There is a specific type of vertigo that comes from trying to contextualise the number 10 septillion (1025). Enter Google’s new quantum processor, a chip named "Willow". It might sound like a weeping tree in the Wicklow countryside or a soft breeze across a meadow but this sliver of silicon witchcraft that has just rendered the concept of "Time" utterly obsolete.
Google claim this chip solved a problem in five minutes that would take the world’s most muscular supercomputer ten septillion years to finish.
You have to stop and appreciate the sheer, savage magnitude of that number. This is longer than the universe has existed, longer than the sun will burn, longer than it takes a lizard to evolve into a crypto bro . And this machine did it in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.
And the crazy part? Hartmut Neven, the guy running Google Quantum AI, has a theory that suggests the computation is so fast that the only way it could be achieved is by is outsourcing the labor to parallel universes. This "Many-Worlds Interpretation," is a concept championed in the 1980s by physicist David Deutsch. The logic is essentially this: The only way a machine could perform a calculation of this magnitude in the time is if it is dipping into alternate realities, borrowing the processing power of shadow-Willows in shadow-universes, and stitching the answer back together in our timeline.
Which all seems akin to some sort of cosmic Ocean's 11 style heist and I guess my question is this: what happens when the house finally realises we’ve been counting cards and stealing free labor?
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