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Google's New Microchip Uses The Multiverse to Work Impossibly Quickly

Google's new microchip Willow uses the Multiverse to work things out impossibly quickly. I know, but this is where we are now.

This is one of those rare moments reading something that makes it seem that science fiction will be with us now. Normally, advances creep up on us by a series of gradual improvements so that the boiled frog does not realise just how much its environment has changed. But Google's announcement of the Willow quantum computing chip has launched that frog into the smoking wok. Because it seems the Willow performs calculations across the multiverse to perform them at impossible speeds. Solving a problem in minutes, that would take on a normal high-speed computer, trillions of times the lifespan of the known universe. Yes, I know.

Hartmut Neven, Founder and Lead of Google Quantum AI, announced the news in which he said that Willow can reduce errors "exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years." And that "Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 10²⁵) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe." By a lot, the universe is 13.7 billion years old, or 1.37 x 10¹⁰. And that "it lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch."

Ooookay. So this Willow chip is not only working a problem out in our universe but across infinite other universes in the multiverse. That's basically what Douglas Adams did with the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy Mark Two in Mostly Harmless. It's also Rick And Morty's multiversal cable show. It is an infinite amount of monkeys typing on an infinite set of typewriters.

Hartmut Neven also adds, "My colleagues sometimes ask me why I left the burgeoning field of AI to focus on quantum computing. My answer is that both will prove to be the most transformational technologies of our time, but advanced AI will significantly benefit from access to quantum computing. This is why I named our lab Quantum AI. Quantum algorithms have fundamental scaling laws on their side, as we're seeing with RCS. There are similar scaling advantages for many foundational computational tasks that are essential for AI. So quantum computation will be indispensable for collecting training data that are inaccessible to classical machines, training and optimizing certain learning architectures and modelling systems where quantum effects are important. This includes helping us discover new medicines, designing more efficient batteries for electric cars, and accelerating progress in fusion and new energy alternatives. Many of these future game-changing applications won't be feasible on classical computers; they're waiting to be unlocked with quantum computing."

And also being able to say "Grok, create me a Predator movie set in feudal Japan starring Tom Cruise" and getting something indistinguishable from the real thing. Encryption is over. And the Terminators are coming. To quote Arthur and Ford in Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams from 1992…

"Unfiltered Perception means it perceives everything. Got that? I don't perceive everything. You don't perceive everything. We have filters. The new Guide doesn't have any sense filters. It perceives everything. It wasn't a complicated technological idea. It was just a question of leaving a bit out. Got it?"
"Why don't I just say that I've got it, and then you can carry on regardless."
"Right. Now because the bird can perceive every possible Universe. it is present in every possible universe. Yes?"
"Y… e… e… s. Ish."
"So what happens is, the bozos in the marketing and accounting departments say, oh that sounds good, doesn't that mean we only have to make one of them and then sell it an infinite number of times? Don't squint at me like that, Arthur, this is how accountants think!"
"That's quite clever, isn't it?"
"No! It is fantastically stupid. Look. The machine's only a little Guide. It's got some quite clever cybertechnology in it, but because it has Unfiltered Perception, any smallest move it makes has the power of a virus. It can propagate throughout space, time and a million other dimensions. Anything can be focused anywhere in any of the universes that you and I move in. Its power is recursive. Think of a computer program. Somewhere, there is one key instruction, and everything else is just functions calling themselves, or brackets billowing out endlessly through an infinite address space. What happens when the brackets collapse? Where's the final "end if"? Is any of this making sense? Arthur?"
"Sorry, I was nodding off for a moment. Something about the Universe, yes?"
"Something about the Universe, yes," said Ford, wearily. He sat down again.

I feel like Arthur Dent again.

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