The Big Tech Stories of 2022: To Space and BEYOND!

a big old yea. We do what we must because we can. So let's start with the James Web Space Telescope. After many many delays, in fact years of delay days because the telescope was originally intended to launch into space way back in two thousand seven, it finally shuffled off its earthly coil last Christmas, it lets slip the bonds of Earth, and last Christmas, I gave you James Webb. The very next day, you said, change that darn name. Just a quick word on that. James Webb is the

name of a former NASA administrator. In fact, he was the second ever administrator of NASA, but he had previously served as an under Secretary of State at the you know, State Department, and he served in that capacity from nineteen to nineteen fifty two. Now, this was during a time in the US known as the Lavender Scare that refers to an erab an ugly era in US history when the federal government discriminated against anyone who falls under the

scope of lgbt Q plus. Essentially, the government would exclude or expel people that were known or suspected to not be heterosexual, claiming that it was like a national security issue, and the State Department in particular was a real target of this kind of witch hunt. Congress launched an investigation in nineteen fifty into the State Department, and President Eisenhower would later sign an executive order essentially putting an exclamation

mark at the end of this pernicious practice. And yeah, this is one of the many periods of American history that are ugly and hateful, and ultimately they are self defeating because you can only imagine how many qualified, dedicated folks were denied employment simply because they didn't fit the

extremely narrow set of beliefs of a bunch of old people. Anyway, that policy was in place when Webb took the position of now administrator in nineteen sixty one, and in fact, one NASA budget analyst named Clifford J. Norton was fired

because of his sexual orientation that happened in nineteen sixty three. Well, because of these events and because of concerns about James Webb and his potential role in perpetuating this practice, NASA was pressured to conduct a research study into the matter to find out what, if any involvement James Webb had in carrying out Congress's desires at the State Department, or if in fact, he was part of Norton getting fired at NASA later on, and the investigation said that there

was no evidence to show Webb did either of those things. In fact, according to their investigation, Webb purposefully limited the amount of information that Congress could access relating to State Department employees. And as for Norton at NASA, he was fired and he was fired because he was gay, But there was no evidence that Webb was even aware of

Norton being fired at all. Because keep in mind, Webb was the leader of NASA, Norton was a budget analyst, so it's not like nor like Webb had direct oversight over every single employee at NASA. So the report found that there was no evidence that was clearly showing Web participating in the persecution of lgbt Q plus personnel. There was a tiny bit of evidence suggesting that he did limit Congress's reach into the State Department, potentially protecting people.

So NASA decides that it's gonna stick with the James Webb name. Now, y'all, I personally don't know if James Webb was a decent guy, or maybe maybe he wasn't. Maybe he just had so much on his plate he didn't worry about a policy that perhaps he didn't even believe in. I have no clue. I just don't know.

The NASA report came from the agency's chief historian, so it came from NASA's chief His story in You could argue that, you know, the fact that it was NASA's own chief historian might mean that it could be a biased report. But anyway, that's the story behind the name and the controversy around it, which flares up every now and again. It's not like this is the first time we've heard about it, but in two uh that story did start making the rounds again. But let's get to

the telescope itself. Now, NASA launched the James Webb Telescope in on Christmas Day, as it turns out, but it would take the telescope a month to get to its orbital point and to fully deploy, and it took more months beyond that for it to actually start doing science. And so all of that is really the domain of twenty two baby. So one month after launch, in January two, the telescope arrived at a point in space we call L two. The L stands for lagrange, more specifically lagrange point.

Some people may say lagrange, which is probably the more correct pronunciation, but you know, I've also heard NASA folks called Gemini geminy, so I guess it's all up for grabs anyway. A L Grange point is a position in space where an object will stay put relative to the rest of its surroundings, like you know, a two body system. And so it's a point in space where the gravitational forces from nearby bodies like say the Sun and the Earth are effectively holding the object in that part of space.

It can't move away from that because it's being held gravitationally by these other bodies. There are five such points around the Earth or between the Earth and Sun where an object can do this, and the one that the James Webb Telescope is in is called L two. That's in an orbit that's on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. So, in other words, this orbit is shaded from much of the Sun's light, which is

important for the telescope's extremely sensitive detectors when it's making observations. Uh, it does still get some light. Otherwise it wouldn't be able to collect light through its solar panels, and the solar panels would be for decorative use only, and that

would be ridiculous. It is a very sensitive telescope. That James Webb Space Telescope is about seven times more powerful than the venerable Hubble Space Telescope, and it has already returned some truly spectacular data, including images such as a shot of the Pillars of Creation. This is a dust cloud. There's really compelling shape to it. I'm sure you've seen pictures of it. If not, you should look up Pillars of Creation on an image search because they it really

is a spectacular site. We've seen some pictures of early star formation, which is great. It's having astronomers more information about how stars form. We've looked at galactic black holes that are far across the universe from our own galaxy. We've looked at exo planets orbiting a star, and these exo plants potentially could have viable atmospheres and so could possibly support life. And we're just getting started and considering how complicated the telescope is. This was never a guarantee.

I mean, the massive eighteen solar panels had to unfold as the telescope made its way to L two over the course of a month, and just one failure would have brought the entire mission into jeopardy or at least severely limited its use. And since NASA had spent decades and like ten billion dollars on this thing, it would be really bad if things hadn't worked out. But it did,

so good news there. It did have a little bit of hiccup recently, so on December seven two, just a few weeks ago, several of its instruments aboard the telescope went into safe mode, so that means they temporarily shut down in order to protect delicate hardware. The source of the problem turned out to be a software fault, So this software was essentially generating errors that related to the

telescope's attitude control. Now, in this sense, attitude control isn't about making sure the telescope doesn't act out like a hormonal teenager. I wish we had that kind of attitude control here on Earth. No, we're talking about the telescope's physical orientation in space, like where it is pointed that kind of attitude. So the software was generating an error that suggested something was wrong with this system when nothing actually was. The shutdowns affected some, but not all, of

the experiments that the telescope was involved in. Work had to pause on certain projects while engineers back on Earth sused what was going on. But by December twenty those engineers had figured out a solution. They were able to essentially patch the software, and now the telescope is back doing science in space full time. NASA reports the telescope is in great condition and the agency is working to reschedule the affected projects that had to delay as the

software was glitching out. The telescope is bound to tell us about the early stages of the universe already. It has captured images of systems that are like only four hundred million years younger than the universe itself, Like, in other words, the universe comes into existence, and then these systems started within four hundred million years of that. And yes, four hundred million years as an astoundingly long time on

our scale, right, Yes, that's that's unfathomable. However, when we consider the universe is somewhere in the neighborhood of thirteen point seven billion years old, it's really just a fraction a moment after the big bang, uh banged. The telescope is creating new possibilities in the fields of astronomy and cosmology, and my guess is we're going to learn a ton of fascinating stuff about our universe and by extension, our

own solar system in history. And that's just plain cool. Now, sticking with NASA, we have a related topic that's been somewhat controversial in multiple spheres, and I'm talking about the Artemists program. This is NASA's plan to return to the Moon. And to be clear, it's not just NASA. NASA's working in conjunction with other space agencies out there, and by return, I am including the goal of actually landing people on

the Moon's surface. This would be the first time we have done that since nineteen seventy two in the Apollo seventeen mission. So the Artemist program has a pretty complicated history. Back in the mid two thousand's, during the George W. Bush and sistration in the United States, NASA initiated a program called Constellation. This had the goal of returning to

the Moon, among other things. This program was linked with a couple of related but distinct projects that were really focused on building the next generation of spacecraft that would turn out into the Orion and the Space Launch System. Keep in mind, this was all going on while the Space Shuttle was still in service, but it's retirement date was coming up, So this was work that was being done with the knowledge that the Space Shuttle program was

going to be sunset. Now when Barack Obama won the election to president, things changed, and this frequently happens with NASA. It's actually one of the really big challenges that the agency faces because there's no guarantee that an incoming administration will continue to support the efforts that were begun under

a previous administration. So not only do you have the technical challenges of creating the spacecraft that will complete a mission, or the engineering challenges of planning out the mission itself and the various processes that the mission is gonna have to follow. You also have the political reality that you're funding can change dramatically year to year, depending upon the makeup of Congress, and it can change even more so

from presidential administration to administration. Obama effectively canceled Constellation. He said the program was behind schedule and it was over budget. It was both of those things. Further, he said the program was leaning too hard on the Apollo program of the sixties and seventies, that the Orion spacecraft it does, I mean, essentially look like a larger version of the Apollo capsule. The launch vehicle looks like an update to the launch vehicles that we used fifty years ago, and

Obama criticized the program for lacking in innovation. A committee found that Constellation, despite being over budget, was also underfunded, and that there was no chance the program would be able to achieve a moon land by twenty which was one of its goals, and so rather than pouring more money into this program that the administration saw as sort of bleeding cash, Obama chose to essentially freeze it out.

The focus began to shift toward commercial space companies, primarily SpaceX as carrying the load for the near term, although work would continue on developing the next generation of spacecraft for NASA itself, so Oriyan and the Space Launch System We're not scrapped. They continued on. And the benefit I guess of that was that or the reason they were able to do this, I guess was because they were not, uh,

intrinsically part of Constellation. Okay, this will bring us up to two thousand seventeen, and the Artemis program it got its start under the administration of Donald Trump, and it picked up some of the threads that were dropped when Constellation got the AX. We'll talk more about that in

just a moment after we come back from this quick break. So, the Artist program is a joint effort between NASA and other space agencies like the e s A, the European Space Agency, and its main goals to establish a permanent presence on the Moon and a lunar orbital station meant

to help stage further human exploration of space. So the primary spacecraft for this mission is the Orion and the launch vehicle is the Space Launch System or s l S. Now, the SLS alone has been the subject of a lot of controversy, mostly stemming from the contractors that NASA has relied upon during the very long development process for this

launch system. So yeah. Another big challenge with NASA is that the agency does a lot of contracting with massive aerospace companies to produce various components for stuff like spacecraft, spacesuits, launch vehicles, that kind of thing. So it's not like NASA has some sort of foundry where it just um use as a massive blacksmiths who create rockets and stuff. They contract with these very big companies that specialize in aerospace uh technologies. So these contracts can get really expensive.

Sometimes individual projects will take more time than was estimated and cost more than was estimated during the proposal phase, and frequently NASA becomes the subject of scrutiny when various analysts and journalists and politicians and others ask, hey, did you really pick the best contractor to do this because it's running over budget and behind deadline. The problem is, we usually don't know the answer to the question is this the best contractor for the job until it's too late.

But yeah, NASA often gets put in the spotlight for budget issue and contractor choices. There's always the question of was the choice of contractor a political choice or was it the best choice for the mission? Like there are a lot of these issues that NASA has to contend with as well. Anyway, all of this plagued the SLS and it took years and years and years for it to finally get to the point where they could launch

the darned thing. Uh So, it was first proposed to launch way back in sixteen, but it took six years to get to where NASA could actually do a a full launch of the SLS, And within those six years there were multiple launch dates that had been proposed and postponed. It led some to question if the whole thing was just going to be a bust, if it's just gonna be a massive failure. But this year we finally got

a launch. Now it was meant to launch in August, but then one of the sensors of the launch vehicle indicated that part of the engine was warmer than it should be and it put it outside the parameters of safe operation, so the launch was scrubbed. NASA would try again the following month in September, but then we got word that there was some sort of hydrogen leak in part of the system and that necessitated canceling that launch. Then it got pushed October, but this time it wasn't

NASA's fault. We had a hurricane, actually had a couple of them, but Hurricane Ian was the big one. I was actually on a ship that was at sea when Ian hit. We were supposed to return to Cape Canaveral Port Canaveral, and we couldn't because of Ian, and I was stuck at sea for a few days more than was my original plan. That was exciting. But finally on November sixteenth, NASA was able to launch the Space Launch System the SLS, and attached to it was an oryon spacecraft.

Now there was no human crew aboard that capsule, but there were some mannequins and a plush toy or two, and it also carried a biology experiment designated Biology Experiment One that aimed to study space radiations effects on fungi and yeast and seeds and such, because obviously any kind of prolonged human activity in space means that humans are potentially going to be uh exposed to various types of radiation that otherwise they'd be protected from here on Earth.

So that was the goal of that particular experiment was to learn a little bit more about that. The s l s successfully attained orbit. The Orion spacecraft successfully separated from the launch vehicle, and it went on a twenty six ish like twenty five and a half day long trip that took it all the way around the back side of the Moon and returned to Earth. So on Sunday, December eleven two, the Orion capsule from Artemis one returned

to Earth. Its splashed down in the Pacific Ocean and a Navy crew retrieved the capsule and it will be transported back to UH to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. So that concluded the Artemis one mission. And it was an enormous achievement. And yes it was an achievement that had been long delayed, but it's still demonstrated this capability that humanity can return to the Moon, and it's a type of space exploration the humans just haven't engaged in in fifty years, so it was a really big deal.

Analysts are going to look over the data from the Artemis one mission and use that data to help prepare for Artemis two. This will be the first mission in the Artemis program to include a human crew aboard and Orion spacecraft, but this mission will not include a lunar landing. The mission will go into outer space and the crew will pilot the Orion capsule and put it through its paces, but it will not land on the Moon. That won't

happen until Artemis three. The Artemis two mission will happen no earlier than and then Artemis three will happen at some point after that, maybe as early as but I would be a little cautious to put that as the actual date when it will happen. As I mentioned earlier, there's actually disagreement regarding whether the Artemis program is a worthy use of time, money, and resources. Some would prefer more of a focus on Mars rather than the Moon. Some question the value of sending humans at all, and

we can rely more on robots and unscrewed missions. Then there are critics who think going back to the Moon is a good idea, but they don't agree with the way Artemis programs process has that laid out. They don't agree with that plan. As for myself, I'm actually conflicted. I'm not really sure how to feel about it. I do think these missions can be inspiring. I think there's always benefits that emerge as a result of the work

that is necessary to make these mission as possible. You know, engineers have to figure out how to make this work, and in the process they create things that can have other uses here on Earth. So we can have real benefits to the advancements that people make just in order to accomplish the goals of these missions. So that's good. I just I don't know. I don't know how I feel about Artemis, but it's I certainly want to see more people inspired to pursue science and engineering and that

sort of thing. And there is no doubt that stories about astronauts going back to the Moon is a really inspiring story. Another great NASA story for two was the success of the DART mission. You might recall that DART stands for double Asteroid Redirection Test, and that this mission was to test whether or not smashing a spacecraft into something like an asteroid could divert its path sufficiently sufficiently so that you can move it out of the way of, say,

a trajectory that would take it towards Earth. Uh. The reason that this is important is that on occasion, fairly sizeable stuff does smash into our planet and have catastrophic consequences. Uh. You can ask the dinosaurs about that. Oh wait, you can't, because they're all dead because of a celestial object that smashed into the Earth and made it uninhabitable for Donna Sawas.

So for years there have been folks wondering about how we might be able to alter the trajectory of something that otherwise could be on a collision course with the Earth, and there's been a lot of proposals. Of course, you've got the Hollywood version in which we send Bruce Willis

up there to blow up an incoming asteroid. This, by the way, would be a very bad idea because instead of one huge rock hurdling at us, you would create a bunch of slightly smaller rocks hurtling at us d like turning a bullet into a cloud of shotgun pellets. And some of those might incenterate upon entering the Earth's atmosphere, but a lot of them would make it down to Earth, and essentially all you would be doing is increasing the

surface area of impact. It would not be a good idea anyway, One of the possible solutions that is considered to be a good idea is to send up a spacecraft to act as a sort of battering ram and to nudge and object like a meteor or an asteroid enough so that it doesn't hit our planet. But how do you test that. You don't wait for the day when you definitely have to do something because something's heading our way, because if it doesn't work, well that's bad.

So you need to test it in advance. So what NASA did was it identified a couple of asteroids or if you prefer an asteroid, and it's quote unquote moonlit, and the Dart spacecraft crashed into the moonlight, which has a name, thank you very much, it's dimorphous. So the goal was to alter dimorphoses orbit around its asteroid and

reduce the orbit by at least seventy three seconds. So on September twenty two, Dart makes contact with Dimorphous and then astronomers are surprised to see that the orbit did shorten, but it shortened way more than seventy three seconds. It became thirty two minutes shorter. So this was a huge success.

Dart showed that using a bit of percussive maintenance, we can change the flight path of a small body in space, and that kind of knowledge can end up being really important should we detect such a small object that is on a collision course with our planet, And the earlier we detected, the better our chances are, and also the less we need to actually move the object to put

it on a different path. Right like if if it's far enough out, you just have to alter its course by a couple of degrees and it will completely miss the Earth. So that shows that it's really important one to have the solution of how you move it, and too that you're able to identify these objects as early as possible, because not only do you have to you know, find it, but you also have to prepare the mission and launch it in time for it to make a difference.

So very important work. Here one more space thing I want to talk about before I go to break, So I covered in yesterday's episode the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Well clearly that has had a big effect on space efforts as well as terrestrial technology matters. Russia has facilities, it has launch vehicles, it is a space capable nation one of the few on Earth. There's only like half a dozen of them on Earth, and a lot of space agencies in in Europe and elsewhere depend upon Russia

as the staging grounds for their own space missions. But with the world placing sanctions on Russia, this became untenable politically, and so several missions had to be postponed or outrights

canceled scrapped. So, for example, the European Space Agency, the e s A, had a Mars mission planned, but it was going to use Russian hardware and a Russian launch facility, and the e s A subsequently chose to postpone the mission and instead they will end up reconfiguring the entire mission so that it will not rely on Russian hardware and launch facilities. That will take about three years and something like seventeen billion euro an incredible decision like to

to make that choice sends a pretty powerful message. Or take the story of one Web. Now, I'll have to do a full episode about One Web in the future, because that company has had a dramatic history. Technically you could say companies, because really it it was like the phoenix, It collapsed and burnt up, and then a new version of one Web rose from the ashes. It started off in America as a company aiming to bring satellite based

broadband internet connectivity to the market. And it'll be clear there already were satellite based internet companies in place, but one Web's goal was to use very small or relatively small and relatively inexpensive satellites and then create constellations of the satellites that would provide uninterrupted service to customers on the ground. And you might be thinking, ha, this sounds

a bit like starlink, and you would be right. In fact, very early on, one Web was working with SpaceX on plans for this service to use SpaceX to help launch the satellites up into space. And then a year or so later, Elon Musk announced SpaceX is competing business Starlink that had a very familiar business plan to it. I'm not saying anything happened, I'm just saying that's a fact. So anyway, the US based one web actually went bankrupt

in twenty Winny. The pandemic killed that business, and a consortium that included the UK government purchased the company's assets in auction bankruptcy auction in November. So the one Web of today is a different company than the original one Web. Anyway, One Web had planned to launch more than thirty satellites on a Russian launch vehicle earlier this year in two but then Russia invaded Ukraine and there was pressure on

the UK government to scrap the mission. Russia told one Web, hey, this thing is paid for, so if you pinky swear that none of these satellites will ever be used by militaries, then we're good. Ski. Also, the UK government needs to sell off its interest in one Web, but the UK government was not ready to do that. It did not

want to give up ownership of one Web. It did not want to guarantee that it would not use the satellite communication system for military purposes, so they refused to acquiesce to the request, and Russia scrapped the mission and kept the satellites woof. Also, Russia announced in the summer of this year that it will leave the International Space Station in four and will prepare to launch its own

independent space station. The i s S has already served well pasted its initial estimated decommissioned date, but the hope in the US was to continue operations until twenty thirty or so. This will be a lot harder to do without the cooperation of the Russians, who handle a lot of the propulsion systems aboard the I S S. So unless they hand those over, it's going to be real hard to keep the I S S an operation not

necessarily impossible, but really hard. But this announcement struck some as being another attempt by Russia to kind of strike a blow to the West, and maybe it was all right, we're gonna take another quick break when we come back. It's grab bag time. Okay. Like I said before the break, we're in a kind of grab bag situation of various scientific and technological advancements that we saw in two. And

let's get our start with nuclear fusion. So to recap, fusion is when two atoms fuse together and they form a heavier atom. And it's the process that happens in the Sun where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. See in the Sun, you've got incredible forces of gravity and heat that allow for this nuclear process to happen. And an output of this process, besides helium, is a huge release of energy, and that energy is what we here on Earth receive and it

makes life possible. Now contrast this with nuclear fission. This is the process where we take a heavy atom, such as your neum, and we use some force to split this atom into two or more lighter atoms and possibly some other byproducts. This process also releases energy. In fact, this is the process that our nuclear power plants use here on Earth. There are some drawbacks to this approach, however, Namely, you end up with some radioactive byproducts that are dangerous

to organic critters like us. So you have to figure out what are you gonna do with these byproducts. Typically it involves putting nuclear waste in dry casks and then storing those on site that the nuclear power plants. And meanwhile the world debates on where to put the stuff long term. And here in the United States there was a proposal for a really long time to store it under Yucka Mountain in Nevada, But those plans have encountered

lots of opposition. It turns out folks are not keen on the idea of having material that emits invisible dead lee levels of radiation anywhere close to them, or even not that close to them, like a decent distance from them, is still not far enough at least in their minds.

And that's kind of understandable. I mean, like I said, nuclear radiation is invisible, and unless there's a really intense amount of it, it's undetectable to your typical person unless they have to be carrying a Geiger counter or something like that. Anyway, while proponents and opponents of nuclear power argue about whether or not there is a truly safe way to store nuclear waste long term, there's this tempting possibility of nuclear fusion. Fusion doesn't create the same kind

of radioactive materials that fission does. Uh. It does have some byproducts to some waste that we'd have to deal with, but nothing on the level of nuclear fission, and that gives it a really attractive uh slant. Another is that the main fuel source, we would use hydrogen as the most plentiful stuff on the planet. There, but there are some catches. Uh. One of the big catches is that to initiate fusion, you have to use a lot of

energy to get things started. Remember, the reason this happens in the sun is because you have this incredible force of gravity and this intense heat that provides the ignition energy needed to keep this process going, So we have to do sort of the same thing here on Earth somehow without you know, turning the Earth into the sun. So meanwhile, if you get less energy out than what you got putting into it, well that means you're spending

more energy than you're getting back. This is a bad investment. But then we saw some exciting progress in this field this year. Not too long ago, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory held a fusion experiment in which the energy emitted was greater than the laser energy g that was used to generate the reaction in the first place. Specifically, the lasers delivered two point zero five mega jules of energy to the little fusion pellet, and the reaction generated

three point one five mega jules of energy. So two point oh five in three point one five out, So we get more out than we put in sort of. Now, I say sort of because this only works if we're just looking at the amount of energy that the lasers delivered versus the amount of energy released by the fusion inside the pellet. However, if we then consider how much energy we needed to consume to generate that laser power in the first place things change because unfortunately, lasers are

not particularly energy efficient devices. So in order to generate that two point oh five mega jules of laser energy, the lab actually had to pull three hundred mega jules of energy on the electrical grid. So when you think about it in that respect, you see they had to use a hundred times the amount of energy they got out of that reaction, and yeah, taking them into account as a bummer, but this experiment is still really encouraging, and that's partly because this is not the only way

we can achieve fusion. It's just one of them. Lasers are just involved in in a couple of the different ways. There are other ways as well, and if we can get the same sort of results that the scientists got out of this experiment, then we might be on the right track here on Earth. It's pretty hard to replicate the conditions of the Sun, but this experiment brought us

a little step closer to doing it. And if we can get nuclear fusion to work out for us in the long run, it will really address our energy needs for well for our lifetimes and well beyond our lifetimes, and that's exciting. It would let us move off of fossil fuels entirely, and that would be great for the planet. But we still have a lot of work to do before any of this becomes practical, and my guess is it's still going to take some decades to get there.

I should also mention that in China, scientists were able to create a sustained nuclear fusion reaction and it lasted for more than seventeen minutes, because another big challenge with fusion here on Earth is not just getting the reaction started, but it's keeping a reaction going so that you can continue to release energy that you can harness and convert into electricity. It doesn't do you a whole lot of good if you do release a lot more energy than

you put in, but only lasts for an instant. That's not really enough for us to make practical use out of it. So this news from China about how they created a superheated plasma and they were able to maintain it for more than seventeen minutes, that is just as exciting as this other announcement of the experiment that generated or released more energy than was put in. So these are all pieces that are necessary for us to have a working nuclear fusion uh process in the future. We

also saw advancements in quantum computing in two. IBM recently announced a four hundred thirty three cubit quantum computer called the Osprey, which is the largest of its quantum computers to date. So you might think, what does any of that mean. Well, my guests, as you probably know, your basic computers ultimately rely on bits or binary digits, and this is what is used to run computations at the machine level. So a bit can have one of two values. It can either be a zero or it can be

a one. You can think of it like a light switch which can be off or on. And all computations, when you really break them down to their most basic level, boiled down to mathematic operations on big old groups of zeros and ones of bits. Well, a quantum computer relies on quantum bits or cubits, and cubits have some odd behaviors, so,

for example, they can exist in superposition. This means a cubit can effectively behave as though it is both a zero and a one, and technically all values in between simultaneously.

This means that if you design a proper algorithm to take advantage of the cubits, and you have enough cubits to do it, you can tackle a subset of computational problems that are very difficult for classical computers and then solve them in a fraction of the time that you would need otherwise, because essentially what the quantum computer can do is run all the different variations of that problem in parallel with one another, and then compare all the outputs at the end and give you the one that

is most likely to be correct. We also talk more about probabilities with quantum computers rather than uh like like specific confirmed results. It does get way more complicated from there. I mean, quantum computers are very delicate systems. It's very easy for them to be upset, and then you end up with a very pathetic classical computer system instead of quantum computer system. It's important to remember that quantum computers

will not be good for all computational problems. Instead, they'll be well suited for a specific group of computational problems. One set of computational problems that is quite relevant to us today relates to cryptography and encryption. So at a very simple level, you can kind of think of encryption involving two very very large prime numbers, like hundreds of digits long, but their prime numbers. You take these two different very big prime numbers and you multiply them together,

and then you get a product. And everyone can see the product essentially, but only the people who hold the keys, those being the prime numbers, know what was used to make that product. So if you wanted to decrypt something that was used using this particular encryption process, you would first need to determine what were those two large prime numbers that were used to make this product in the

first place. What were those two And this is the type of problem that would make a classical computer take, you know, thousands or maybe even tens of thousands of years to solve, because it would go through every single prime number in order to determine whether or not this is the solution, and that would just take thousands of years. But the quantum computer, with a suitable program written for it and with enough cubits to run it could potentially

come back with a solution much much more quickly. And this tells us that eventually quantum computers will make our current encryption methods totally pointless. But the National Institute of Standards and Technology has been reviewing proposed post quantum cryptography methods in anticipation of tackling this problem before all secrets are revealed, which is really exciting. Stuff like you started again the kind of like a spy mentality. You're thinking,

it's a race against the clock. Eventually, we're going to have quantum computer systems that are sufficiently powerful enough and have a sufficient algorithm designed for it to reverse certain types of encryption and make it a trivial task, which means the stuff that we count upon as being encrypted, like like like really sensitive information things like your your your financial information, maybe your credit card numbers, that kind of stuff could just be revealed totally because you could

reverse that encryption process using this methodology. So there is a necessity to develop the next generation of cryptographic techniques that will work both with classical computers and with quantum computers. That's really important to say, because there was one proposed post quantum cryptographic method that proved to be uh solvable using classical computers, and that obviously doesn't solve the problem. And in two we also saw some pretty amazing developments

in AI. I'm specifically thinking about how several different AI image generating tools really emerged this year or became famous this year, where you would type a prompt into a field, and then an AI program generates an image based upon your prompt, and you can tweak your prompt and put in different adjectives or different guidelines and get new images that continue to try and develop this idea you've had.

Then there's the story of chat GPT, the AI that can compose responses to text queries and it can give you a text answer. Both of these applications of a I got a lot of attention and criticism this year. For one thing, the capabilities of AI have improved tremendously over recent years, but they still show that there are some interesting and sometimes humorous or even disturbing gaps between the way AI goes about doing something and the way

humans do. Some of the AI generated images I have seen appear to have spawned from the fever fueled brain of a mad genius. If you look at that and think, yeah, no human would ever do this. Others seem hopelessly misguided. You'll look at an image and say, I can't even tell you what words were used to prompt this image.

As for the text, the text can span between being helpful, concise, and accurate to being very much inaccurate but presented in such a way as to seem really confident, so it might make the reader feel, oh, I can depend upon this answer, when in fact you might not be able to, and that serves as a potential problem. Now, these instances of AI have launched multiple conversations in different contexts. Right,

you've got the trustworthiness of AI? For example, how do we know the answers we get are accurate, are correct, are unbiased? And in a lot of cases we don't know the answer to that because the AI isn't revealing what sources it draws from in order to compose the responses that we get, So without being able to check the AI's work, we can't be certain that it's reliable. And in fact, we have seen stories about how chat GPT in particular could sometimes generate unreliable responses. Uh So

that is one of the concerns. But there are other conversations we've heard too. We've heard debates about whether or not AI is going to have a negative impact on artistic efforts going forward. If you train an AI to generate images that can mimic the style of working artists. Does that not threaten those artists livelihoods? I mean, if you're thinking, gosh, I really would love a sketch by

this one artist, but I can't afford their rates. But I could just use this AI to create a a mimic of what this artist would do based upon what I want, and I don't have to pay anyone anything. That definitely is a concern in the creative world. Then there's also the concern that if an AI like chat GPT could potentially create an essay on any given subject, then what's going to stop students from cheating on their homework by giving it to a I Now, I have a solution to that, by the way, which is to

eliminate homework. Just get rid of it. I mean, I've I've seen studies that show that homework doesn't do much good anyway, and so it ends up being a big time killer for both students and teachers who have to grade the stuff. So yeah, you know, maybe maybe get rid of the homework. Um, I don't really have a dog in that fight. I don't have kids, and I haven't been in school for a few decades, so I

don't really have to worry about that. I mean, I have to generate essays every single week, because that's kind of what these podcasts are, right, So hey, maybe I'll do an episode that was completely written by AI, which I don't think I will do because one, I don't think AI will be able to produce an episode that is in my style, and two, if it does, I'm out of a job. So forget I said that. Okay, that's it. I am done looking act on the news

stories of two. There were other ones, obviously, there were tons of things that happened in the tech world this past year, but I wanted to tackle the really impactful ones I had been keeping an eye on throughout the year. And while there are others, I feel like six or however, many episodes we've done that have been retrospectives on two are plenty. So tomorrow's episode will be something else. What Who knows. I haven't really decided yet. I think I

have an idea, but we will see. It will also be the last episode of tech Stuff for at least the last new one. Friday's episode will be a classic episode. Then on Monday. The following Monday, we have a holiday here at my heart, so it will be probably a rerun of some sort I have not decided on that yet, and then starting on Tuesday of next week, we'll be back with all new episodes of tech Stuff, looking forward to three and the brave new world we will be

in by then. I guess. I hope you are all well. I hope you are enjoying your time with friends and family. I wish you the best. We'll be back tomorrow with some more. If you have suggestions, you know how to reach me. I'm running out of time, so I'm not going to go through that whole spiel, but I will taught to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an

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