Assessing the Business Impact of Quantum Technologies
OODAcast informing your decisions with intelligence analysis and insight brought to you by the team at oodaloop.com hello I'm Bob Gourley the chief technology officer of OODA LLC and today on the udacast Lawrence gassman the president of inside Quantum technology Lawrence thanks for joining us today sure thanks for inviting me Lawrence I've been a fan of your site for a long time you guys provide a lot of information in a very I think unique way for Business Leaders and I definitely want to talk about Quantum and Quantum Technologies but first wanted to ask a bit about your background can you tell us who Lawrence gassman is and um how you got into the role of President of inside Quantum technology well I'm old so I've had plenty of time to get there um as far as education goes I've always been a nerd uh going way back um my first degree from University of Manchester in England was in mathematics and philosophy uh and then I went on it's not really clear from the fact that my next part was the London School of Economics uh there's a lot of things that London School of economics and I went to scout to study mathematical logic and philosophy of science and had I finished my PhD which I didn't um I would have been writing a paper on quantum mechanics I mean a thesis on quantum mechanics and but more from a philosophical point of view so I've been involved with quantum mechanics a long time more than half a century I suppose um and then a lot of things happened to me which we don't need to go into but um I ended up getting my MBA at London Business School which turned out to be a very valuable education for what I ended up doing I so I guess I've indicated I originally grew up in the UK moved to the states um and got involved with the analyst Community initially in uh in the Telecom business and Advanced Materials um then in 3D printing actually and finally in quantum uh technology um and throughout that the time I've been here I've owned or partially earned analyst firms in that space right and so uh today you're at inside Quantum technology and I know that as both a site and a community you hold events and you bring folks together and you produce research did I get that about right yeah pretty right uh we have a podcast um we have a site that um it is a new site primarily um we put out um market research reports on a fairly regular basis on our topics of interest in the quantum community and as you say we have uh trade shows slash conferences in both the US and Europe um I've missed something I'm sure of it but I can't think about right now so all right well through that I know you're all good communicators and that's some of the questions I wanted to ask you may test some of your communication skills uh Lawrence because one thing I really think is still lacking is more business Executives need to understand this world of quantum effects but you don't expect Business Leaders to have a background in quantum mechanics and I wanted to ask how you explain to people this world of quantum mechanics how do you talk to a business leader about this so to be fair um there will be some Business Leaders who do know something about it certainly in um Electronics or the electronics Industry or maybe even in the farmer industry uh the kinds of people who are leading the companies uh often have phds or at least master's degrees in the science so they would have started quantum mechanics and know a lot about it um you know they may never teach it or anything um I think one way of explaining it on the on the fingers of one hand as it were would be to say look with regular Computing as everybody knows from high school you've got ones and zeros and that's the high level theoretical side of it but you have to model it onto something real to make a computer work so you model it onto Gates and they're either on or off and it's very simple and don't knock it for that that's one of the reasons it's been so successful but obviously it takes time to compute things that way it takes less time if instead of ones and zeros you can have uh essentially an infinite number of states all of which can carry information problem is you've got to have something to model it onto and what you do there and again this is an amazingly simplistic view of it is to model it on to Quantum phenomena the kind of really weird Quantum phenomena one of them's entire government but what it all boils down to is in a Quantum machine you've got a fantastic level of parallel processing you're just not doing something linear you know one plus one plus one you're doing one plus one plus one and then somewhere else you're doing 103 plus again you know not very good examples because you can do it in parallel your the speed the times of computing speed up um and to take a very well known example you can break a code um uh the kind of codes for we use all the time for encryption um with a regular computer but it might take and then here you've got to believe what people say I've seen everything from 9 000 years to 9 billion years but it doesn't matter because it is going you know I mean you're not going to sit around and wait but it could be down to nine hours if you're um if you're using your quantum computer and then that becomes a real threat to you know pretty standard encryption right thanks that is a very clear and helpful articulation of these Quantum effects and Quantum Computing very helpful and you also mentioned something else you said entanglement and this is another one that's is this is the one that Einstein called spooky Magic seems so hard to understand the reality of things at this super small level yeah it really is and and that's a perfect example um so he actually called it spooky action at a distance spooky action at a distance action at a distance and the the classical physics you don't have action at the distance if you know if I'm moving you but there has to be something intervening and in really classical Computing you have particles that are moving between things and and he wanted he think Einstein wanted to reduce all physics to that and he thought anything that appeared to um to go against that was there was something methodologically wrong with it um and it turns out in entanglement you can entangle two particles to Quantum particles two Elementary particles in a way that if I do something to particle a it automatically instantaneously happens to particle B um and uh then you get yourself into all sorts of paradoxes which is faster than light information and you're right people don't understand it and actually nobody understands that particular uh thing but it turns out ironically that you can you can work with it and do interesting things with it even if we don't understand it I just occurred to me it's like hypnosis nobody knows how that works either um right but people are hypnotized routinely every day so um but what it all means is whether I was going to wrap my PhD gets thesis on about 50 years ago but uh that won't happen now so right well one thing we know for sure is that experiments tell us again and again and again that this is how it works even if we don't know why it works that way all these things I think there's quite a bit of experimental evidence saying this is how it works yeah so um if you take that spooky action as a distance uh thingy um there was a guy called oh what was he called Bell I can't talk with his first name is Irish physicist and essentially he came up with a way of um showing that um under any reasonable condition uh we really did have spooky action there's a distance and then much more recently and French physicists could Alan aspect who actually was part of the quantum technology Community now he works for a firm um he showed that experimentally it must be right and there's still people who take the Einstein point of view and are trying to show that it's right but that's a whole different story right all this stuff is very interesting and I think every high school today teaches these uh strange effects where at that scale something can be both a wave and a particle which is counterintuitive if you're thinking at our scale but at the quantum level is extremely important extremely important Quantum effect to understand I think yeah now actually uh some of those experiments go back a Long Way to the 19th century but uh one of the debates that used to be held is whether it only applies a very small scale and I think the consensus is it now it applies to everything including you and me um it's just that the quantum effects tends to cancel themselves out so you know you're a Quantum entity and we could do Quantum Computing with you um but it would be quite difficult to do and meet exclude myself um but uh um well the sure thing is cat experiment that everybody thinks they know about is essentially showing that that a Quantum event can kill a cat which shows that it can impact uh macro level this is all very fascinating and um I can see how um you were talking about your earlier degree of mathematics and philosophy it kind of all fits um some of this because it really does yeah but it's also oh go ahead oh I was just going to say there's been a couple of periods in the there's been a couple of periods in the history of quantum mechanics when it's become more about philosophy than about physics and you can find some of that still around yeah and I tell you as a as a business guy I'm very excited about how all of this Theory and all of this experiment is now translating into the business world and businesses have been stood up to bring these kind of things to Market and of course there's a big research by Google and IBM and Microsoft on new ways of doing Quantum Computing and of course d-wave and others so it's a very exciting time in the business world where all these theoretical constructs are being turned into real capabilities there's a probably oh somebody's going to write in and tell you I'm an idiot but I think that's about probably about eight to ten companies with quantum computers right now um of different degrees of power for different applications uh you mentioned some of them um the there's also probably another 20 or 30 companies who produce Quantum processors which are the same thing as processors in any computer they're the gats of the computer they're the things that the Computing but whereas IBM uh take a very good example is producing a full stack computer which is you know it's it's everything you plug it in and it works the processor is simply the thing that goes at the in the center of it like you know Intel is one of the companies producing Quantum processes or engineering month and work engineering research on them and you know at the heart of a lot of a lot of non-quantum machines as well and then of course there's people working on Quantum security Quantum sensors and Quantum networks all of which have something to do with each other right and Lawrence let me ask your view about this first let me give you kind of a thesis I believe that well guys like you you've been studying Quantum for a long time and you have a background an academic background where you studied it intensely um and I think you're studying that intensely for years and writing about it and running inside Quantum technology gives you good insights a lot of people don't have that background and it's hard to understand this technology so how can we know if the claims of a Quantum Computing company are valid or not and the reason I ask this is um in any other domain in Computing if a company makes a claim I can test that I can bring it into my lab and see if this software works the way they said it would or if their Hardware works the way they said it would but with Quantum Computing I don't know of any way to really know if uh claims are valid or not well yes and no um yes in the sense that we're in the very early days um so a lot of the I mean are there quantum computers that's one of those things you see on Wikipedia is a question and yeah I'm so sure there are um you know pay enough money to IBM and they'll ship you and they're doing it now um but um so that's easily disposed of can it do anything useful yeah it can it can optimize stuff pretty well so if you're designing drugs for instance you can feed it through some of these machines d-wave you mentioned specifically has designed their machine which isn't quite a compute but they're going to start providing proper computers but the original one was an optimization machine so they do do useful things and in that sense um if you wind up with a better drug or a better portfolio in a investment house hedge fund or something you can prove it because it's doing better than the one you didn't design with that but um obviously the power of a quantum computer is depending on the number of qubits you can handle not bits qubits like I was talking about at the beginning and we have we we're in a fuzzy period where it's difficult to show that a useful problem that can't be solved by a uh regular computer can be solved by quantum computer but we're getting very close to that time um I I think and maybe this is an oversimplification that we've got to a point where you can invent a problem mathematical problem that can only be solved by a quantum computer and not by a regular computer the only thing is it's not a useful problem you set up the problem to make the point and and that's by the way a standard standard way of doing things within mathematics to you know to to prove a theorem but but obviously if you're you know you keep on mentioning business people if you're a practical businessman that probably sounds pretty stupid and if you're trying to make money out of that you can't so yeah you know we're again on the cusp of getting to a point and it'll it'll happen gradually in this in one sense it will happen gradually because people will tackle more and more difficult problems in another sense it might happen overnight because we're at such an early stage that break you know breakthroughs are unpredictable but inevitable right so maybe um I think that all makes a lot of sense maybe a close analogy might be the Wright brothers fly first manned flight 1903 and that airplane could do nothing um it was you know what's the use case of that first airplane it couldn't carry the mail it couldn't you know do anything but it proved something it proved that man flight was possible and maybe would you consider that an analogy to where we are in Quantum yeah yeah absolutely so if you take I mean the two applications that come up all the time are as I mentioned Material Science or lymphoma or in the uh in the financial services and um and people are experimenting with this every major bank has access to quantum computers at this time you know not your small local banks I live in rural Virginia and we've got a few banks around here it's going to be many years before they have access but uh you know the Goldman Sachs of this world they're paying a lot of money to put the the quantum teams that paying a lot of money for the service but at the end of the day if you were uh uh putting together a portfolio for some huge industrial com company would you really hand it all over to a quantum computer and say yeah this is it because it is a computer it has the same error potential and um uh you know you you could really screw things up completely if if uh if it goes wrong even more so for making drugs oh sorry we killed a million people but quantum computers did it um uh so we've got ways to go before some of these things can be trusted enough but that that's always true um you know uh I'm it's not so true anymore but you know it was a long way from Wright brothers which was a dangerous thing to do to flying in a Pan Am InterContinental flight in the 60s right these days not that Pleasant to fly but the analogy breaks down but you know what I mean yeah absolutely absolutely yeah all right and Lawrence I want to you also mentioned uh Quantum sensing and I hear that term a lot and to me when I think of quantum sensing I think of the medical devices in most hospitals today uh like the MRI for example is using Quantum effects to understand what's going on in your body is that kind of the state of quantum sensing today well yes and no again um there are sensors quite a lot of them actually but the majority of actually magnetometers but it's true across a whole range of sensing like sensors and motion sensors and things that use quantum phenomena uh specifically to measure things and and the point there kind of sorter is the Quantum phenomena are very sensitive um so I suppose you could make the case that every kind of Medical Imaging is is a Quantum thing but they're talking when they talk about that they're talking about new forms of Imaging with explicitly Quantum phenomena at their core um and there's a number of different types and they are very good at uh identifying uh tumors and all sorts of things um some of them are in Practical effect most of them aren't um but every I'm sure this is wrong but I'm going to say it anyway that every sensor has a Quantum equivalent that's that much um that much more effective sensitive whatever and it's really got to do with the quantum events always so sensitive to intervention of some kind that you know you could make some fairly fantastic things out of it um Quantum sensing is actually becoming a hot topic now it had been pretty much an academic topic and when we started this series of conferences it was an academic topic but uh you're now seeing real military applications or it uh Medical Imaging applications for it and there were people who have finding ways of turning arrays of quantum sensors into quantum computers uh counter quantum computers are based on in some ways fairly conventional technology but there's a half a dozen ways of doing it including Atomic Computing with Quantum phenomena and it using sensors is the it's a basic physical fabric I mean that's over R and D stuff it's not out there all right thanks Lawrence that's good context and you also mentioned earlier Quantum security and I wanted to mention a friend of mine who I interviewed on the udacast last year uh Vic Vikram Sharma who's the CEO of quintessence labs and uh he like you I think is a he's a good explainer and uh and I think he has to be in his field because uh what quintessence Labs does is leverage Quantum effects to generate encryption keys and do that at you know they can do Millions a second and he has to be able to explain that to busy Security Professionals who are not Quantum experts um but he's where I've learned a lot about Quantum security from but would love your context on the leveraging of quantum effects for the security side of the equation so I know Vikram uh I know what quintessence Labs does but um so part of this is it's not physics it's coincidence most of the security that we use at the moment and have done for 40 years is is public key encryption um and that means that part of the key part of the code travels over a public network um and because you have the code book at the other end literally but the equivalent um it doesn't matter that anyone can get it um what's being looked and the funny thing is that they could have chosen a lot of different encryption schemes which might be very difficult to break even with the quantum computer uh it turns out they chose one that's very easy to break with a quantum computer and and that's just weirdness in history and there's several levels of weirdness to it um so there's two ways of doing something about that and uh one of them is called uh qkd uh Quantum key distribution which means that the channel That the uh the channel that the key goes in is protected using Quantum technology essentially it's a bit it's a lot like a um it's a lot like uh it's not like Quantum sensing actually uh when you try to break in and get the key if you're a bad person um it just disappears on you um and um you know so that's Quantum protecting protecting Quantum from Quantum I suppose uh the other way of doing it and that's what contestants labs and about 20 other companies are doing um uh and some of them are shifting stuff some of them aren't uh the other way of doing it is to say look we screwed up we should have an entirely different kinds of just regular not Quantum way of encrypting things that just aren't that vulnerable to quantum computers and that's what uh it's called post Quantum encryption that's what that is and um since today I'll mention that uh nist and government agency part of um part of uh Department of Commerce um has held a competition for the best post-quantum encryption schemes and they announced the uh they announced the winners today actually I just haven't had a chance to look at who they were um and uh at least one friend of mine is competing in that so there's nothing Quantum about post Quantum cryptography it's just that the consideration is that it's not hard to it's not it's very hard to break with the quantum computer so that's the two things that's happening in that space all right thanks good context and uh regarding the nist announcement I haven't read that myself yet either but have been anticipating it um I'll definitely put the link in our show notes as soon as we publish this well I wanted to be fair to this I was going to say there's no there's no real end to this because people will be coming out with new forms of software and encryption and things so you know then this announcement is in many ways the first stage which will keep us going for a few years right all right so I have a feeling this may also coalesce a lot more r d spending because now I think businesses will feel more comfortable that they're investing in something that has legs um do you share that view yeah I mean some of the big numbers you see are often from governments um who have uh you know Quantum programs um even little countries like well particularly Holland have 650 million through into it a year or so ago um and I mean that's everything so it goes into education and you know if you if you have to pay to ship something it's in there too so it's not you really don't see 600 million dollars worth of Staff um as far as businesses go I'd say they're already investing usually uh at the level of r d and just trying things out um I mentioned two industries that are particularly using it but it's right across the board um and I'm an automotive industry and transportation they're using it too but in very experimental ways um uh so it's part of their r d budget um so I think the other part of the question that you asked was how long will it take to pay off and and the answer maybe God knows um I don't know that any of them are entering this thinking you know that there's a promise that it's going to pay off anytime soon um what they hope I suppose is it will pay off and also that it places them as leaders in in the field uh I mentioned the financial services industry and um I think I said Goldman Sachs and and it is spending a lot of money on developing a Quantum department but so but think of a major bank and so are they um and you know in every country really and um uh again my my little bank that I bank with here it's not so little actually it's all the way down to Florida probably isn't thinking about that but if you're based in the if your headquarters are in New York you kind of are because if you don't your shareholders are going to want to know why I I'd say we're still at the point that some of this stuff just isn't going to work out and this already some cases where it hasn't but um uh but and we'll not know for a few years uh you know I don't I've already mentioned my age I don't expect to be around during the real area of quantum technology but it's happening fast now well Lawrence one thing I know will be around is inside Quantum technology you got a great company and it's going to endure uh for a century I just know it so thanks for building that yes for a century pleasure it wasn't just me of course but yeah I know it takes a team but you're a great leader and I appreciate you building that site and using it to explain to all of us these Quantum Technologies and Lawrence thank you very much for joining us today on the udacast I really appreciate it uh my pleasure I enjoyed every moment thanks for listening to this ooda Loop production for the latest analysis on cyber security technology and Global risks please visit www.oodaloop.com
2022-09-04 15:41
