This spring, a mysterious figure calling themselves the Quantum Bullshit Detector strolled onto the Twitter scene. Posting anonymously, they began to comment on purported breakthroughs in quantum computing—claims that the technology will speed up artificial intelligence algorithms, manage financial risk in banks, and break all encryption. The account preferred to express its opinions in a single word: “Bullshit.”
The provocations perplexed experts in the field. Because of the detector’s familiarity with jargon and the online personalities it chose to follow, the person or persons behind the account seemed to belong to the quantum community. Researchers were unaccustomed to such brazen trolling from someone in their own ranks. “So far it looks pretty well-calibrated, but […] vigilante justice is a high-risk affair,” wrote physicist Scott Aaronson on his blog a month after the detector’s debut. People discussed online whether to take the account’s opinions seriously.
“There is some confusion. Quantum Bullshit Detector cannot debate you. It can only detect quantum bullshit. This is why we are Quantum Bullshit Detector!” the account tweeted in response.
In the subsequent months, the account has called bullshit on statements in academic journals such as Nature and journalism publications such as Scientific American, Quanta, and yes, an article written by me in WIRED. Google’s so-called quantum supremacy demonstration? Bullshit. Andrew Yang’s tweet about Google’s quantum supremacy demonstration? Bullshit. Quantum computing pioneer Seth Lloyd accepting money from Jeffrey Epstein? Bullshit.
People now tag the detector, @BullshitQuantum, to request its take on specific articles, which the account obliges with an uncomplicated “Bullshit” or “Not bullshit.” Not everyone celebrates the detector, with one physicist calling the detector “ignorant” and condemning its “lack of talent and bad taste” in response to a negative verdict on his own work. But some find that the account provides a public service in an emerging industry prone to hyperbole. “I think it does a good job of highlighting articles that are not well-written,” says physicist Juani Bermejo-Vega of the University of Granada in Spain.
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The anonymous account is a response to growing anxiety in the quantum community, as investment accelerates and hype balloons inflate. Governments in the US, UK, EU, and China have each promised more than a billion dollars of investment in quantum computing and related technologies. Each country is hoping to become the first to harness the technology’s potential—to use the computers to design better batteries or to break an adversary’s encryption system. But these ambitions will likely take decades of work, and researchers like Bermejo-Vega worry whether they can deliver on inflated expectations—or worse, that the technology might accidentally make the world a worse place. “With more money comes more promises, and more pressure to fulfill those promises, which leads to more exaggerated claims,” says Bermejo-Vega.
It’s not clear that quantum computing will end up benefiting society, says Emma McKay, a graduate student at York University in Canada who studies the societal impacts of the technology. If quantum computers are to be broadly available to users, the computers will need a lot of environmentally-unfriendly infrastructure for storing data, says McKay. According to physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, writing in The Guardian, a future quantum computer capable of simulating new chemicals would produce 10 terabytes of data per second and “require a supporting cast of conventional computers and other devices to program, operate and monitor them.”
“I have yet to see evidence that any quantum technology is worth the amount of resources we are putting into it,” says McKay.
Most quantum researchers take a softer public stance than McKay, but they too have begun to voice their anxieties, in response to a specific hyped announcement: Google’s quantum supremacy demonstration, in which the company’s researchers performed a largely useless mathematical problem on a quantum computer faster than a supercomputer. Since reports of this demonstration first leaked in September, many researchers have expressed concern that the word “supremacy” suggests quantum computers are now better than conventional ones, which is patently false. While Bermejo-Vega thinks Google’s demonstration does provide scientific value of the technology’s viability, she emphasizes their success was “narrow.” In addition, all quantum computers, including Google’s, perform inconsistently because they are prone to errors that researchers don’t know how to correct. “Google’s computer is mostly still a useless quantum computer for practical purposes,” she says.
