Welcome to the After-On Podcast. I'm Rob Reed, and I'm Tom Merritt. And this is a special

episode designed around the book, After-On. Each of these special episodes focuses on one

aspect of the science, tech, and social issues explored in the novel. Now, you don't have

to read after on in order to learn from or enjoy these podcasts. That's because we

wait until the very end to discuss the book in detail and to really tie it to this week's

topic. That last section will make perfect sense if you're reading the novel, but if you're

not reading it, just tune out at that point. You can always come back if you decide to

read it later. And we'll warn you before we get to that part. But first, we have a lot

of things to talk about which should be interesting to everybody. Specifically, quantum

computing, which plays a large part in making AI possible in the book. The short and wildly

inaccurate version of quantum computing is that it can handle a 1, a 0, or a 1 and a 0

at the same time, making it potentially wildly more powerful than our current binary digital

computers. But that's going to leave a lot of you confused and doesn't do the concept

justice anyway. Who can help us understand this more, Rob?

Well, a venture capitalist named Steve Jervitson, who has sat on the board of directors of

a company called D-Wave, which is the world's largest quantum computing company for 15

years. We'll talk to him in a moment. And it is intriguing. Quantum computing could potentially

take a fraction of a second to crack encryption that would otherwise take a thousand years

or maybe an infinite amount of time and do loads of other computing super fast and efficient

involves things like super positions and decoherence and the uncertainty principle. And thankfully,

we do have Steve Jervitson to help us understand it from a non-physicist point of view. Let's talk

with Steve about quantum computing. Steve Jervitson, thank you for sitting down with me in your

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