When the likes of IBM spurred a rallying call, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, for the masses to join their revolution in personal computing, they sold us a dream of making our work, and our lives, easier. They would make us more productive, give us more free time to do the things we most wanted to do.
Surprisingly (or not) it turns out what the average person wants to do most is watch porn, download pirated movies and music, and click on Facebook ‘Like’ buttons that magically transform good intentions into sustenance for starving children in Ethiopia. Simplistically speaking, personal computing promised to make us happier.
Fast forward 30 years or so, and the very definition of personal computing has changed almost beyond recognition. No more that cumbersome metal box of a desktop PC; gone is the monitor with a display area to weight ratio rivalling a large house with only one window. Nowadays we have laptops, notebooks, netbooks, tablets, phablets, PDAs, smartphones, smart watches – the list goes on, and grows ever longer.
With all the choices at our fingertips, we should have so much free time we can barely contain our happiness. Our glee quotient ought to be so high that not even entire paragraphs of smilies, not even a zillion gigabytes of beaming selfies, should be enough to capture the extent of our insuppressible joy. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Don’t get me wrong: I don't deny that all this technology at our disposal has its benefits. It provides us with opportunities and convenience that would have been inconceivable before the computing age. Speaking from personal experience, having been without my car for an extended period last year, I developed such strong feelings for Uber I actually considered parting ways with my own car for good. Thanks to the Internet I’ve won so many lotteries and been bequeathed the vast fortunes of so many Nigerian princes that I could easily afford to retire to an island of my very own – just as soon as those cheques clear.
The problem is, it’s also become more convenient for telemarketers to call us every 15 seconds; for us to check our phones for urgent emails from a client or boss during dinner, or before (or even after) climbing into bed at night; to text while we drive; to hold our tablets above our heads to take photos at a rock concert instead of losing ourselves to the beautiful noise; to tweet about how awesome a particular sunset is rather than savouring every fleeting moment of the eye candy; to stream the latest box-office movie to our home media centre instead of taking that special someone to the drive-in. Where is the ‘ease of use’ we’ve been promised when my poor mother is too terrified to send an email lest she inadvertently unleash some sort of electronic apocalypse?
It must sound ironic, all this aspersion coming from an electronic engineer, but the truth is I love computers for what they are; sometimes I just resent what they’ve done to our lives.
The amazing thing about computers, and one of the reasons they’ve become so indispensable, is they’re absolutely brilliant at something humans are absolutely terrible at: doing repetitive tasks, at superhuman speeds, without tiring and with almost no errors. The downside is they’re poor at reasoning and lateral association – those are still our domain. But in our never-ending quest to come up with that one killer invention that will utterly obsolete ourselves, the next breakthrough may come from the field of quantum computing.
Quantum computing is based on the phenomenon of quantum mechanics, which is, quite frankly, weird. Even the genius that was Albert Einstein resorted to describing it cryptically as "spooky action at a distance", while Richard Feynman – theoretical physicist, pioneer of quantum computing, conceiver of nanotechnology and participant in the Manhattan Project – was once quoted as saying “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
IBM is once again in the thick of this nascent computing revolution. Its scientists have built a quantum processor that can be accessed through the cloud by literally anyone with Internet access. Called IBM Quantum Experience and accessible via www.research.ibm.com/quantum, it allows users to run algorithms and experiments by working with the individual quantum bits (qubits). For those not ready to actively experiment, the site also has some great background information, as well as tutorials and simulations around what might be possible with quantum computing.
Brett van den Bosch
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