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This is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but predictions are notoriously hard to do. "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairm
by prox 6y ago
This is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but predictions are notoriously hard to do.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
"The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys." -- Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office, 1876.
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" -- H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927
- st1x7 6y agoI don't see how pointing out incorrect predictions from the past is constructive or helps address the question. In the same line of thought you could have collected a list of correct skeptical predictions and listed a bunch of technologies that haven't worked out.
- prox 6y agoAnd what is the question here exactly? OC points out a couple of assumptions that are made (I agree for instance that I don’t see the QM replace classical computers anytime soon) But then also makes a few assumptions that might prove to be true or not. That is to say : we don’t know. The people who I quote in the past also had a delineated idea of what the future might entail, but it’s impossible to look very far ahead.
- volta87 6y agoYou are argumenting with a fallacy. The OP argumentation might be incomplete, but is at least solid argument for why we won't need a quantum operating system. If you believe there is or could be a need for a quantum operating system, _explain why_. If you don't know, that's ok. But arguing that "The OP argument cannot be correct because other people made incorrect predictions about other stuff in the past" is pointless and useless. Maybe some application of quantum computing appears in the future that requires a quantum operating system, or maybe there is one such application that already exists today and we don't know about. I don't know of any, and like the OP I also think of Quantum Computers as "accelerators" (like GPUs, FPGAs, Xeon Phis, ...) for certain class of problems.
- prox 6y agoI guess I am looking at it from a different angle, in which case, and following your reasoning, you are indeed correct and I misconstrued OCs intention/message.
- Enginerrrd 6y agoFundamentally, I disagree. The person you are conversing with is applying a sort of Bayesian prior to the reasoning about quantum computers. I think this is actually a very wise thing to do.
- st1x7 6y ago- they're specifically picking a prior made of only the skeptical predictions of famous people about some technology that turned out to be wrong. - they aren't updating the prior with new information, they're just pointing it out as sufficient on its own Using the two points above anyone can make a bad argument about anything - just pick the data points that fit your narrative, state that narrative as a conclusion and don't update it when presented with other facts.
- xondono 6y ago> I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943. This quote always rubs me wrong, because the problem is that we’ve changed definition of what a computer is. If you come to think about it, what he was referring to is what we would now call cloud infrastructure, and there’s not really that much more than 5 of those...
- jacobr1 6y agoYep, and that works for cloud infrastructure. But we also have mobile/IoT ...