Quantum Computing: The New Brain Drain Out of Universities
Having just completed an even at Quantum Tech Congress 2019 in Boston, The Qubit Report ambassador noted the number of corporate delegates with a PhD was “eye-opening.” Organizations such M SQUARED, NKT Photonics, and Zapata Computing, among others, had their PhD teams out on the sales floor alongside their marketers. So, there is little wonder about the veracity of the concern of ‘brain drain’ from the Universities. Why? Because Quantum is Coming. Qubit.
Keep quantum computing global and open
Excerpts and salient points ~
+ [T]he race to cash in is fracturing the field. Companies are rushing to build large teams of researchers, draining universities of talent4,5. Hundreds of start-ups are patenting the products of publicly funded research, closing off avenues of enquiry. Public funding for quantum computing is also booming. But it is uneven and skewed towards hardware. North American institutions dominate, and drive the field in directions that suit them. They focus on superconductor technologies, for example. Researchers lacking huge labs and find it hard to compete. Geopolitical walls are also rising as national security and commercial interests heat up infrastructure find it hard to compete. Geopolitical walls are also rising as national security and commercial interests heat up.
The race to cash in is draining universities of talent, fracturing the field and closing off avenues of enquiry, warn Jacob D. Biamonte, Pavel Dorozhkin and Igor Zacharov.
+ Many researchers hope that companies will fill the applications gap. But businesses have little interest in addressing the basic theory of quantum information processing, and they often operate in isolation. This means that the proliferation of start-ups and commercialization of quantum software at this early stage could hinder the development of theoretical methods and quantum software tools.
+ We appeal to academic and industrial scientists to develop quantum applications in an open scientific spirit. Basic research must not be done in isolation or steered by political agendas. These huge investments and the devices stemming from them should serve all 0of humankind, like science itself.
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