Rois Ni Thuama PhD is an expert in risk mitigation and head of cyber governance at RedSift.
I’m not claiming that I manifested the glitch in the Air Traffic Control system at the end of the summer because I’m so deeply attuned to the natural and digital world that my worries actualised as a blip on the radar. But I might have done. Fortune, fate or actualisation intervened and, because of that glitch, it wasn’t possible for me to fly. Phew! I say phew because, with only a few working days left to go before needing to travel to a cyber-resilience event, the organisers unilaterally changed the title of the upcoming discussion. That’s without consultation or agreement with the firm sponsoring the panel session. Or, indeed, agreement with all the panellists.
Now, that might seem odd and inconvenient, but hardly the stuff of nightmares. Until you learn that the agreed title was sensible and intelligible, whereas the revised title was none of those things. It was, as one fine wordsmith put it, “a lot of old guff”.
But wait, it gets worse. An email arrived late on Friday afternoon with a “debrief” that contained a very short list of the topics that we would be
expected to cover, including “quantum technologies”. Oh boy!
Aside from the initial internal dialogue – which included such classics as “Quantum what? Huh? What on earth is going on with these
organisers? Is anyone else seeing what I’m seeing?” – I was plagued by another question tumbling around my head: why now? In particular, what recent developments in this complex field merited non-experts discussing it on a stage? More importantly, why would anyone think that people
uninvolved in quantum technologies would have anything even remotely interesting to say about them? Does the audience benefit from a single
panellist pontificating on matters where they can claim no real expertise? Who was looking to benefit from bamboozling or bluffing the busy attendees? How might this be written up and where would it be shared? “The panel discussed quantum technology, with panellists including...”
Oh no, nope, nope, nope.
I didn’t want my name anywhere near this. Not my circus, not my monkey. I raised the issue with the organisers, they raised their voices. It got messy, PDQ. This was more than simply a change to the scheduled programming. Depending on how this was treated, this had all the markers to be a source of significant misinformation – or worse. The glitch in the ATC system worked for me.
But if I thought that this question about the state of quantum would be replaced with some other curiosity, I was wrong. If anything, it reached a
higher pitch still. A week or so later at a rather grand dinner (unconnected to the previous summit), I sat close to a CEO who claimed that his firm had developed a quantum computer. Holy mackerel! Had this guy developed a quantum computer, or did he have a computer he labelled quantum, like Calvin’s Transmogrifier? Things were getting madder by the minute.
Why was the conference circuit suddenly a hotbed for people with no tech background, no qualifications in physics, mathematics, engineering or
for that matter any related field, seemingly perfectly comfortable making quite serious claims about serious technology?
And if you’re at a dinner, what does it mean to say that your company had developed a quantum computer? Had this little-known business with a plucky bunch of exuberant salespeople, in fact, developed a quantum computer that surpassed IBM’s 1,000-qubit Condor? This would be big news!
Huge. I’d have heard it on the PC Pro podcast, for sure.
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