Thinking On Paper

Quantum computing is going to be the most important computing technology of this century, and I still stand by that. I think that’s right. AI will change things. It’s important, yeah, that’s not a question. But as a fundamentally different thing, something most of us have not seen in our lifetime, quantum is going to be it.

How does the UK stop its best tech founders and entrepreneurs moving to America?

Rory Daniels from techUK says the UK robotics industry is not trying to copy the U.S. and China. Those markets are pushing hard into general-purpose robotics, especially humanoids: machines built to move through a world designed for people and perform a wide range of tasks.

The UK’s strength is different. It is better at specialized robotics: machines built for a particular job, in a particular environment, where failure is expensive or dangerous.

A robot that inspects wind turbines. A robot that enters a nuclear site to decommission equipment or move waste.

Go UK.

From our upcoming episode on the state of technology in the UK.

Rory Daniels from techUK says the next great robotics company will not look like the robotics companies of the past.

AI will sit inside it from the start, not as an add-on. So will other emerging technologies: sensors, advanced manufacturing, edge computing, data infrastructure, connectivity, perhaps quantum, depending on the problem being solved. The company will still build robots, but the value will come from how those systems understand, decide, move, learn, adapt, and connect.

That is why interdisciplinary skills matter. The people building the next generation of robotics cannot live inside one discipline. They need enough technical range to see the whole system before they can build any single part of it.

The classic traveling salesman problem asks: given a list of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city once and returns to the starting point?

At Thinking on Paper, we're giving it an upgrade. The asteroid-mining version.

The cities become asteroids.

The road the Kuiper Belt.

The salesman becomes a spacecraft. And the problem becomes: what is the cheapest, fastest, most efficient route through a set of asteroids if you want to inspect, measure, or mine them?

Bring a quantum computer.

Quantum computing has a drug problem.

Material science, new alloys. How about batteries? Lithium sulfide, for example.

Lithium and sulfur are both relatively small elements in terms of their atoms, so working with them should be more amenable to quantum chemistry. Smaller systems should run faster.

So you start with batteries, then the energy industry, saving energy, electric cars.

And then, once again, the conversation expands from quantum chemistry into much larger systems: energy networks, storage, and where all this information is ultimately kept.

A physics lesson onSpace Based Solar Power from former head of Solaris at the European Space Agency.

As you increase the distance, you increase the size of the transmitter and receiver accordingly, according to what the physics asks you to do. And you can continue to transfer that power efficiently over that distance, right?
And achieve that 80 to 90% capture of the power that you transmit from your transmitter can be received and captured by the receiver.

So whether you’re doing that at a half-meter scale on the benchtop, or you’re doing that at a 500-kilometer distance from low Earth orbit, that physics is expected to scale.