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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor to The Spectator, and this week my guest is the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, who's here to talk about his

new book, Quantum Supremacy. Professor Kaku, welcome. The thesis of your book, if I'm summarizing

it right, is that quantum computers, which are just now in their infancy, are going to be

as transformational to the world in almost every respect

as, you know, I don't know, the book, the invention of electricity, you know, a real game-changing

technology. Can you tell me why? What is so special about quantum computers? Well, the world

economy depends on computers, but computers have gone through three basic stages of evolution.

The first stage was analog computers, where we computed on levers, gears, pulleys.

You had to turn the crank in order to make a calculation on an analog computer.

Then after World War II, we had the transistor and the digital computer

that helped to win World War II with the work of Alan Turing, for example, that broke the German

code. And so we had this tremendous evolution of digital technology, which we use today.

It's called the digital revolution.

But that's coming to a close. Silicon Valley could become a rust belt. There could be mass

unemployment in the digital industry as we go to the third stage where we leave the world of

digital, that is zeros and ones,

zeros and ones, and enter the world of quantum, where we compute no longer on transistors,

but we compute on the smallest possible unit, the atom. We're talking about an atomic computer,

a computer that computes on atoms rather than

transistors or levers, pulleys, and gears. And as you can imagine, that's going to affect

the economy, science, weather research, energy, everything. In the same way that the digital revolution changed everything,

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