Hey, I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. We have come to trust supercomputers to make breakthroughs and help solve so many problems. But in today's talk from TED at BCG in 2020, quantum advocate Matt Lanzoni says classical supercomputers have reached their limit.

And it's time for a different, more advanced kind of computing to confront the even more complex problems to come.

What will the biggest challenges of the 21st century turn out to be?

Today, one might guess climate change, public health, inequality, but the truth is we don't

yet know.

What we do know is that supercomputing will have to be part of the solution.

For nearly 100 years, our reliance on high-performance computers in the face of our most urgent challenges

has grown and grown.

From cracking Nazi codes to sequencing the human genome,

computer processors have risen to meet

increasingly critical and complex demands

by getting smaller, faster, and better, year after year, as if by magic. But there's a

problem. At the very moment that our reliance on computers is growing faster than ever,

progress in compute power is coming to a standstill.

The magic is just about spent.

The timing couldn't be worse.

We rarely talk about it,

but for all that we've accomplished with computers,

there remain a startling number of things that computers still can't do

at a great cost to business and society.

The dream of near-instant computational drug design, for instance, has yet to come to fruition nearly 50 years after it was first conceived.

Never has that been clearer than now as the world sits in a state of isolation and paralysis

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