Mike Villas's World

The augmented-reality wonderland of Pyramid Hill and Fairmont High School is taking shape today

11 min read

About The Big Picture , there isn't much doubt. Sensing, monitoring, networking, and computing technologies of incredible variety and profusion will converge over the next 10 to 20 years to give us--and those who would keep tabs on us--incredible powers of observation. But exactly how it will change our lives, we can only imagine.

Some fear a simple eruption of technology-based Orwellian repression. Others anticipate the emergence of a hyperengaging form of existence based on really cool toys that (caveat emptor) spy on us every now and then. We'll drift casually in and out of augmented reality and have dizzying access to an unceasing torrent of information.

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An IBM Quantum Computer Will Soon Pass the 1,000-Qubit Mark

The Condor processor is just one quantum-computing advance slated for 2023

4 min read
This photo shows a woman working on a piece of apparatus that is suspended from the ceiling of the laboratory.

A researcher at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center examines some of the quantum hardware being constructed there.

Connie Zhou/IBM

IBM’s Condor, the world’s first universal quantum computer with more than 1,000 qubits, is set to debut in 2023. The year is also expected to see IBM launch Heron, the first of a new flock of modular quantum processors that the company says may help it produce quantum computers with more than 4,000 qubits by 2025.

This article is part of our special report Top Tech 2023.

While quantum computers can, in theory, quickly find answers to problems that classical computers would take eons to solve, today’s quantum hardware is still short on qubits, limiting its usefulness. Entanglement and other quantum states necessary for quantum computation are infamously fragile, being susceptible to heat and other disturbances, which makes scaling up the number of qubits a huge technical challenge.

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