you may know that one of
the big outstanding challenges
in physics is to reconcile
quantum mechanics
with general relativity.
That hasn't been done.
And so this would be referred
to as quantum gravity.
They don't have really
a theory for it.
But maybe quantum
gravitational resources
may be needed to transcend
what quantum computers can do.
So we would have to
corral a black hole
into becoming a computer,
something along those lines
that could transcend.
