Jon: Welcome to episode 172 of The Digital Life. A show about our insights into the future of design and technology. I'm your host Jon Follett and with me is Founder and co-host Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Greetings, Jon.

Jon: This week on the podcast, we're going to discuss the strange but exciting world of quantum computing. Quantum computers operate on an atomic level to harness the power of quantum mechanics to perform processing tasks that are much more rapid than those of computers designed using classical physics. They have the potential to perform calculations much, much faster than our silicone-based super computers of today. Up to 100 million times faster, in fact. Research in quantum computing has, up until recently, been largely theoretical with practical technology needed to achieve it beyond reach.

Now, both Google and D-Wave, a Canadian company, have made some significant progress in bringing quantum computing to life. D-Wave has a commercial quantum computer but it's not a universal quantum computer. It's suitable for solving certain kinds of computational problems around optimization. That's the limit of its capabilities. Will there be a coming revolution in computing power? Will quantum computers one day replace our silicone-based computing devices? That's some of the stuff that I think would be interesting to explore today, Dirk.

Dirk: Sure. I'm no expert on quantum computing. Perhaps you are and can help myself and the listeners better understand what we're talking about.

Jon: I can talk about how it works just based on my limited understanding. Today's computers work by manipulating bits that exist in one of two states. As you know, it's 0 or 1. Whereas, quantum computers, on the other hand, they're not limited to these two states. They encode information as qubits, which are quantum bits, which can exist in super positions. They can be both 0 and 1 at the same time. The quantum mechanics that make that happen are as confusing to me as I think they're probably as confusing to most laypeople. Because quantum computing contain these multiple states simultaneously, it has this potential to be millions of times more powerful than today's super computers.

Google is in the process of building this so-called universal quantum computer that it hopes will usher in a new era and making this technology not just lab and research-based but moving out of the labs and into the commercial sphere. What's exciting is that Google's universal quantum computer could be revealed or be finished as early as the end of next year, 2017. We're really waiting with baited breath to see if Google can pull this off. D-Wave, which is this Canadian company that has a quantum computer. Although, as I said earlier, not of the universal kind, is already selling their computers to researchers and to companies like Lockheed Martin. Even if it doesn't happen in 2017, this is definitely where the future of computing is looking.

What's really startling is how this technology might intersect with the technologies that we talk about all the time on the show. If you can imagine artificial intelligence and machine learning accelerated by quantum computing. We're talking about jumps of millions of times. Which means that the advances will happen all that much more quickly. Talk about the genomics research that we discuss all the time, that being accelerated millions of times. I think it's really in this intersection of quantum computing and some of the other areas of research and technology where this becomes exceptionally powerful. Your thoughts on that, Dirk?

Dirk: Yeah, that's right. It's really a microcosm of the shift that has happened in physics over the last 120 years, basically. Which is to say that, ever since the 17th century, the Newtonian mechanics, classical mechanics, ruled the scientists' notion of how the world worked. That changed even before atomic ... this radiation. Things that were smaller than we realized.