It’s one year ago that I began my quantum journey. I started making work with quantum computers because, like AI, it was a technology which seemed impenetrable. And I hoped that, like my work with AI, making art would give me some new insights into the technology.
The idea that quantum computing might eventually break the cryptography that secures the blockchain, and thus NFTs, placed the work in my critique of the endless hype of techno-utopianism. But, at the same time, it’s been fun to make the work available as NFTs. (A little bit of biting the hand that feeds me?)
And the terms… superposition, entanglement, decoherence. “Spooky action.” Plus, the theory that the act of interrogating a quantum bit (meaning - asking what its value is) causes the universe to split into two — in one universe the bit equals 0, the other it equals 1 — is just brain twizzling. It’s the foundation of the multiverse.
At this one year mark it’s interesting to note how my (still developing) perceptions of AI and quantum computing differ.
At the moment, AI feels backwards looking. It uses existing data and builds models that make sense of it. It might imagine new things, but those new things are limited by what it was trained on. It feels almost claustrophobic.
Quantum computing, as I frame it with the multiverse thinking, is infinite in its future possibilities. Every option is possible. Every option will happen. It’s an optimism that every future is possible.
