. A photon is simultaneously both a wave and a particle. Schrodinger’s cat is neither dead nor alive but some strange superposition of states in which it is both dead and alive. And an electron can tunnel through an energy barrier larger than the energy it possesses.
And only quantum strangeness can explain how the current government can distance itself from the past government’s sports rorts of tens of millions of dollars by its own quantum rort of nearly a billion dollars. But what if you step back and look at the larger impact? Boston Consulting Group has estimated that quantum technologies could grow Australia’s GDP by $48 billion and add around 240,000 jobs by 2040. That sounds quite a prize.
I call it the fallacy of the faster-thinking dog. Imagine your family dog had a magic dial, so you could turn up the speed with which it thinks. Even if you dialled it to 11, it would still be a dog, doing doggy things like chasing birds. It isn’t going to start composing sonnets in the style of William Shakespeare. It lacks some fundamental things like language.Quantum computing will give us speed. But speed alone is not the barrier to make artificial intelligence more intelligent.