On Oct 8th, I was delighted to host two classmates (Sebastian Hassinger and Denise Valentine, CBS Global ‘05s) for a discussion on Quantum. Sebastian spent four decades in emerging technology and nine years inside the quantum industry, first at IBM Q and then leading worldwide quantum business development at AWS. We approached this discussion purposefully from an intro/101 learning perspective. Here are some highlights:
Quantum mechanics turned 100 in 2025. Its first century gave us the theory, and with it the transistor, the laser and the MRI. More recently, we see quantum effects in an electrical circuit you can hold in your hand. Transistors are approaching atomic scales, where quantum effects become bugs. Quantum processors turn those same effects into features. The result is not a faster laptop but a fundamentally different machine for a specific set of hard problems.
Quantum computing will, over the next ten years, change how we discover drugs, design batteries and protect every encrypted message we send. In 1994, Peter Shor showed that a quantum computer could factor huge numbers efficiently. Factoring is the hard math problem behind the encryption that protects your bank account, your messages and your medical records. A large, error-corrected quantum computer would break it. As policy catches up, government encryption initiatives are well underway:
2024: NIST publishes post-quantum encryption standards.
2026: Major browsers and messengers have migrated; a White House executive order sets federal deadlines.
2030: Federal systems and contractors must switch, with authentication following by 2031.
2035: RSA and other quantum-vulnerable encryption are removed from US standards.
Sebastian's verdict: hardware/migrations will not happen next year, but it’s no longer "decades away."
I’m looking forward to hosting follow-up sessions in 2027:
Session Two: Building a Quantum Ecosystem in New York State. How universities, government and industry are working together to make New York a center for quantum research and development.
Session Three: Investing in Quantum. A conversation with leading venture investors about the emerging quantum venture landscape and how to participate.
To go deeper in the meantime, Hassinger's weekly podcast and essays are at newquantumera.com.
This is no clockwork universe
Peter Shor
If the eternal dance of molecules
Is too entangled for us mortal fools
To follow, on what grounds should we complain?
Who promised us that Nature’s arcane rules
Would make sense to a merely human brain?
https://math.mit.edu/~shor/No_Clockwork_Universe.html