Accenture has a report on 2019 technology trends, which they call “post-digital”. Post-digital doesn’t mean digital technology is gone, it just means we are kind of over it and it is now the new minimum level of technology that other technologies build on. They also focus on something they call DARQ: “distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and quantum computing.” I had to look up distributed ledger technology – this is basically the same thing as blockchain.

I was curious what they think is going on with quantum computing. They don’t have a lot to say actually, but if you dig into the full report there are a couple paragraphs.

And while quantum computing is the furthest from full maturity and impractical as a current investment for most companies, advances in quantum research are bringing costs down significantly. The number of qubits (the quantum equivalent of a bit in a traditional computer) in leading chips is accelerating: it took 19 years to get from a chip with two qubits to a chip with 17, which IBM achieved in 2017; later that year, IBM bested its own record with 50 qubits, and by 2018, Google had unveiled a chip with 72.9,10 In concert with these advances, Microsoft, Rigetti Computing, 1QBit, and other leaders in quantum research are increasingly making their quantum systems available for experimentation via APIs and software development kits (SDKs, or QDKs).11 These offerings give companies a way to develop and test quantum solutions for specific enterprise use cases today.

Volkswagen has used quantum computing to test traffic flow optimization, as well as to simulate the chemical structure of batteries, hoping to accelerate battery development…