Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Data center use of power is very high, but water is often being overestimated. See https://theconversation.com/ai-has-a-hidden-water-cost-heres-how-to-calculate-yours-263252 for a good basic discussion of the issues involved.

I was wary of learning Italian because it seems to muscle into spoken Spanish. I was in Spanish classes with a couple of other English people and they would use "ma" instead of "pero" for "but" without even noticing. Two decades later and I'm now learning Mandarin where "ma" has plenty of meanings depending on the tone.

Also a separate reply to note a specific detail: > 12 and 21 You mean 15 and 21. There's no way Shor's algorithm would factor 12. It only factors odd numbers.

What evidence? The only evidence you've provided was a vague wave about Shor's algorithm, which we're in agreement with. You haven't attempted to give anything else remotely resembling evidence, like a link, a citation, a source, anything here. And then after all the insults here and in the other thread where you and I discussed these issues you think the problem is me being an asshole? How hard is it rather than insult people to just give evidence that I and everyone else in this thread can actually look at, or for you to go back to the prior thread where we were having a conversation and continue that?

People are really quick to accuse things of being AI. I've lost track of how many times on Reddit I've written two or three paragraphs with citations and someone responds accusing it of being AI. Apparently the bar is very low, and seems even lower if one is arguing for something they disagree with. But I've also had this happen with short stories. I had someone claim a short story I wrote was AI generated when the story was from 2019 and thus predated any AI that could write more than a few sentences.

I'm not sure why you think that. It wouldn't be surprising if Israel has access to Signal App chats, and other things. But you don't need quantum computers for that. The vast majority of penetrations of secure systems involve finding implementation bugs, or infecting machines thought to be secure, or social engineering, or given how the beeper operation went, possibly just compromising phones at their source before they even get to the targets. And we have good evidence that the governments have not yet built quantum computers on a scale that can decrypt anything substantial. There are two major lines of evidence.

First, while we've seen some government investment in quantum computing, we're seeing scientists and engineers there publish in the open. When they get really close, some of that will start getting classified. That's happened with a bunch of techs before. Georgy Flerov was able to detect that the US was working on an atomic bomb because all of the apparent public nuclear research stopped. Similarly, a sign in the 1970s to the US that the Soviets were *not* working on stealth aircraft was that the work on related ideas such as the work by Ufimstev and related work had not been classified https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Ufimtsev.

Second, the US and its allies have built giant data storage facilities and are still expanding those. The Utah Data Center is the obvious big example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center but other governments have built similar smaller facilities. This doesn't make much sense if one has quantum computers. But it makes a lot of sense if one is expecting to get quantum computers a few years from now since it lets one do the strategy of storing massive numbers of messages now for later decryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_now,_decrypt_later.

There is however one argument in your favor. If one looks at the history of declassified material from the NSA, material from GCHQ (the British analog of the NSA), and looks also at declassified Soviet material, anthe pattern seems to be that the classified version is generally 10 to 20 years ahead of the unclassified work on a bunch of things. (For the Soviet end, this stops being the case in the 1980s it seems, but I don't know how much of that is that the USSR is just falling apart and how much of this them failing to archive things well, or make their archives available, or failure to declassify things. Also, the Soviets were never quite as good at a lot of cryptography things. For example, while both NSA and GCHQ came up with a lot of ideas about public key cryptography before it was public, I'm not aware of any evidence the Soviets did.) So by that logic, if one thinks that quantum computers will be practically able to do some decryption within 15 years or so, then that's an argument that it should be plausible that the NSA can do it now.

Local models aren't very good for many purposes. For example, for doing math reasoning, they are poor enough to be completely useless. There's a version of your proposal that would be much more workable though: require that new data centers are built with solar power and batteries that offsets much of their power consumption. Even if you only have them offset 20% or 30%, that would go a long way. And then if the current boom does go under, the worst situation is you have a big set of solar panels that can feed back into the grid.

This is exactly the sort of response that isn't helpful. You haven't provided any evidence. You haven't grappled with anything I said. You've just repeated yourself. I don't know if QCs are going to become practical soon or not, but I suspect they will be in the next decade. But I'm very aware that people who have thought about it much more than I have disagree on the timeline here. Gil Kalai, for example, thinks humans will *never* have quantum computers based on fundamental physical issues. But I'm able to disagree with Kalai on this while not having the arrogance to label him as deluded or lying. It is true that there are some people who claim that QCs are going to happen real soon now who are probably lying, but that happens whenever you have some large-scale investment. You'll get some people, a certain investment type, who has so little connection to the truth that understanding whether they are lying is genuinely difficult to determine. But you get that in all sorts of industries, and the probable success should be judged on the underlying mechanisms and trends, not on the presence of some hucksters.

Instead of labeling people you disagree with "delulus" it would help to examine the serious evidence. Let's note that labeling this as a delusion means one is saying that people like Scott Aaronson, one of the most prolific and major quantum computing experts in the last few decades, who spent years being an active skeptic of a lot of claims about quantum computing, and still spends time explaining to people that the things they think quantum computers can do are often things they won't (like efficiently solve NP hard problems in polynomial time) are delusional https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9718. As a rule of thumb, if you need to call lots of really smart people who are experts in an area "delulus" you may need to rethink your position. You may even be correct about where things are or where they are going, but it you are very likely overconfident. And yes, it is true that serious implementations of Shor's algorithm have not been implemented. But by many other metrics, we're seeing drastic improvement in quantum computing capability, things like number of qubits, coherence times, ability to error correct are all showing growth. How long it takes for qubits to decohere for example has gone up by a factor of 10 roughly every 3 years now. https://physics.aps.org/articles/v4/103. Pointing to a lack of Shor's algorithm improvement is like looking at rockets in 1959 and dismissing how now humans have been successfully sent to space while ignoring the steady improvement of rockets since the 1930s.

From slide 21 he has a quote that "The word “quantum” sucks people's brains out, and otherwise sensible people suffer from impaired reasoning," and there are other similar lines. So I'm not sure why you think I got his claimed causality wrong. That you personally think that only stupid people take quantum computers seriously is a separate issue, which is independent from what Gutnam says. (That you are wrong is incidental.)

Gutnam's link is primarily about using quantum computers to break cryptography. Gutnam is not making any claim about other uses, such as in material science. And even in that context, there's a lot of issues with this, such as using Shor factorization records and extrapolating those out, when we know we're not yet in the domain where that should happen. (He's right that the current Shor factorizations aren't real implementations of Shor's algorithm but that's one slide of many.) Many of the slides in the middle are simply attacks on motivation and claiming that using the word "quantum" makes people stupid. The comparison on slide 31 to historians trying to understand what happened to the Ninth Legion is also just terrible. Historians often cannot figure something out because the information is just gone from the historical record. That's radically different than work in physics or engineering where there's steady improvement. Also the claim in that slide that we've been trying to figure out what happened to the 9th legion for 2000 years is obviously wrong. The Legio IX Hispana disappeared from the records around 120 CE, so much less than that, and it isn't many centuries (over a thousand years later) that anyone was wondering about where it went.

2028 is probably too early, but not by that much. People often overestimate short-term tech improvement and underestimate medium to long-term improvement. In this case, there's a lot of evidence for steady but improving metrics. TFS and TFA mention some of them but it is also worth looking at the general trend lines. In general, coherence times are increasing at a rate of roughly ten times as long every three years. See https://physics.aps.org/articles/v4/103. The rate varies for the specific type of qubit in question (that article is talking about superconducting qubits). But this and the increase in number of physical qubits as well as maximum number of entangled qubits all show progress.

Just out of interest, do you generally use the desktop or the mobile version of the site? I only ask because I think you have complained about "vacuous" subject lines on several occasions, whereas it's not something I would give any thought to when typing a reply. I wonder whether the presentation style makes it look either important (you), or barely noticeable (me).

You will notice I have not gone to any effort to change this subject line, either :)