Distribute More of the Future Here

As seminal science fiction writer William Gibson (supposedly) once said, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” My fear is more of it is being distributed in China, not in the U.S.

We’re supposed to be the country of big dreams. We’re supposed to be the country that invents the future and goes boldly into it (Captain Kirk, after all, was born in Iowa). The list of innovations America helped pioneer, the Nobel Prizes Americans have won, the amounts of patents we file – all speak to our faith in the future and our confidence that we’ll be the ones who get there first. But, more and more, we seem to be looking back, not forward.

I’ve written before about the Trump Administration’s war on science. Its attacks on many of our leading universities may be viewed as culture wars, but they are wars that our country is the casualty of. Historian Garrett M. Graff, writing in The New York Times, put it this way:

What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project — which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together.

He laments: “Today, just as China’s own research and development efforts take off, the Trump administration has been erasing this legacy,” and concludes by warning: “If China is able to capitalize on our self-inflicted wounds to invent and secure the future of the 21st century instead, we may find that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project.”

President Trump famously hates EVs, solar energy, and wind turbines, promotes more use of oil, gas, and “clean” coal, and considers climate change a hoax. Well, the future begs to disagree - and so does China.

Some examples:

The New York Times had an in-depth analysis How China Went From Clean Energy Copycat to Global Innovator. Its thesis, supported by several nifty charts and graphs:

Accused for years of copying the technologies of other countries, China now dominates the renewable energy landscape not just in terms of patent filings and research papers, but in what analysts say are major contributions that will help to move the world away from fossil fuels.

“It is the opposite of an accident,” Jenny Wong Leung, an analyst and data scientist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told NYT, adding: “The sheer volume of Chinese investment has been so much larger than in the West. It meant they could build industries from the ground up, all the way through the supply chain.”

Credit: NYT (Source: European Patent Office, Espacenet)

Or there’s Jacob’s Dreyer’s essay, also in NYT, about China’s push in biotech. He asserts:

In its quest to dethrone American dominance in biotech, China isn’t necessarily trying to beat America at its own game. While the U.S. biotech industry is known for incubating cutting-edge treatments and cures, China’s approach to innovation is mostly focused on speeding up manufacturing and slashing costs. The idea isn’t to advance, say, breakthroughs in the gene-editing technology CRISPR; it’s to make the country’s research, development, testing and production of drugs and medical products hyperefficient and cheaper.

Mr. Dreyer thinks that the Trump cuts to research may mean that America’s biotech industry could go from a “homegrown dominance” to “Big American companies will be ever more dependent on the cost advantages and bright young engineers that China offers.”

Then there’s China’s efforts in robotics, As I wrote previously, “…when it comes to robots — especially AI-powered, humanoid ones — the battle may be closer to being over…and the U.S. is not winning.” Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), told The Wall Street Journal: “They have more companies developing humanoids and more government support than anyone else. So, right now, they may have an edge.”

Last week China hosted the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games, and while it was funny seeing robots sometimes fall down or swing wildly at another robot, the breadth and depth of its advances should not be trivialized. The Guardian noted that when it comes to the competition between China and the U.S. on AI, the Games illustrate that “…while the US still has the lead on frontier research, owing in part to Washington’s restrictions on the export of cutting-edge chips to China, Beijing is going all-in on real life applications, such as robotics.”

Or, finally, there’s the furor over “rare earth minerals” as well as other elements critical to modern electronics, such as lithium and copper. China’s recent threat to restrict exports of them put U.S. industry (and the military) in a state of panic. The U.S. used to lead the world in the mining and refining of these, and we still have huge sources of them. The trouble is, for the most part we no longer do either of those, ceding them to China.

I could go into the whole chip manufacturing debacle – again, we invented the industry, then gave it away – but that ground has been well covered. By now hopefully you get the point. China is eagerly looking ahead; we’re not.

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Dan Wang, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, thinks he knows the crux of the problem. His essay in The Atlantic (adopted from his book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future) posits that we have become a nation of lawyers, while China is a nation of engineers. Who, you know: Get. Things. Done.

He writes:

Think about it this way: China is an engineering state, which treats construction projects and technological primacy as the solution to all of its problems, whereas the United States is a lawyerly society, obsessed with protecting wealth by making rules rather than producing material goods. 

The U.S., he charges, “…has a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers.” We’re good at writing laws and regulations, taking people to court, and (for the most part) protecting intellectual property, but when it comes to actually building stuff, we’ve gone soft and slow. He says: “The United States has lost the ability to get stuff done as it focuses on procedures rather than results.”

We don’t want China’s reckless approach to environmental damages, its surveillance state, or its censorship of ideas, but, gosh darn it, it’d be nice for the U.S. to get back to making things and making them better.

Look, I’m a Boomer. My future is way shorter than my past. Some of that past I’m nostalgic about. But I’d sure like to see more of the future, and have more of that future invented here.

Après AI, le Déluge

I have to admit, I’ve steered away from writing about AI lately. There’s just so much going on, so fast, that I can’t keep up. Don’t ask me how GPT-5 differs from GPT-4, or what Gemini does versus Genie 3. I know Microsoft really, really wants me to use Copilot, but so far I’m not biting. DeepMind versus DeepSeek?  Is Anthropic the French AI, or is that Mistral?  I’m just glad there are younger, smarter people paying closer attention to all this.

When it is you or the AI, who will get the job? Credit: Microsoft Designer

Still, I’m very much concerned about where the AI revolution is taking us, and whether we’re driving it or just along for the ride. In Fast Company, Sebastion Buck, co-founder of the “future design company” Enso, posits a great attitude about the AI revolution:

The scary news is: We have to redesign everything.

The exciting news is: We get to redesign everything.

He goes on to explain:

Technical revolutions create windows of time when new social norms are created, and where institutions and infrastructure is rethought. This window of time will influence daily life in myriad ways, from how people find dates, to whether kids write essays, to which jobs require applications, to how people move through cities and get health diagnoses.

Each of these are design decisions, not natural outcomes. Who gets to make these decisions? Every company, organization, and community that is considering if—and how—to adopt AI. Which almost certainly includes you. Congratulations, you’re now part of designing a revolution.

I want to pick out one area in particular where I hope we redesign everything intentionally, rather than in our normal short-sighted, laissez-faire manner: jobs and wealth.

It has become widely accepted that offshoring led to the demise of U.S. manufacturing and its solidly middle class blue collar jobs over the last 30 years. There’s some truth to that, but automation was arguably more of a factor – and that was before AI and today’s more versatile robots. More to the point, today’s AI and robots aren’t coming just to manufacturing but pretty much to every sector.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg warned:

The economic implications are the ones that I think could be the most disruptive, the most quickly. We're talking about whole categories of jobs, where — not in 30 or 40 years, but in three or four — half of the entry-level jobs might not be there. It will be a bit like what I lived through as a kid in the industrial Midwest when trade in automation sucked away a lot of the auto jobs in the nineties — but ten times, maybe a hundred times more disruptive.

Mr. Buttigieg is no AI expert, but Erik Brynjolfsson, senior fellow at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, is. When asked about those comments, he told Morning Edition: “Yeah, he's spot on. We are seeing enormous advances in core technology and very little attention is being paid to how we can adapt our economy and be ready for those changes.”

You could look, for example, at the big layoffs in the tech sector lately. Natasha Singer, writing in The New York Times, reports on how computer science graduates have gone from expecting mid-six figure starting salaries to working at Chipotle (and wait till Chipotle automates all those jobs). The Federal Reserve Bank of New York says unemployment for computer science & computer engineering majors is better than anthropology majors, but, astonishingly, worse than pretty much all other majors.

And don’t just feel sorry for tech workers. Neil Irwin of Axios warns: “In the next job market downturn — whether it's already starting or years away — there just might be a bloodbath for millions of workers whose jobs can be supplanted by artificial intelligence.” He quotes Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook: “AI is poised to reshape our labor market, which in turn could affect our notion of maximum employment or our estimate of the natural rate of unemployment."

In other words, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

While manufacturing was taking a beating in the U.S. over the last thirty years, tech boomed. Most of the world’s largest and most profitable companies are tech companies, and most of the world’s richest people got their wealth from tech. Those are, by and large, the ones investing most heavily in AI -- most likely to benefit from it.

Professor Brynjolfsson worries about how we’ll handle the transition to an AI economy:

The ideal thing is that you find ways of compensating people and managing a transition. Sad to say, with trade, we didn't do a very good job of that. A lot of people got left behind. It would be a catastrophe if we made the similar mistake with technology, [which] that also is going to create enormous amounts of wealth, but it's not going to affect everyone evenly. And we have to make sure that people manage that transition.

 “Catastrophe” indeed. And I fear it is coming.

We know that CEO to worker pay ratios have skyrocketed over the past 40 years. We know that concentration of wealth in the U.S. is also at unprecedented levels. And we know that social mobility – the American Dream of children doing better than their parents, that anyone can make it – has stalled and is actually lower than in many of our peer countries. AI can address those, or make them much, much worse.

It’s exciting to think of all the things AI is going to do for us. We’ll be able to do old things better/faster/cheaper, and do new things that we can barely even dream of now. With it, we should be living in a post-scarcity/abundance society. But that doesn’t mean we’ll all benefit, and certainly not all benefit equally or equitably.

Professor Brynjolfsson hits the nail on the head:

I'm optimistic about the potential to create a lot more wealth and productivity. I think we're going to have much higher productivity growth. At the same time, there's no guarantee all that wealth and productivity is going to be evenly shared. We are investing so much in driving the capabilities for hundreds of billions of dollars and we're investing very little in thinking about how we make sure that leads to widely shared prosperity. That should be the agenda for the next few years.

So if you’re not thinking about social welfare programs, universal basic income (UBI), baby bonds, and the like, as well as what, exactly, we want humans to spend their days doing, start thinking. As Mr. Buck suggests, start designing the AI revolution we should want.

Quantum Is Still Surprising Us

Most of us don’t think about quantum mechanics very much, if at all, even though our everyday life depends on it (such as in semiconductors or GPS). It is said to be the most accurate theory in terms of testable predictions, even though the fundamentals of the theory don’t make sense in our everyday life. Light is both a particle and a wave? Particles can be “entangled” even when they are vast distances apart? Cats that can be alive and dead at the same time?  

Ready for quantum batteries? Credit: Quantum Insider

It’s so counterintuitive that a recent Nature survey found that even leading quantum physicists don’t agree on what it really means. “I find it remarkable that people who are very knowledgeable about quantum theory can be convinced of completely opposite views,” says Gemma De les Coves, a theoretical physicist at the Pompeu Fabra University.

Quantum computing has become a big thing lately, thought to be the future of computing. The Wall Street Journal says: “The emerging technology promises better medicine, faster internet and more sustainable food production,” not to mention upending all existing cryptography. We’re quickly rushing into the AI world, but quantum may be the next gold rush.

I knew all that, but what I did not know was that included in the quantum revolution are quantum batteries.

We all know about batteries, whether they’re for our phones, our cars, our flashlights, our computers, and a host of other applications. Batteries have existed for several hundred years, and basically all have relied on some form of chemical reaction. Quantum batteries, on the other hand, use what is called quantum superposition, moving electrons into higher energy states to store energy.

The field is still in early days, and one of the major problems has been how long researchers could get the quantum batteries to store energy. They charged rapidly, but also lost their charge rapidly, in a matter of nanoseconds. Now researchers from RMIT University and CSIRO (Australia’s national science agency) have announced a new method that lasts a 1,000 times longer – we’re talking microseconds now, folks. The results were published in PRX Energy.

That's what a quantum battery looks like? Credit: RMIT

I won’t try to get into the weeds to explain the approach, other than to regurgitate what was in the title, that they used molecular triplets in Dicke Quantum Batteries. The researchers’ “popular summary” explains:

Quantum batteries may offer scalable charging power density. Those based on the Dicke model enable a cavity-enhanced energy transfer process called superabsorption, but the lifetime is limited by fast radiative emission losses and super radiance. Here, the authors show a promising approach to extend the energy storage lifetime using molecular triplet states, which they test on five devices across a triplet-polariton resonance. One device shows a 1000-fold increase in storage time compared to previous demonstrations.

Study co-author and RMIT PhD candidate Daniel Tibben said: “While we’ve addressed a tiny ingredient of the overall piece, our device is already much better at storing energy than its predecessor.”

“While a working quantum battery could still be some time away, this experimental study has allowed us to design the next iteration of devices,” study co-author and RMIT chemical physicist Professor Daniel Gómez said. “It’s hoped one day quantum batteries could be used to improve the efficiency of solar cells and power small electronic devices.”

Coauthor Francesco Campaioli notes that, while the storage is still only microseconds: “It’s the equivalent of having a phone that charges in 30 minutes and runs out of battery after about 20 days if left idle. Not too shabby.” He adds: “There is still a lot of work to do to develop these ideas into a technology that could impact everyday life. What matters to me is that we have a clear understanding of the challenges that we need to overcome to make it happen.”

And that’s not all the recent news in quantum batteries.

A new paper from researchers at PSL Research University in Paris and the University of Pisa proposes “a deceptively simple quantum battery model that displays a genuine quantum advantage, saturating the quantum speed limit.”  

"Our model consists of two coupled harmonic oscillators: one acts as the 'charger,' and the other serves as the 'battery,'" explained Vittoria Stanzione and Gian Marcello Andolina, co-authors of the paper, to Phys.org. "The key ingredient enabling the quantum advantage is an anharmonic interaction between the two oscillators during the charging process. This anharmonic coupling allows the system to access non-classical, entangled states that effectively create a 'shortcut' in Hilbert space, enabling faster energy transfer than in classical dynamics.”

Got it?

They added: "To the best of our knowledge, this work provides the first rigorous certification of a genuine quantum advantage in a solvable model. Furthermore, the proposed setup can be realized with current experimental technologies."

It seems like a big deal that it outperforms “classical” approaches and is achievable with existing technology.

Finally, researchers from Hubei University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Lanzhou University have proposed a “diamond-based” approach to quantum batteries, using the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond. Who knew diamonds had a nitrogen vacancy?

Schematic illustration of the QB scheme. Credit: Jun-Hong An

The paper was published in Physical Review Letters, and deals with the issue of quantum batteries “self-discharging” (due to what is called decoherence). "The main advantage of our QB scheme in the NV center is that the unique hyperfine interaction between the electron and the ¹⁴N nucleus, which is absent in other platforms, permits us to coherently optimize this ratio," Jun-Hong An, co-senior author of the paper, told Phys.org. "This is the irreplaceable feature of our QB scheme in the NV center. This irreplaceability endows us with the ability to mitigate the self-discharging on one hand, and to maximize the extractable work on the other."

Again, both of those are big deals.

As a result, the researchers conclude: “our results pave the way for the practical realization of the QB.” Professor An believes: "A quantum-technology revolution is underway, which uses quantum resources to overcome various performance limitations of devices set by classical physics."

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Quantum computing seems like it is where AI was five years ago, still around the corner but turning that corner faster than we realized. And I feel like quantum batteries are where quantum computing was five or so years ago, starting to overcome the practical issues that had once seemed insurmountable.

They’re going to happen, sooner than we think.

I don’t think they’re going to replace the existing power grid, and maybe not even your cell phone battery, but in a world of the Internet of Things, nanobots, and other things that edge closer to the quantum level, they’re going to be important.