by Jochen Szangolies
In my day job, when I’m not regaling the readers here at 3 Quarks Daily with rash ruminations on free will, power and politics, or why people sometimes erect huge stones for no apparent reason, I work on finding prospective applications of quantum computing for the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, DLR). With the timelines on useful quantum computation widely seen as contracting (at least according to those entities that stand to profit the most from this belief), I’m suddenly faced with an awkward question for a theorist: what does it mean for society at large if my area of expertise suddenly makes the leap from the page into the real world? And what are my own responsibilities in shaping this transition?
It’s probably not a hot take to suggest that humanity might not have the greatest track record in shepherding the rollout of new technology in such a way as to minimally disrupt, much less aid, social progress. Sure: technological marvels are instrumental in having brought about a revolution in wealth, health, and knowledge. But in fingering such easily-tracked metrics, we must be careful not to lose touch with more difficult to quantify markers of human flourishing, like meaning, community, joy, or kindness. As argued previously, each selection of greedily optimized KPIs for the human project relegates what falls beyond their ambit to mere externalities, hidden from view—often literally by exporting unwanted byproducts, material and ideological, to countries less able to make their concerns heard on the world stage. While it’s great that ‘we’ in the sense of a fictitious ‘average person’ enjoy greater wealth than ever, if this comes at the prize of exploiting 5 times the resources our planet generates per year, we’re not looking at a great long-term strategy.
The creed of the modern tech entrepeneur has long been ‘move fast and break things’. But with technological capabilities that encompass anything up to the wholesale destruction of a livable ecosystem, and a sixth mass extinction already underway, we should perhaps slow down a little before breaking any (more) things that can’t be fixed. Read more »