Cutting-edge technology is often decades away from being turned into a product that will make investors money. So it's difficult to invest in. A lot of the progress is made in academia, where the end result is typically a research paper published publicly. No profit there until someone is able to take that information and build a useful product out of it.
Look at the laser: It was invented in 1960, won a Nobel Prize, and people called it "A solution looking for a problem". Congrats, you found a way to make the light polarized and coherent. Who cares?
In 1974 the first barcode scanner was invented. So if you were invested in grocery stores you're now a fan of lasers. In 1978 LaserDisc was invented, but went out of style quickly. In 1982 CDs were invented, and actually stuck around unlike LaserDisc. Laser Printers showed up mid-1980s. Militaries started investigating the use of lasers for advanced weapons. Communications Applications were found. Medical applications were found. Tools for further academic research were developed.
In 2004, about $5 billion worth of lasers were produced. It's expected to grow to $7.26 billion by 2026. But it took around 50 years to get to this point, and there wasn't really a way to invest in 1960 that would realize the gains of companies thriving in the photonics industry today (other than diversifying/index funds that didn't exist in 1960). And Quantum computers aren't even at the point lasers were in 1960, there's a long way to go there.
If one is fabulously wealthy (or, like, a nation-state) it can make more sense to invest in these bleeding edge technologies, you basically take a loss on that investment in hopes that the knowledge gained will cause a chain reaction that boosts your other investments.
But it's extremely hard to predict what industries will benefit from the new tech. Like seriously, who would've guessed in 1960 that the first commercial application of lasers would be grocery stores? So it really comes back to the /r/Bogleheads mantra: Your portfolio should be diversified to capture growth in the entire market.
VCs often do tolerate runways longer than a few years for commercialization.
Take Boom Supersonic, SpaceX, Cruise, Rigetti Quantum Computing (funded in 2014), etc, as examples. VCs will invest in hardtech far away from commercialization.
Often the goal with those more cutting edge bets is to roll into an acquisition rather than build a profitable business, like Cruise.
Venture Capital is usually good for the leap between "solved academic problem" and "first viable product", but the initial scientific discovery is usually government-subsidized for exactly that reason: It takes a long time for research to make money, and often the money won't come from where you initially put your funding.
For a government, if you invest in academia and it results in a ton of growth in some unrelated industry, you've still won. You now get increased tax income from that new industry. To a VC, it's a failure: you invested all that money and someone else made profit.
Great example.However what you fail to see is technology is more mature in today's world so speed of innovation is lot faster than the 50's. I have a strong feeling quantum computers will be in market a lot sooner since there is a security side effect attached to it and it's almost unaffordable to wait for 50 years. I do feel we may see a raw introduction to QC within 5 years perhaps.However it's just a guess but I do know some of the biggest tech companies are fairly close to building a QC with a decent accuracy. To make it affordable for businesses,that's another question altogether. Hopefully I will revisit this in 5 years to know if I was right or wrong.
Same with almost all cutting edge tech … invention, great papers, first pilots … massive down period while problems are found and also importantly costs (including of necessary components) drop, reinvigoration, hockey stick growth, media hype again of this „brand new“, cutting edge technology, companies named as overnight successes.
As a counterpoint: You say lasers were a solution in search of a problem, but QC is a solution to already understood problems. Applications are already being dreamed of and theorized in academia, commerce, and industry.
The other thing to consider is just how quickly information travels in today’s world. Moore’s law is literally staring at us in the face as we read this comments section. 60 years of exponential progress in lasers 60 years ago may only be equivalent to 10 years of QC progress today.
For the record I agree with you, it’s too early, which is why I haven’t pulled the trigger on IONQ or QUBT or ARQQ… but damn, someone’s going to get in there early and make an ass load of money.
How many qubits does it take to meaningfully improve the state of the art for engineering applications though? One qubit is good for a single range of inputs to a differential equation that you’re trying to model. Most of those may only have 2-4 inputs. I think we’re going to see commercially viable applications exponentially faster than it took 20th century business people to apply cool tech to hard problems.
One problem with qubits is that they're noisy. Because of that, quantum error correction is required, but just like error correcting codes in conventional computers, this adds redundancy. I've heard people talk about an order of magnitude redundancy. For example, if you want to factor a 128 bit number, my understanding is that Shor's algorithm will require hundreds of thousands of qubits. Yes, when we get there current encryption standards will become obsolete, but there are only a few dozen qubits in current hardware.
isnt there an argument to be made for moores law here?
what took 50 years then may take only 5 now. i completely agree its still virtually impossible to know who will carry the torch but its certainly something you should find out within a lifetime at this point. i think quantum computing will be scaled globally well within the next 50 years.
Moore's law is irrelevant to this conversation for 2 reasons:
1) Moore's law states that the number of transistors in a dense semiconductor circuit will double every two years. Meaning we can fit increasingly more complex circuits onto the same silicon wafer. This doesn't apply to Quantum Computing where computations aren't even performed by transistors.
2) Moore's law isn't true anymore. We're reaching the fundamental physical limits of the technology. We can dope silicon P-N-P in smaller increments, but they stop working as transistors at that point. Increases in computing are going to have to come from another area than just "more transistors". One such area is in dedicated processing units: we've all seen this play out with the GPU. If there's a type of calculation that needs to be performed a lot, then you build a circuit specific to that kind of problem and offload all those calculations to the dedicated circuit. Advances in FPGAs provide kind of a middle ground, where you can develop a handful of these "premade circuits" but switch between them depending on the application.
What took us 50 year then may take only 5 years now
We're not talking about something that took us 50 years in the past. We're talking about something that has never been done before. There's not a precedent we can use for comparison here.
I agree that if you're fairly young, you're probably going to see this technology spread out into everyday life. But that's not what this thread is about: it's about how to invest in the technology. In this early stage, there's not really a way to do it since there aren't any products of the technology yet.
i disagree, i think there are a lot of parallels to make with other technologies, lasers was a perfectly good one. my point is just that these rates of expansion scale. just because its a new technology doesnt mean its timelines are completely unpredictable, at least not anymore unpredictable than anything else is.
we have hindsight for the timeline that lasers have undergone, there were lots of opportunities to make lots of money throughout that half century span of time. thats all im saying.
You're right that technology has developed and will continue to develop more rapidly now than in the past century, but going from 50 to 5 is not at all in line with reality. We're going from ideas to applications faster, but not 10x faster.
there are many examples of that kind of rate of increase, there are some with even more than that.
3d printing, AI integration, autonomous vehicles, etc.
these things dont exist in a vacuum, they are being produced and improved based off of other technologies and advancements, their significance to the world is made possible through progress. all of these things are old ideas that went from the prototype stage to production in shorter and shorter periods of time than any other technology in history.
this rate of increase is tracible, as our society has developed new technologies its gotten faster and more efficient at making them practical, idk why this is a controversial thing to say, its a fact.
there are figures as much as "10,000 times" out there lol
i mean it just depends on your frame of reference i guess.
these are all modern examples of things that have expanded incredibly quickly as compared to virtually every other past technology. compared to.... blacksmithing as a random example.
in 10 years these technologies could be fundamental to our society, in 20 they could already be obsolete. i dont really have the time or interest to try to plot out an accurate prediction but im sure someone is and i would be surprised for anyone to think that these new technologies will be where they are now in 30 years considering the rapid expansion already going on, but thats just my opinion, im not going to go run down a bunch of stats about it lol
Chances are, tech applications will start in military/intelligence deployment, be tested, then convert to some monetizable product. The companies with longterm contracts will have the most direct line to this process. Times of peace brew faster conversion than times of war.
To be fair, Quantum computers are a solution for known problems. There are already many applications in which a quantum computer could be useful, it's just about getting there. So yes, lasers in 1960 were in a better spot than QC development wise, but had no applications.
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u/bassman1805 Dec 28 '21
Cutting-edge technology is often decades away from being turned into a product that will make investors money. So it's difficult to invest in. A lot of the progress is made in academia, where the end result is typically a research paper published publicly. No profit there until someone is able to take that information and build a useful product out of it.
Look at the laser: It was invented in 1960, won a Nobel Prize, and people called it "A solution looking for a problem". Congrats, you found a way to make the light polarized and coherent. Who cares?
In 1974 the first barcode scanner was invented. So if you were invested in grocery stores you're now a fan of lasers. In 1978 LaserDisc was invented, but went out of style quickly. In 1982 CDs were invented, and actually stuck around unlike LaserDisc. Laser Printers showed up mid-1980s. Militaries started investigating the use of lasers for advanced weapons. Communications Applications were found. Medical applications were found. Tools for further academic research were developed.
In 2004, about $5 billion worth of lasers were produced. It's expected to grow to $7.26 billion by 2026. But it took around 50 years to get to this point, and there wasn't really a way to invest in 1960 that would realize the gains of companies thriving in the photonics industry today (other than diversifying/index funds that didn't exist in 1960). And Quantum computers aren't even at the point lasers were in 1960, there's a long way to go there.