Tag: Microsoft

Finding, and losing, Majorana

I’m looking forward to breaking down and understanding a new paper in Physical Review B soon – the sort of work of condensed-matter physics that’s complex enough to warrant a week-long dive into the subject but not so complex as to leave a non-expert enthusiast (such as myself) eventually stranded in a swamp of mathematical intricacies. But while I’m going to do that, I thought I should also make a note of how differently the paper’s principal interestingness has been presented by its publisher and by its authors. The American Physical Society, which publishes Physical Review B, tweeted this on June 21:

On the same day, both Microsoft (where the paper’s authors are employed as researchers) and a slew of popular science outlets, including Popular Science (which doesn’t once say “Majorana”), published articles claiming the tech company had achieved, in its own words, the “first milestone towards a quantum supercomputer”.

The existence of Majorana zero modes do lead to the possibility of a quantum computer that uses topological qubits as its basic information-bearing units (like the semiconductors of a classical computer). But we don’t even have a quantum computer yet, yet here we have reports about a quantum supercomputer well in the future. I understand that quantum computing is regularly in the news now, that Microsoft itself is calling the new study a step towards a supercomputing version of such a device, and that doing so is a sure-shot way to draw public attention towards the work.

But something about looking away from the past, from the long quest for observing these states in different intricately engineered systems, in order to focus on the future sits ill with me. That physicists have finally found a way that could work should be the headline, if only to hang on to the idea that Majorana modes are valuable in more ways than to build a quantum supercomputer, as well as to commemorate – in a manner of speaking – what physicists of the past did and didn’t get right, especially when they didn’t have the tools and the knowledge that they do today.

It also matters that a private technology company is undertaking this research. The Microsoft researchers published their results as a scientific paper, but what’s to say a different private entity won’t uncover some important bit of physics, not publish any papers about it, proceed straight to applying it in some lucrative technology, and keep their findings under wraps? I imagine that, on some epistemic spectrum, knowledge of the natural universe seamlessly transforms at some point into the know-how of building a highly profitable (or highly destructible, for that matter) machine. Yet some knowledge of the former variety belongs with the people at large, even if the knowledge of the latter kind need not.

Part of the issue here is that the study of topological phases of matter has progressed almost in step with, and oftentimes been motivated by challenges in, efforts to build a better quantum computer. This is a good thing – for privately employed researchers to advance science, even if in the pursuit of profit – but that resulting scientific knowledge eventually has to be out, and made available as part of the public commons. Microsoft did that (by publishing an open-access paper in Physical Review B); I’m disappointed that some of the science journalists who took over at that point, in efforts to take that knowledge to the people at large, fell short.

Alibaba IPO – A vindication of China’s Internet?

This is a guest post contributed by Anuj Srivas, tech. journalist and blogger, until recently the author of Hypertext, The Hindu.

The differences between Jack Ma – the founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba – and an average Silicon Valley CEO are numerous and far-reaching. Mr. Ma’s knowledge of mathematics, for instance, was once so poor that it almost prevented him from attending college. Contrast this to the technological genius of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak or the academic-based origins of Google’s search algorithm.

His background as an English teacher, who dabbled in a number of different sectors before being fascinated by the Internet industry, is more characteristic of the average American investor that was duped by the dot-com bubble than it is of a Bill Gates or a Mark Zuckerberg.

And yet, today, Alibaba stands shoulder-to-shoulder with much of Silicon Valley. Its recently launched initial public offering (IPO) raked in a little over $20 billion, turning it into the world’s biggest technology flotation.

Is this event an inflection point? To some, it may seem to be a natural course of affairs after Yahoo! threw Alibaba a lifeline back in 2005. But is there something else to take away from it other than the obvious comparisons with India’s fledgling Internet industry?

Foremost, it is enormously pleasing to see Jack Ma, like Lenovo’s YY, clearly avoid subscribing to the Silicon Valley ideology of ‘transparency through opacity’. The CEOs of Google, Yahoo!, Facebook and Microsoft paint a picture of openness, sharing, and transparency wherever they go. The world of the cloud seems to make life easier (“look, no wires!”) but in fact wraps its users in an opaque black box. We have no tools that allow us to track our information and data, let alone allow us to take charge.

Of course, Mr. Ma (who sticks to doling out life and management tips in his speeches) is clearly constrained by the circumstances that allowed Alibaba to become what it is today: namely, the way China views, approaches and governs its Internet. This brings us to one of the more interesting implications of Alibaba’s IPO.

For decades now, China has been the poster-boy for how the Internet would look if we stopped fighting for a transparent, open and censorship-free system. The Great Firewall of China has continued to stand, quite proudly, in the face of international criticism.

The country itself has managed to make more than one U.S technology company come around to its way of thinking. As US government official Tom Lantos commented after Yahoo actively helped China in its censorship efforts, “While technologically and financially you [Yahoo!] are giants, morally you are pygmies.”

What are we to take away from the fact that China is in the process of undergoing one of its harshest ever Internet censorship/crackdown periods since 2003 (when it started construction of its Firewall) while Alibaba may yet go down in history as the biggest technology IPO ever? China’s approach to the Internet is a deadly mixture of censorship, propaganda and protectionism. The victory of Alibaba at the New York Stock Exchange will prove to be fodder for three takeaways.

First, that China’s protectionism-censorship stance (there cannot be one without the other) works. Despite years of criticism and threatened sanctions, China currently houses three of the world’s ten most valuable technology companies. After Alibaba’s IPO, how can Beijing look at its Internet governance approach with anything but approval? This is a moment of triumph for the country’s Internet regulators.

Second, that investors do not, and will not ever, care about censorship.

Third: will other countries, already outraged by the NSA and the Snowden incident, be emboldened to take China-like steps when it comes to governing their local Internet industries? There is little doubt that most countries that need to be build their own digital infrastructure, but China and Russia have shown us that their version of digital sovereignty comes with a lack of privacy and the introduction of a censorship regime. Asian, African and Latin American countries will have to escape this trap; the success of Alibaba does not help this.

On the other hand, this will also prove to be the biggest challenge for China’s Internet. If the country wants its Internet firms to go international, it will find it tough to take refuge behind its current Internet governance policies. Companies like Huawei and ZTE, which are in the telecommunication business, have to constantly defend themselves every time they enter a new country. Alibaba, which of course will not be plagued with national security issues, will have to consciously and unconsciously defend the Chinese Internet wherever it goes.

It would be instructive to monitor Mr. Ma and whichever ideology he chooses to adopt and market in the near future. I have a feeling it will tell us quite a bit about the fate of China’s Internet.

More by Anuj Srivas:

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