SPIROS MICHALAKIS: You may think quantum, Why should I care? You should care because even if 1% of what we expect comes to be, it will exponentially transform your business.
SCOTT LIKENS: Quantum will give us an advantage to go solve big, global societal problems that are just impossible to solve today on classical computers.
SPIROS: What really gives it its power, is this function it has to push you to look at the world from a new perspective.
LIZZIE O’LEARY: From PwC’s management publication strategy and business, this is Take on Tomorrow, the podcast that brings together experts from around the globe to figure out what business could and should be doing to tackle some of the biggest issues facing the world. I’m Lizzie O'Leary, a podcaster and journalist.
FEMI OKE: And I’m Femi Oke, a broadcaster and journalist. Today: is quantum computing about to change our world?
LIZZIE: Femi, imagine solving previously unsolvable problems in seconds. Making incredible discoveries that could transform everything from business to healthcare. And training new, incredibly advanced AI models with unlimited ability to process it all.
FEMI: It’s hard for me to imagine it, but we won’t have to imagine this much longer. A new generation of quantum computers are on their way—And might be here more quickly than the world is prepared for.
LIZZIE: Which means, there is no time to waste! Business leaders need to start thinking about quantum computing RIGHT now.
FEMI: But, Lizzie, it’s a really tricky balance. How do they make sure that they’re investing in the right tech? And how do they realign their business—and way of thinking—so that they’re ready to solve previously impossible problems?
LIZZIE: So, we took these questions and took them to Spiros Michalakis, a Caltech mathematical physicist who helps businesses understand quantum physics.
FEMI: But first, we’re joined by Scott Likens, PwC’s Global Chief AI Engineer. Hi there, Scott, thank you for coming!
SCOTT LIKENS: Hello. It is great to be here.
LIZZIE: Scott, I think we need to start with the basics here—what exactly are quantum computers?
SCOTT: So, starting off with the easy question, fantastic. I think it’s that next generation of what we call supercomputing. Quantum computers, they use the concepts of quantum mechanics, which means they can actually operate, all right, get this, in many different universes at once. So, not just here on earth in our universe, but in almost infinite universes. What that means is they can process massively parallel calculations that today’s supercomputers can’t.
FEMI: That’s really a helpful description though, Scott, because I’m thinking about why businesses at this moment should be paying attention to quantum computers.
SCOTT: Yeah, I think the promise of being able to process everything at once is undoubtedly useful. The cloud gave us access to more and more processing, but what we found was the cloud had limits, and we still are bound by the silicone transistors that were invented decades ago. But as businesses grow, as data around us continues to exponentially grow, the problems are harder to solve. And what we have to do today is sequentially solve them and use more and more compute to do that. The promise of a quantum computer is, could we do that in parallel? Could we take advantage of these infinite universes and solve a massive problem in seconds?
FEMI: Scott, we will come back to you in a moment. But first, let’s dig deeper into how quantum computers work. So, Lizzie—you spoke to Spiros Michalakis, and he’s a world leading quantum expert who helps businesses better understand quantum through his work at Caltech University. Oh, and he also helped the makers of Ant-Man understand the real phsyics behind their film.
LIZZIE: Spiros is definitely a quantum star in his own right! And while he didn’t tell me how I could shrink to the size of an ant, he did blow my mind by explaining the science behind quantum computing.
SPIROS MICHALAKIS: Let’s start with what supercomputing is. So, supercomputers can be thought of as many, many computers in one universe, this universe, in fact, on earth, planet earth currently. A quantum computer is one processing unit, but runs across multiple universes, across the multiverse. Which sounds like sci-fi, right?
LIZZIE: Totally. You just blew my mind.
SPIROS: And it’s pretty cool, because, in fact, everything that the supercomputer cannot do, there is a possibility that the quantum computer will be able to do. And the moment anyone comes up with anything that can do something useful that we thought, it’s not that it would take us ten years or something like that to get, or some future supercomputer will be able to do, it’s like, humanity would never be able to do until and unless we develop quantum computers. That will be a mental shift that will be very powerful, I think.
LIZZIE: Do you have an example of an instance where quantum computing is being used right now and changes the way a business operates, or will be used in the near future? I’m trying to figure out where those multiple calculations of the same thing come into play if you’re running a company.
SPIROS: The first reason why we started developing quantum computers was to simulate nature. And if you can do that, then there’s some pretty crazy applications. Just drug discovery, chemistry. Think of everything that every physics lab has ever done and what it has led to. OK, this is just even classical physics. Electromagnetism. Every communication we have right now is based on these things. Quantum has already revolutionized magnetic resonance imaging, right? You know, GPS, through atomic clocks, so many things. But this is just version one of quantum technologies. We’re talking about the next generation. We’ve already seen the possibility that quantum computers can do some type of computation that no supercomputer can touch. But to get utility, you need a handshake between a particular quantum algorithm and then quantum hardware, a quantum computer that is capable of running this many operations to complete the quantum algorithm. So, from that point of view, we don’t have something yet. But there is a reason why everyone and their mother is spending billions on research and development, and quantum computing. Once we do have these devices and they can run, say, millions to billions of quantum operations—which is nothing, your laptop can do classical operations within less than a second, like more than a billion of them—so if a quantum computer can run even for one second, you’ll be able to do some magical things.
LIZZIE: Listening to you—you already laid out a few scenarios in which this could be incredibly helpful for businesses—when you’re talking about drug development, MRIs. Why should, if you are one of our listeners, and our listeners tend to be C-suite execs who are smart and thoughtful, why should they care about quantum computing?
SPIROS: The answer is actually so simple these days. Imagine if you had started thinking about the same question about AI ten years ago, which was mostly at the time an academic issue. Just like you may think quantum right now, it’s just an academic thing. There is some hype behind it. There are companies developing some of the technologies. Why should I care? You should care, because even if 1% of what we expect comes to be, it will exponentially transform your business. And so, you should start thinking about what are the issues, what are the applications that are germane to your particular business and industry that if you had the ability to solve these, you would have a massive advantage? Imagine adding quantum to AI. You could exponentially advance training of AI itself. What could this do? If you can have a full view of every piece of data you have in your company and you can update the AI model that is personal to your company every two seconds, that’s what we’re talking about.
LIZZIE: What do you think the timeline is for that?
SPIROS: If I were to be bold, I would say we’ll see something within the next five years.
LIZZIE: That’s pretty soon.
SPIROS: It is pretty soon. Yeah. And that’s why I keep saying to business leaders that you should start thinking of this handshake between the two worlds, your world and our world, because you will be the ones to try to figure out what it is that you want from quantum computer. If you were to have the ability to use these powerful machines, to do something very useful and interesting to you, what would that be like? Right? And in order for you to have the right questions, you need to play around to understand what it can possibly do for you.
LIZZIE: What about the flip side of that, though? That’s not just thinking about the potential opportunities, the potential streamlining or savings, but the risk that comes along with doing that. I mean, does this increase, say, cyber threats? Does this increase, I don’t know, overall global risk when you’re thinking about running a large company that’s incorporating a new kind of computing?
SPIROS: One of the first threats, I guess, that quantum computing posed right away, right off the bat, and that kind of kick-started this quantum revolution, was the development of Shor’s algorithm by Peter Shor, now a professor at MIT, that would allow a quantum computer to be able to break your password, right? Authentication, all these things. So that is something we don’t know how to do with a supercomputer. The best algorithm would take millions of years, but a quantum computer can do it in minutes, right? So, it’s kind of crazy, right? It’s a situation where it’s like a whack-a-mole. If somebody comes up with a quantum algorithm that also breaches cryptographic standard, then you have to think, what is the next one?
LIZZIE: Does it matter if the knowledge around quantum computing is contained in the hands of a few, where we’re talking about top academics like you or, you know, top executives, or should it be more egalitarian? That’s one of the issues that’s been raised a lot with generative AI, that it requires such money and computing power, that the knowledge is very concentrated.
SPIROS: Quantum belongs to the whole world, and it should always be part of the whole world. In fact, it is the foundations of the universe of the multiverse itself. So, what is really cool about quantum physics, in my opinion, what really gives it its power, is this forcing function it has to push you to look at the world, the same thing, from a new perspective. In fact, from perspectives that we thought were alien, were impossible. And when you look at the world from all these different complementary points of view, you realize that there is no singular, true way to look at things.
LIZZIE: That is a very metaphysical answer. I’m trying to differentiate the elegant mathematical view that you are putting forward with someone who is listening to this saying, like, Oh god, I have to make a corporate investment here. This technology is moving incredibly quickly. How do I make sure that I’m investing in the right thing, the real thing, not getting fooled by something with the word quantum in it, but that isn’t the genuine article?
SPIROS: That’s a very good question. I would say academic institutions are number one trusted when it comes to this because we don’t have a horse in the race. We are helping everyone else, including the big companies and the startups and others working in the space directly to make the breakthroughs needed so that humanity can benefit. So, make friends in academic, like, you know, divisions, institutes like the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech. The second thing is, start messing around with quantum. There’s many tutorials, ways to do this online, through IBM quantum experience and many others, that allow you to get your hands dirty, writing small programs, right? Getting a sense of what it feels like to experience quantum.
LIZZIE: I heard you tell a story about staying up late at night as a child to do math. Your parents thought you were watching TV.
SPIROS: I was a nerd.
LIZZIE: Is there a way to harness that kind of enthusiasm in a workforce that already exists to find the staying up all night to do math in your employees who are just maybe a little curious?
SPIROS: I have the perfect answer, an actual example of this. Through a common friend, I ended up meeting a young lady who, at the time, was a Google engineer. But she had a love of chess, and she heard about quantum chess, and she wanted to know more, just about the game. And she heard that Google had these weekly meetings that you could jump in and learn more about this game, but also like about the quantum aspects of it. She had no background in quantum whatsoever. And just simply by being immersed in some of these conversations, and working to understand the game, [she] is [now] one of the lead quantum engineers at Google. A quantum game is the same as a quantum algorithm. If you can write a piece of quantum software, then you can do anything. And I think it’s really cool because I love the fact now that there are ways, again through quantum games but also other demonstrations and simulations, to get your hands onto some of these concepts, play around to understand them. And, honestly, it’s one of the most fun ways to bring your team together.
LIZZIE: I think what is so interesting about this is, how do you differentiate between reality and the sort of theoretical sci-fi thinking about this?
SPIROS: The research that I do at Caltech has put me in a place where you start to question reality itself. And when I think about science fiction versus the science of things, science fiction is just science that hasn’t come to pass yet. The conversation we’re having right now, the fact that your listeners can consume this over their devices, this literally would have been magic 100 years ago, not a thousand years ago, like, or millions, just even 100 years ago, it would have been science fiction. And it’s just that humanity has found a way to accelerate progress between the transition from science fiction, almost science fantasy, honestly, to reality. So, my favorite way of attacking this question for myself is to just do the work. To find ways to understand the assumptions that we make so often about what is possible. And so that’s what I love to do, also, when I talk to business leaders: what are the assumptions you have made about what is possible? How can you think outside of all these possibilities and see new opportunities? AI, again, if you had seen it six years ago as something that is actually going to happen, in order for you to do that, you would need to be deep inside of this world that was, like, we’re about to have a breakthrough. So you’d be telling your team, I need to start looking into this with you, in a partnership with academic institutions, in partnership with other companies that are focusing specifically on this. So that’s what I would tell leaders right now as well. You will create the reality if you have the right partnerships right now.
LIZZIE: Spiro, thank you so much for spending time talking with me and sharing your knowledge.
SPIROS: It was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.
FEMI: So Scott, we’ve got so much to think about and unpack there. What type of companies are already thinking about quantum computing? They’re already there and maybe starting to invest, would it be fair to say, early?
SCOTT: I think of, kind of, three waves of investment. First, there’s, undoubtedly, in the last year, nation states are seeing that there’s a technology advantage in quantum. You’re starting to see big investments across the world. This is a concept five or ten years ago was not on the agenda. Then I think about, there’s a massive amount of startups that are trying to approach quantum in the physical building of the machines. So I think that’s very interesting. And then on the enterprise side, we’re starting to see across many different industries, investments in starting to experiment. The early signs of value show that there are problems we could solve today with the quantum computers that have been developed. So, in the enterprise, it’s still early, but I think we’re starting to see the promise, and we’re starting to see slight investment. And I have some great examples that kind of show the tangible value, even though we’re still early in the realm of quantum computing.
FEMI: Tell us one of your great examples.
SCOTT: Well, one that comes to mind is a classical mathematical problem—the traveling salesperson. How do I optimize a route for someone moving around to many locations? And we know in today’s world, with traffic and weather and workforce issues, that could save money if we could get a great solution. And we did an experiment where we had to move people around to 4,000-plus locations in the US, and we wanted to optimize that. So we used good old classical AI, and we created a really optimal pattern. How do we optimize eight hours a day? How do we minimize hotel nights? How do we save on fuel—which is great for the environment? And it was a good solution. But then we did an experiment and said, could we actually use quantum to solve it better? Now, we didn’t have access to enough quantum compute, so we had to use classical clustering and quantum solving. But in the end, we saved an amazing amount of miles—which meant less fuel, less carbon in the air, less people moving around. And it was a tangible outcome. The quantum computer, the math behind the quantum algorithm solved the problem better. So, to me, that shows today, we can start to take the concepts of quantum. The math is different. The algorithms are different. The computing is, of course, different. But if there’s a better solution, even today, let’s go use it.
LIZZIE: When you talk to these companies, including those that aren’t thinking about quantum computers, what do you tell them to prepare them?
SCOTT: I think the technology investment is happening, but the workforce investment—there’s not enough people in the world that are studying quantum mechanics or particle physics or high-end math to be able to actually make that translation from today’s AI to quantum AI. So, I think there’s a workforce issue ahead of us. Some experimentation is my first recommendation. Find some people in your organization that may have a passion, believe it or not, around quantum mechanics and the concepts that it involves, and tap into them. Start with a business problem like that traveling salesperson. Do you have to move parts or people around a very complex network? And if you could take 1 or 2 or 5 or 10% out of that, is there business value? And I think there will be. So, the experimentation is important. The education is important and then starting to enable your workforce. Don’t think of it as science fiction, start to experiment with it, and bring it to life in your organization. But base that on real value today, not just pure experimentation for something five or ten years out.
FEMI: I’m also thinking if you can tell business leaders, CEOs, that this will give you a competitive edge, that is very compelling, right?
SCOTT: Absolutely. Absolutely. So if you think about being able to solve problems faster than your competitors, that gives you an edge. Can you solve bigger problem sets than your competitors? There’s an edge there. There’s undoubtedly a competitive advantage to going early. And some of this might be a slowly, suddenly problem. So, quantum computers are slowly evolving, and suddenly, when one’s available at scale, whoever has access to that could have a massive advantage.
LIZZIE: Are there risks that come along with quantum computers? I mean, if companies are thinking about this, what are the risks that they need to think about right now?
SCOTT: I think we’re in a much different place in the world today because of the last few years of AI visibility and excitement. And the wave of things like generative AI have put this on the radar of every executive. And with that, we’ve really focused on building responsible AI and trusted technology. So, I think we’re in a different place than we were years ago. We’re thinking about doing this responsibly. Things like cryptography, which could be at risk with quantum computing—almost eight years, there’s been a standards body looking at, how do we get ahead of that? I think we’re going into this with a mindset of trust by design. So if we’re putting the right principles in place today, we’re being responsible about the frameworks and the guidance we’re giving, which I think we are. The academics are looking at the good and the bad of this technology, and we’re being very open about it. So, I think the community is very like-minded in the sense of doing this the right way, to the benefit of business and society and the world in general. I’m very positive in the sense of working together to solve this problem, and to put trust by design in the beginning, and I’m seeing a lot of those indications along the way.
LIZZIE: And what about the partnerships that businesses make over quantum?
SCOTT: Yeah, I think of it as an ecosystem. So there’s the physical quantum computer. There’s not going to be a lot of those in the beginning, so how do we share that? And what type of quantum computing do you want to use? An ecosystem of partners that provide the access to the actual quantum computing? There’s likely an ecosystem of how I access that. How do I create the algorithms and the math that has to be different to run on that quantum computer? You may start to build that capability in-house, but you might partner up and leverage an ecosystem. There’s, hopefully, some open standards that, you know, accelerate that, like we see in the world of open-source software today. And then, thinking about your partnership model, where do you get all that data you want to process? That’s a pure-play ecosystem that we do today. But it might broaden, it might change the types of data that you go after. It might change the types of partnerships in that ecosystem. But I don’t see a world where we don’t use this ecosystem to leverage the power of quantum, at least in the next decade.
FEMI: So if business leaders are thinking about quantum computing and long-term investment and strategies, what piece of advice would you give them?
SCOTT: I think you start with what area of your business has the most opportunity, based on what quantum provides, infinitely parallel processing of massive data. Things like optimization. Is there an area of your business that optimizing would create some efficiencies or create new market opportunities? Could you move faster in planning or logistics or scheduling, and you could outpace your peers? Finding those areas in your business to start to experiment, I think is step one. Thinking about, then, the workforce. How do you actually build that muscle around quantum mechanics and quantum computing? That’s probably an ecosystem play. You may reach out to academics like my friend Spiros or people that are really deep in understanding the true benefit areas and the areas that are still further out and making some of those decisions. But I think you always have to base it on where you’re going to find value for your business. Again, efficiencies or new revenue, new products, new markets, and then go from there. It’s the same problem with AI, though. AI does not solve every problem. So the same way we narrow down the use of generative AI or good old AI, similar concept. But much more power.
FEMI: One of the reasons I enjoy talking to you, particularly, Scott, is that you have been grinning the whole way through this conversation. There is something about quantum computing that makes you really happy.
SCOTT: Yeah, the first thing is that the people working in this area are just such brilliant minds, and they’re seeing a world that is hard for most people to understand, let alone see. And I see their passion, and they’re always very conservative. Oh, it’s five or ten years away. But then you see that sparkle, and they tell you about some algorithm they just proved out—from a theory to a simulation. And I can see that coming. And I’m an optimist, of course. But I think about the pace of the internet, think about the pace of social media. It was measured in decades. So, this stuff takes a while, but I do see the promise, and I see the value it could add to the world. Quantum will give us an advantage to go solve big global societal problems that are just impossible to solve today on classical computers. So I do see the promise, and I just love the excitement. I see people working in this day to day and the passion. It’s infectious.
FEMI: Scott, thank you for joining us.
SCOTT: Thank you so much. That was fun.
LIZZIE: Femi, I don’t know about you, but I feel like I felt my brain stretch its existing parameters in trying both to understand, kind of, some of the science and math here. And then the practical applications. I think that the thing that I focus on is Spiros talking about how you can begin to think about solving a problem in a nonlinear way. That you can have multiple processes and multiple computers running in multiple ways. And that’s like opening a door into a universe that I’m not sure I understood existed.
FEMI: I love that image of your brain expanding, Lizzie, because I’m feeling what we’ve just done in this episode is talk about what is possible when we don’t really know what is possible, but we do know we need to start thinking about what is possible now. Right?
LIZZIE: It’s very sci-fi in a lot of ways. But also, you can hear from Scott that there’s a real OK, pay attention now aspect to this.
FEMI: That’s it for today. Next time on Take on Tomorrow…
GUEST: The very steps you want to take to mitigate your impacts are the same steps that are going to increase your resilience in the face of increased drought, heat, floods, and hurricanes, and storms, et cetera. You have a more resilient farm when you’ve got a more natural farm.
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