I would give anything to feel a sense of wonder that I used to get when reading sci-fi in my youth.
But "can't enter the same river twice" and all that.
(Asimov's is better. Also, the version of this one in my memory is better than the actual story, in that "There is now" is better than the rather clunky equivalent in the story. I suppose it's possible that I'm remembering a different, slightly better written, story with the exact same idea.)
I saw many people come up independently with a direct quote from this story when they saw the IBM promotional image of a man standing in front of an IBM Quantum System One machine.
The image: https://www.techmonitor.ai/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2023/...
If shown a dazzling, mysterious, $10m glass cube draped with all that hyperbolic "quantum future wow!!" marketing, ordinarily smart people will leap to anything. In reality, QC doesn't seem to have a ton of applications yet.
The post suggests sparkly marketing hooplah wrapping up meager actuality.
I don't think any of those who quoted from this story fell into the marketing hyperbole. We all know these machines are interesting engineering marvels, but far from actually useful at the moment, with the exception of a very narrow set of problems that fall within the narrow capabilities. The people who fell for it probably never heard of this story.
dash2•4mo ago
dooglius•4mo ago