A giant dream fills your mind every day.That ball in your stomach telling you to want more. But this is immediately followed by the thought:"I've never done anything like that." So you do nothing.You don't act on this dream because you haven't done it before.

Whether you are anentrepreneur looking to kickstart your first business or someone who wants to leverage skills outside of your current role, here is how you make yourself more valuable than any experience ever could.

When I vet out mentees, I seek to understand how much research they have done before reaching out to me--andhow good they are at listening. Because as a mentee, or any business professional, if all you want to do is talk about yourself and your ideas, you're ultimately limiting your potential to learn.

Surround yourself with people who can teach you,then actively listen to their words of advice. Put yourself in the positionwhere you are the least experienced person in the room and soak up every piece of information possible. Engagement is the source of experience and fortune favors those who put themselves out there.

When it comes to learning, don't take yourself for granted. Sure you can learn from books, mentors, and those you admire, but don't forget to learn from yourself along the way. Spend intentional time reflecting on your experiences to extract powerful lessons from the wins and the losses. Use your past to power your sailsforward. The quicker you learn, the faster you will go.

"Every person you meet knows something you don't.Learn from them." -H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Humility is a trait that portrays self-confidence.While everyone else is running around preaching how great they are, use humility to stand firmwith unwavering confidence.The important thing to note here is that the most humble person in a room is often the most approachable. This approachability creates thebyproduct of gaining supporters, partners, and knowledge.

Eliminate the need to portray something that you are not. When you speak honestly about your experience, or lack thereof, do so from a humble place and maintain your confidence.Remember, humility listens. When you step into being humble you are more receptive to feedback from others, feedback that could help you take leaps forward. When you respectfully solicit feedback, you boost their internal value while giving yourself insights that would have been glossed over otherwise.

"Humility will open more doors than arrogance ever will."- Zig Ziglar

It no longer matters who has the most experience. What matters is who can gain the knowledge the fastest. If you don't have the experience you want, learn how to get it.This can be creating a network of people to turn to for support, reading blogs and timely articles, ortaking courses. Build a library ofresourcesat your fingertips for reference when needed.

In today's world, you no longer need to know how to do calculus. You simply need to know how to use a calculator.Given the endless amount of resources available today, there are no excuses for lacking the knowledge you need. Those who are willing to go the extra mileand get knee-deep in the situation at handare the ones who will step out ahead.

"It's not the lack of resources that causes failure;it's the lack of resourcefulness." - Tony Robbins

Published on: Apr 16, 2020

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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3 Must-Have Traits to Start Business (Experience is Not One of Them) - Inc.

Do you think money is the secret to happiness in the long run? A lot of people ask me the question, Can money buy you happiness?.

First of all,the answer is no you dont need money to be happy.

This is, after all, a debatable topic by a lot of people and not everyone would answer no BUT

Being a global entrepreneur for over 35 years and knowing many people that have a lot of money along with having done very well for myself, I can tell you that sometimes using big money for buying all kinds of things like homes, boats, and cars can actually make you an unhappy person because you get many more things to deal with and many more areas to add problems in your life.

Wealth is the ability to truly experience life. Henry David Thoreau

So money doesnt necessarily buy you happiness but I will say this lets just think about it

Money could help your family and ultimately provide for the family in many ways which is usually the main and driven factor as to why we work so hard for more money.

You could use it for amazing and relaxing vacations to do and see some awesome things but mostly to reset and enjoy life in these fortunate ways.

And if youre a charitable person, which you should be, and youd like to help nonprofits, that would be a great way to use your money for long-term happiness.

Although, you dont necessarily need money for nonprofits because you can contribute your time.

Helping others and giving back is NOT Money the Secret to Happiness

Learn more aboutwhy entrepreneurs can have the best of both worlds when it comes to happiness And money.

Although money can be helpful, it can also lead to greed and unhappiness.

So youve gotta be very careful.

I like to say if you have money, put it to good use, dont be greedy or you will be unhappy. Kevin Harrington

Overall, put your money to good use by providing for others, for the family, for nonprofits, and participate in a giving back to the community in general.

Zig Ziglar, one of my mentors, said it best that

You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want. Zig Ziglar

If you think about money and your life that way in helping other people, youll be happier in the long run.

Ive created a simple, proven process for helping you get there faster.

Get the free step-by-step guide here now!

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Is Money the Secret to Happiness? - Thrive Global

East, west or beyond, sooner or later events elsewhere may have a local impact, which COVID-19 has illustrated so well. A recent sampling:

Q-Anon followers have been told that drinking bleach can fight off coronavirus infection. But the FDA says the ingredient chlorine dioxide can cause vomiting and liver failure. Its been linked to two deaths.

Digital repression: Weve had a taste of that given odd behaviors exhibited by the Internet after the traffic load went up 35 percent following during stay-at-home orders. Last year, access to the Internet was restricted in 33 countries that were attempting to control their citizens, The Wall Street Journal reported. The United Nations declared Internet access a human right in 2016.

By early April, the Defense Production Act, which could be used to order masks produced in the U.S., had not been utilized by President Donald Trump, so the crowd-funding Masks For America was launched. Taiwan already had a stockpile of masks, The New York Times said, and all countries should maintain such a cache.

New York State, unable to get federal help for medical supplies, is paying private entities 20 cents for medically protective gloves that normally cost a nickel, $7.50 for 50 cent masks, and a quarter million for portable x-ray machines that cost, at most, $80,000, according to Inequality Media.

A Pew Research poll shows 66 percent of Americans are uncomfortable about voting at public polling places during the pandemic. The obvious solution is to vote by mail, according to conservative opinion writer Jennifer Rubin, writing in the Washington Post. So far, the Trump Administration has indicated support for vote by mail, but Politico reports, only for seniors.

Stay-at-home recommendations have resulted in traffic accidents being halved, The Hill reported. Less travel has also resulted in better air quality in many places.

Over a half million people in the U.S. are homeless, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless. They have higher rates of infectious, acute and chronic diseases, made worse by minimal opportunities to wash up. During the pandemic, California has turned to their budget surplus to arrange shelter for their homeless.

Infectious disease expert Dr. James Lawler, in TIME magazine, said there could be 96 million COVID-19 cases in the next couple of months. The potential result is 1.9 million ICU admissions (there are an estimated 95,000 ICU beds in the U.S.), 4.8 million hospitalizations and 480,000 deaths.

Some 14 million jobs could be lost by the end of summer due to the crisis, said the Economic Policy Institute.

The best way to dodge an epidemic via a rapid response is cooperation and trust for scientists and leaders, according to historian and author Yuval Noah Harari. He pointed out that those measures frequently have been overlooked in addressing COVID-19, driving the virus to pandemic status.

Schools out: enhance the days spent with family read-aloud time, suggested TIME magazine. Start with 15 to 20 minutes a day, first with an adult reading aloud, and then the children can take a turn.

Another federal fundraising angle: Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman said a wealth tax of 2 percent on assets over $50 million and 3 percent on assets above $1 billion would, over 10 years, raise $2.75 trillion. Trumps tax cuts created a loss of $2 trillion, The Progressive reported.

Traffic accidents claim 40,000 lives annually in the U.S. AAA suggested that could be reduced with mandatory ignition interlocks that detect alcohol. While seatbelts and airbags were once optional, AAA pointed out that their life-saving abilities resulted in their becoming mandatory.

Blast from the past: The deadly influenza of 1918 showed up in the spring, and then made a comeback in the fall. Philadelphia was particularly hard-hit, with 759 deaths in one day, connected to a WWI parade attended by 200,000. Within three days of the parade, all hospital beds were full. The city was shut down days later. The response to the flu was further hampered by so many of the citys doctors having gone to war. As well, morgues could not keep up with demands for their services.

And another blast: You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want, said Hilary Hinton Zig Ziglar, 1926-2012, American author, salesman and motivational speaker.

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Western News - The Western News

Encourage Your Staff Positive reinforcement and acknowledgement of accomplishments are key to feeding your team. We dont always take time to celebrate the wins. Its important.

As a part of my series about Lessons From Inspirational Women in STEM and Tech, I had the pleasure of interviewing Krisanne Fieldhouse.

Krisanne has been with Modernizing Medicine for over 13 years with a primary focus on practice management and operations. She currently leads strategic efforts to further develop Modernizing Medicines Practice Management and Analytics solutions to help bring operational improvements to the specialty healthcare markets.

Krisannes prior experiences include managing electronic health records (EHR) implementation teams. She previously served as the product manager of Modernizing Medicine Gastroenterologys, formerly gMed, Practice Management solution. She oversaw the gastroenterology revenue cycle management (RCM) division, which has directly contributed to her current role.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

At10 years old, I clearly remember visiting the ER for a broken wrist. I was enamored with the technology and workflow during my visit and declared to my parents that I wanted to work in a hospital. Apparently my 10 year-old self was right about my career path!

Throughout my career, I have held positions in the hospital setting which were highly operational in nature. Often frustrated with the lack of tools and technology to bring efficiency to process, I was drawn to the product management field to make a positive impact in the industry and ultimately patient care.

I have now been with Modernizing Medicine for over a decade. I am thankful for the opportunity to fulfill my personal desires while working towards the company mission of transforming how healthcare information is created, consumed and utilized to increase practice efficiency and patient outcomes. It blends the best of both worlds on a daily basis medicine and tech and I love it.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?

In the tech space you have to be agile. Once you combine tech and healthcare, the only constant is change and the ability to pivot quickly and frequently grows exponentially.

Working at Modernizing Medicine, I have been extremely lucky to experience and create many interesting moments. Some of the most memorable ones have occurred during our annual users conference, MOMENTUM, where over 1,000 of our clients gather for a weekend of learning and networking. At our most recent conference, I had a Practice Administrator approach me and sincerely thank my team and I for transforming their office with our Practice Management solution. Since using our solution, theyve decreased workload, redirected efforts and made positive changes to their bottom line.

These are the conversations that remind me that what I am doing is making an impact and motivates me to keep delivering. You have to relish these positive moments and save them and remember them when you have those more um, challenging days, which we all experience.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Oh, the value of a personal introduction. It may seem as though introductions at the start of a meeting are just common sense, but you know what they say when you assume.

Early in my career, I was brought into a heated meeting regarding an application not supporting workflow. I began pushing the meeting participants hard regarding workflow irregularities to get to the crux of the issue. Following the meeting, I received an email from a new executive who was a participant in the meeting. Oops! I wouldnt have changed the context of discussion, but I perhaps would have tweaked my delivery just a tad.

The lesson? Dont make assumptions. An introduction can and does go a long way.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Timing can be everything.Modernizing Medicinewas founded based on a chance encounter between a patient (who happened to be a tech entrepreneur) and a dermatologist. Daniel Cane, Modernizing Medicines CEO, met Dr. Michael Sherling, the companys Chief Medical and Strategy Officer, during a routine visit. As Dan observed the lack of tech to take notes and Dr. Sherling expressed frustration with the lack of dermatology-specific technology on the market, ideas began to brew. The two continued their discussion about this gap in the market. Modernizing Medicine was founded in February of 2010 and our electronic health record (EHR) system, EMA, was created with the goal of transforming healthcare and truly modernizing medicine.

One of the unique founding principles that still rings true today is having on-staff physicians actively program specific medical knowledge into our software and work alongside our development team. As practicing physicians in their specialties, they know the workflows that their peers need. Its much easier to teach a medical doctor how to code versus teaching a coder how to be a medical doctor.

Think about it from a patient perspective. The process from the office procedures to the clinical exam vary greatly and this changes dramatically depending on specialty. A visit to the dermatologist is much different compared to a visit to the ophthalmologist. One size does not fit all and this applies to technology that doctors use.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

This is definitely the era of the patient and healthcare consumerization will only continue to grow alongside the needs and expectations of patients. Knowing that, an exciting aspect of our teams focus revolves around patient engagement strategies. How do we help equip our clients practices to provide what their patients need and want?

Our goal is to support practices in delivering great patient care and improving the overall patient experience by helping provide them greater access and involvement in their own healthcare.

By expanding engagement tools such as a mobile patient portal, online self-scheduling for appointments, online bill pay and text to pay help place the ability to manage healthcare in the patients hands. Just as we use our smartphones to order a car on demand or reorder household products with the touch of a button, convenience and accessibility for our health will continue to expand.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Lets now shift to the main focus of our interview. Are you currently satisfied with the status quo regarding women in STEM? What specific changes do you think are needed to change the status quo?

Progress has been made towards the status quo however, I believe there is significant opportunity for improvement. Even though we are seeing more and more women move into leadership positions within the engineering space, the field still remains primarily dominated by men. Strides can be made through early engagement and mentoring programs for young females introducing opportunities in STEM. It needs to start at an early age and remain consistent throughout the education system. Reinforcement is key at home, in the academic setting and from the top down at the company level.

In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by women in STEM or Tech that arent typically faced by their male counterparts? What would you suggest to address this?

In tech, I see that women have a more difficult time asking for what they truly desire compared to their male counterparts. Whether it be a project they want to work on, a promotion, a pay raise or being more transparent about their familial commitments, there seems to be a hesitancy to ask for what is deserved. I mentor women on my team to gain confidence to ask for what they want and to have substance and the why behind it.

Oprah Winfrey once said, You get in life what you have the courage to ask for. This quote resonates in the workplace as well as in life and serves a gentle reminder to go for what you want.

What are the myths that you would like to dispel about being a woman in STEM or Tech. Can you explain what you mean?

I believe its important to dispel the myth that women in STEM or tech have to be a developer and engineer. Its not necessarily a prerequisite. Its possible to lead teams, manage products, create user experiences and lead agile processes without understanding how to create a single line of code. By using creativity, communication and leadership skills, women can find a place in this environment and thrive.

What are your 5 Leadership Lessons I Learned From My Experience as a Woman in STEM or Tech and why. (Please share a story or example for each.)

Walk the Walk Accept responsibility with your team for both wins and losses. Let them know youre in the boat together. When there is a challenge be willing to roll up your sleeves with the team.

Encourage Your Staff Positive reinforcement and acknowledgement of accomplishments are key to feeding you team. We dont always take time to celebrate the wins. Its important.

Talk Less, Listen More Some of the best solutions are identified by listening. You dont have to have all the answers. Listen to your customers, staff, peers and choose your words wisely.

Lead by Example Be thoughtful of your behavior, others are watching and learning. How better to educate your team than leading by example.

Communicate Your team cant read your mind. Communicate clearly and effectively. Learn how to tailor your communication to drive the results you need.

What advice would you give to other female leaders to help their team to thrive?

Paint the big picture and empower your staff to deliver. Responsibility drives growth.

What advice would you give to other female leaders about the best way to manage a large team?

Inventory yourself. Know your strengths and weaknesses and identify key team members to support you and drive team and company goals. I also recommend operating in transparency. Transparency enables trust. Trust takes a long time to build and minutes to destroy.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Im grateful to my parents who helped me get to where Im at today. My siblings and I were raised to be honest, work hard and respect others, and my parents led by example. I live by these core values and look for them in others both in and out of the workplace.

My father always looked out for people. I distinctly remember him inviting a friend who was struggling and going through some challenging times to our house for a holiday dinner. That one act of kindness turned into many late nights over several months where my father provided his friendly advice and guidance. There never was any judgment or lack of patience, just a desire to help him improve his situation. This left a lasting impact on me, and I believe it contributes in my desire to help people grow.

My parents also instilled the belief that you can do anything you put your mind to and to see challenges as opportunities. The idea of challenges being viewed as opportunities is something that I refer to on a daily basis. We all encounter challenges its about how you react to them. If you look for the opportunity during analysis it leads to constant performance improvement.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

I take pride in growing people in their careers its one of my favorite aspects of the job. I love seeing raw talent and working alongside these individuals to further develop them and help them reach their potential. My personal success has enabled me to directly contribute to the personal and professional growth of team members, peers, family and friends. I find that incredibly rewarding. My hope is that by empowering others, that they will do great things and pay it forward.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

If I could inspire a movement it would be to improve recognition to highlight the importance of teachers in the United States. The influence that teachers hold and their ability to shape young minds is bar none. They have tremendous power to positively impact society. When students lack support in their home life, teachers can have a huge impact and help fill the emotional gaps, making them both inspiring mentors and positive role models. Our education leaders should hold students accountable for success and failure and provide consistency.

Unfortunately, compensation for teachers in the United States doesnt align with the momenumental impact and role they play in shaping our countrys future. I know the lack of pay often discourages those who would be wonderful additions to the education system. Why arent we investing in our best and brightest to shape our future generations?

Can you please give us your favorite Life Lesson Quote? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude. Zig Ziglar

Im all about attitude. Great attitude will allow you to identify pathways to success and help you to not get stuck in the weeds. I have found when dealing with challenging situations, keeping a positive attitude will help others find an effective solution. You may have all the talent in the world, but if you have a less than stellar attitude, then you wont get very far.

We are very blessed that prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them

Id enjoy sharing a meal with Simon Sinek. Simon is a leadership guru and motivational speaker who has interesting perspectives on communication and leadership. His delivery and concepts are easy to assimilate and apply. He offers refreshing ideas which I have personally applied with great success. I particularly enjoyed readingLeaders Eat Lastwhich focuses on leadership and human relationships. One of the concepts that resonated with me is that leaders provide cover from above and the people on the ground look after one another. Your team needs to feel safe in their environment to reach the collective goal. Keeping this concept in mind, the idea of were all in this together is a much more actionable thought.

As for our meal, I think I would opt for breakfast seems like a guy who would love a solid plate of French Toast and a mimosa, of course.

The rest is here:
Positive reinforcement and acknowledgement of accomplishments are key to feeding your team With Penny Bauder & Krisanne Fieldhouse - Thrive Global

By Leah Crane

Credit: Luca Petit for QuTech

Quantum computing is heating up. For the first time, quantum computer chips have been operated at a temperature above -272C, or 1 kelvin. That may still seem frigid, but it is just warm enough to potentially enable a huge leap in the capabilities.

Quantum computers are made of quantum bits, or qubits, which can be made in several different ways. One that is receiving attention from some of the fields big players consists of electrons on a silicon chip.

These systems only function at extremely low temperatures below 100 millikelvin, or -273.05C so the qubits have to be stored in powerful refrigerators. The electronics that power them wont run at such low temperatures, and also emit heat that could disrupt the qubits, so they are generally stored outside the refrigerators with each qubit is connected by a wire to its electronic controller.

Eventually, for useful quantum computing, we will need to go to something like a million qubits, and this sort of brute force method, with one wire per qubit, wont work any more, says Menno Veldhorst at QuTech in the Netherlands. It works for two qubits, but not for a million.

Veldhorst and his colleagues, along with another team led by researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia, have now demonstrated that these qubits can be operated at higher temperatures. The latter team showed they were able to control the state of two qubits on a chip at temperatures up to 1.5 kelvin, and Veldhorsts group used two qubits at 1.1 kelvin in what is called a logic gate, which performs the basic operations that make up more complex calculations.

Now that we know the qubits themselves can function at higher temperatures, the next step is incorporating the electronics onto the same chip. I hope that after we have that circuit, it wont be too hard to scale to something with practical applications, says Veldhorst.

Those quantum circuits will be similar in many ways to the circuits we use for traditional computers, so they can be scaled up relatively easily compared with other kinds of quantum computers, he says.

Journal references: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2170-7 and DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2171-6

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Quantum computer chips demonstrated at the highest temperatures ever - New Scientist News

Can human ingenuity assisted by new and emerging technologies overpower Covid-19? Will faster processing of moreand more relevantdata, analyzed with the right models, yield better insights into mitigating the spread of future pandemics, designing effective treatments, and developing successful vaccines? A number of promising initiatives were announced in recent weeks aiming to enlist data, AI algorithms, supercomputers, and human expertise in the fight with our global predicament.

Supercomputers and quantum computers crunching lots of data are at the core of recent initiatives to ... [+] fight the Coronavirus

The Digital Transformation Institute, a new research consortium established by C3.ai, Microsoft, a number of leading universities, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), announced its first call for proposals for AI techniques to mitigate pandemics. In addition to a total of $5.8 million in cash awards, recipients will be provided by Microsoft and C3.ai with significant cloud computing, supercomputing, data access, and AI software resources and technical support. Thomas M. Siebel, founder and chief executive of C3.ai, told The New York Times I cannot imagine a more important use of AI.

IBM is sharing supercomputing resources, cloud-based data repositories, and AI-driven search tools. The Allen Institute for AI has partnered with leading research groups to prepare and distribute the Covid-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), a free resource of over 51,000 scholarly articles. Googles Kaggle has launched a series of data science competitions to answer Covid-19 questions posed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) and the World Health Organization (WHO). The Covid-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium is providing broad access to over 30 supercomputing systems, representing over 402 petaflops, 105,334 nodes, 3,539,044 CPU cores, 41,286 GPUs, and counting.

These are just few examples of recent efforts combining the power of data with computer power to understand and respond to the Coronavirussuper-fast computers or supercomputers crunching lots and lots of data are at the core of these initiatives. In the future, quantum computers, much faster computers than todays supercomputers, may contribute to the speed by which our responses to pandemics are determined and deployed.

D-Wave Systems, a quantum computing startup, recently announced the immediate availability of free access to its cloud computing service, designed to bring both classical and quantum resources to quickly and precisely solve highly complex problems with up to 10,000 fully connected variables. Joining this initiative are a number of D-Waves partners and customers, including Forschungszentrum Jlich, a German interdisciplinary research center. According to Prof. Dr.KristelMichielsen from the Jlich Supercomputing Centre, the initiative "is promising to accelerate the solution of complex problems in pharmacology and epidemiology, such as those that have arisen in the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis, by means of hybrid workflows from quantum-classical computer simulations. To make efficient use of D-Wave's optimization and AI capabilities, we are integrating the system into our modular HPC environment.

While quantum computing is just emerging as a viable technology, it stands in practice on the shoulders of the many scientists who have solved complex problems for years with high-performance computing (HPC). Peter Rutten, Research Director at IDCs Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group, observes that you can probably draw a fairly direct line between using HPC in the cloud to attack the Covid-19 problem to using the initial quantum computing capabilities that exist in the cloud to attack the Covid-19 problem.

Last month, IDC published the results of a survey of 520 IT and business users worldwide and in-depth interviews with current quantum computing end-users.A little less than 75% of respondents reported their organizations as being very interested in quantum computing. 52% of the organizations surveyed have plans to begin experimenting with quantum computing technology in the next 18-24 months and about 10% indicated that their quantum computing technologies are already in the process of being operationalized.

When we asked why are you investing in technology that may not show ROI in the short term, says Rutten, quite a few answeredweve run out of capabilities with our HPC environment, we cannot solve these problems with the HPC infrastructure that we have today. Thats really the jump that a lot of business are making, the jump from HPC to quantum.

The healthcare and life sciences industry was found by the IDC survey to be one of the sectors most interested in quantum computing. Developing and distributing drugs faster, drug discovery, and clinical trial enhancements were some of the key motivations for experimenting with quantum computing, according to Heather West, Senior Research Analyst at IDCs Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group. A pandemic like Covid-19 adds urgency to this interest in a very new technology.

Quantum computing could identify patterns that will allow us to identify something like Covid-19 earlier. We would be ale to work faster to identify compounds, put together a vaccine faster, or determine faster the different ways by which we can slow the transmission, says West. In addition, she thinks the global supply chain is a prime candidate for the use of quantum computers, allowing for the quick identification of patterns of supply and demand and for swift action in response to sudden shortages or surpluses.

Drugs today are discovered on a trial and error basis. It takes five or more years to develop a new drug, at a cost of $1 billion, says Doug Finke, Managing Editor of the Quantum Computing Report. Quantum computers can simulate chemical reactions at the molecular level and quickly narrow down possible candidates for drugs and vaccines from 10,000 compounds to a few dozens. The work can be done in the computer before the petri dish, says Finke. But he cautions that it will take 2-3 years to learn how to use these machines productively.

The IDC survey found that the three biggest challenges for organizations considering the adoption of quantum computing are cost (26%), training resources (22%), and long-term budgets (22%). About a third of respondents expect quantum computing to improve their AI capabilities (32%), accelerate decision making (31%), and increase productivity/efficiency (30%).

Now is the time to start building the vision, the expertise, dedicating teams and resources for quantum computing, says Brian Solis, Global Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce. The stepping stones to get there are building a center of excellence around AI, he adds, making AI the focal point of the organizations efforts to become more agile and innovative. It forces you to get better data, clean the data, and build expertise and key capabilities around the data. Complement that with a smaller set of resources, a Center of Excellence for quantum computing, says Solis.

The economic consequences of the current global pandemic may reduce in the short-term technology investments by corporations and venture capital firms but we may also see accelerated investments in emerging technologies, particularly those promising to assist in preventing and mitigating future pandemics.

Governments worldwide may show a specific interest, even in the short term, in technology investments. Along the relatively new AI tools (which are all about identifying patterns in large data repositories), quantum computing will probably continue to benefit from public funds. Many governments have established on-going research programs in both areas due mostly to concerns about future national competitiveness and, specifically, cybersecurity capabilities (see here for a comprehensive list of government-funded or supported quantum computing initiatives).

Governments, however, should take into consideration the less-convenient truth that investing only in computer power and speed will not raise the bar high enough to defend us from future pandemics. In the US, for example, the healthcare system is still plagued by antiquated technology infrastructure in which one hospital still cant communicate electronically with another hospital a few miles down the road (and sometimes, as I experienced myself last year, between medical offices located in the same building and belonging to the same healthcare system...).

More important, antiquated and failed privacy protection policies and regulations, currently take control of healthcare data from the hands of the people they are supposed to protect and greatly encumber efforts to use the data for research purposes. Government programs aimed at stopping or overcoming quickly the next pandemic must addressand fixthe regulatory and legal issues of managing data in the 21st century, starting with healthcare.

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Calling On AI And Quantum Computing To Fight The Coronavirus - Forbes

While supercomputers are critical to researchers today, even they can't provide the massive computing power needed to map out the molecular structures of viruses to find cures.

When it comes to finding a vaccine that can halt and eradicate the deadly COVID-19 virus, today's supercomputers can only do so much. While supercomputers can do amazing things, they are not complex enough to find answers to nature's deepest and most complicated secrets, such as quickly and carefully mapping out the molecular structures of viruses so they can be defeated with modern medicines and treatments.

But an answer awaits perhaps five to 10 years away in the form of quantum computers, which are exponentially more powerful than traditional classic computers, according to computer scientists and other researchers.

SEE:Coronavirus: Critical IT policies and tools every business needs(TechRepublic Premium)

Recently a public-private partnership was formed to create a COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which is working to harness the power of high-performance computing resources to massively increase the speed and capacity of coronavirus research. And though that work is today welcome in the fight against COVID-19, it won't unlock all the incredibly difficult secrets that are held closely by such viruses.

For most pharmaceutical companies, supercomputers are used regularly to help research, find, and identify new drug treatments, including the identification of virus structures so cures can be found.

Yet supercomputers used today in virus and other pharmaceutical research are still based on classical computing architectures that view all data as a series of binary bits with a value of zero or one. Those machines face the limitations of modern bit-based computer architectures and power that is available today but can't theoretically or physically handle all the tremendously detailed research that is still needed.

That's where the future promise of quantum computing is expected to one day provide the vast computational power that could allow researchers to truly map out molecular structures in real time to solve medical mysteries and help quickly identify new drugs and treatments, said Chirag Dekate, a supercomputing and high-performance computing analyst with Gartner.

"If you're trying to do a quantum realistic simulation of the molecules and interactions of a virus, that is where classical computing starts falling short," Dekate said. "In classical computing, what you are able to simulate is only a fraction of what you can do with quantum computing."

The problem, though, is that true quantum computing capabilities are probably at least five to 10 years away from actual use, Dekate said.

"When two molecules or compounds interact, in order to do a quantum computing simulation, you have to be able to simulate the electrostatic forces of the interaction at the atomic level between those things," Dekate said. "This is where the computational complexity increases exponentially," requiring the power of quantum computing over traditional classical computing architecture.

SEE:Coronavirus: What business pros need to know(TechRepublic)

Quantum computers are based on qubits rather than bits, which are far more complex and allow information to be stored in new ways, giving them added dimensions of computing power. But that intense power requires many more technical requirements to make it possible, and much work is still to be done to enable the technology.

Dr. Itamar Sivan, a physicist and the founder and CEO of Quantum Machines, a quantum computing technology company, said the promise of quantum computing will someday help during times of crisis, such as today's coronavirus pandemic. Such machines are expected to be able to solve incredibly complex scientific problems in minutes in the future, compared with many years by even the most powerful supercomputers of 2020.

"Quantum computing is not a new field--it is already decades old," Sivan said. "In academia it is being investigated, and in the last five years in industry as well. The interest in quantum computing stems from a promise of immense computational power that we will never be able to achieve with classical computation."

SEE:Quantum computing: When to expect the next major leap(TechRepublic)

For researchers, quantum machines will provide power that will transform medical research and a wide range of other fields, he said. "If you would want to have an exact simulation of a molecule such as penicillin, you would never be able to do it with any classical computer because it is too complex. But quantum computers with hundreds of logical qubits will be able to do this task."

Just how much more powerful is a quantum computer compared with a classical computer?

"In order to explain the information in a quantum computer with 300 qubits you would need a classical processor which is built from more bits than there are atoms are in the universe," Sivan said. "It's one of the toughest moonshots that we face as a society, but if we can do it it's going to change the whole world."

Sivan agreed that such machines are easily a decade away before they would be able to perform the quantum simulations that are needed for virus research breakthroughs.

SEE:Quantum computing: Myths v. Realities(TechRepublic)

"For some problems, it's not about just running an algorithm faster, it's about making the impossible possible," he said. "This is why in drug discovery today, the majority of the process is done with the molecules themselves in test tubes and culture dishes, because you can't simulate them and look at their reactions and behavior using classic computers."

The challenges of achieving usable quantum computing are huge, including the extremely delicate state of quantum data when it is used. In operation, quantum data is rapidly lost in experiments being done over the last few years, preventing stable use of the machines.

"There are immense challenges all over the stack to get to the Holy Grail of quantum computing," Sivan said. "Once we solve the problem of loss of information, we will be fine."

The coronavirus has infected almost 2 million people and killed 121,000 around the world so far. While many patients with COVID-19 have mild symptoms and don't require hospitalization, with the incredibly wide scale of the pandemic, even at a 5% hospitalization rate large numbers of patients have been requiring emergency care in hospitals and other medical facilities that are struggling to keep up.

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COVID-19: Quantum computing could someday find cures for coronaviruses and other diseases - TechRepublic

Garland views Amaya as a typical Silicon Valley success story. In the world of Devs, it's the first company that manages to mass produce quantum computers, allowing them to corner that market. (Think of what happened to search engines after Google debuted.) Quantum computing has been positioned as a potentially revolutionary technology for things like healthcare and encryption, since it can tackle complex scenarios and data sets more effectively than traditional binary computers. Instead of just processing inputs one at a time, a quantum machine would theoretically be able to tackle an input in multiple states, or superpositions, at once.

By mastering this technology, Amaya unlocks a completely new view of reality: The world is a system that can be decoded and predicted. It proves to them that the world is deterministic. Our choices don't matter; we're all just moving along predetermined paths until the end of time. Garland is quick to point out that you don't need anything high-tech to start asking questions about determinism. Indeed, it's something that's been explored since Plato's allegory of the cave.

"What I did think, though, was that if a quantum computer was as good at modeling quantum reality as it might be, then it would be able to prove in a definitive way whether we lived in a deterministic state," Garland said. "[Proving that] would completely change the way we look at ourselves, the way we look at society, the way society functions, the way relationships unfold and develop. And it would change the world in some ways, but then it would restructure itself quickly."

The sheer difficulty of coming up with something -- anything -- that's truly spontaneous and isn't causally related to something else in the universe is the strongest argument in favor of determinism. And it's something Garland aligns with personally -- though that doesn't change how he perceives the world.

"Whether or not you or I have free will, both of us could identify lots of things that we care about," he said. "There are lots of things that we enjoy or don't enjoy. Or things that we're scared of, or we anticipate. And all of that remains. It's not remotely affected by whether we've got free will or not. What might be affected is, I think, our capacity to be forgiving in some respects. And so, certain kinds of anti-social or criminal behavior, you would start to think about in terms of rehabilitation, rather than punishment. Because then, in a way, there's no point punishing someone for something they didn't decide to do."

Excerpt from:

Alex Garland on 'Devs,' free will and quantum computing - Engadget

Let me welcome you the same way Stewart welcomes Forest in Episode 7 of the Hulu miniseries Devs: with a lengthy, unattributed quote.

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future, just like the past, would be present before its eyes.

Its a passage that sounds as if it could have come from Forest himself. But its not from Forest, or Katie, or evenas Katie might guess, based on her response to Stewarts Philip Larkin quoteShakespeare. Its from the French scholar and scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace, who wrote the idea down at the end of the Age of Enlightenment, in 1814. When Laplace imagined an omniscient intellectwhich has come to be called Laplaces demonhe wasnt even saying something original: Other thinkers beat him to the idea of a deterministic, perfectly predictable universe by decades and centuries (or maybe millennia).

All of which is to say that despite the futuristic setting and high-tech trappings of Devsthe eight-part Alex Garland opus that will reach its finale next weekthe series central tension is about as old as the abacus. But theres a reason the debate about determinism and free will keeps recurring: Its an existential question at the heart of human behavior. Devs doesnt answer it in a dramatically different way than the great minds of history have, but it does wrap up ancient, brain-breaking quandaries in a compelling (and occasionally kind of confusing) package. Garland has admitted as much, acknowledging, None of the ideas contained here are really my ideas, and its not that I am presenting my own insightful take. Its more Im saying some very interesting people have come up with some very interesting ideas. Here they are in the form of a story.

Devs is a watchable blend of a few engaging ingredients. Its a spy thriller that pits Russian agents against ex-CIA operatives. Its a cautionary, sci-fi polemic about a potentially limitless technology and the hubris of big tech. Like Garlands previous directorial efforts, Annihilation and Ex Machina, its also a striking aesthetic experience, a blend of brutalist compounds, sleek lines, lush nature, and an exciting, unsettling soundtrack. Most of all, though, its a meditation on age-old philosophical conundrums, served with a garnish of science. Garland has cited scientists and philosophers as inspirations for the series, so to unravel the riddles of Devs, I sought out some experts whose day jobs deal with the dilemmas Lily and Co. confront in fiction: a computer science professor who specializes in quantum computing, and several professors of philosophy.

There are many questions about Devs that we wont be able to answer. How high is Kentons health care premium? Is it distracting to work in a lab lit by a perpetually pulsing, unearthly golden glow? How do Devs programmers get any work done when they could be watching the worlds most riveting reality TV? Devs doesnt disclose all of its inner workings, but by the end of Episode 7, its pulled back the curtain almost as far as it can. The main mystery of the early episodeswhat does Devs do?is essentially solved for the viewer long before Lily learns everything via Katies parable of the pen in Episode 6. As the series proceeds, the spy stuff starts to seem incidental, and the characters motivations become clear. All that remains to be settled is the small matter of the intractable puzzles that have flummoxed philosophers for ages.

Heres what we know. Forest (Nick Offerman) is a tech genius obsessed with one goal: being reunited with his dead daughter, Amaya, who was killed in a car crash while her mother was driving and talking to Forest on the phone. (Hed probably blame himself for the accident if he believed in free will.) He doesnt disguise the fact that he hasnt moved on from Amaya emotionally: He names his company after her, uses her face for its logo, and, in case those tributes were too subtle, installs a giant statue of her at corporate HQ. (As a metaphor for the way Amaya continues to loom over his life, the statue is overly obvious, but at least it looks cool.) Together with a team of handpicked developers, Forest secretly constructs a quantum computer so powerful that, by the end of the penultimate episode, it can perfectly predict the future and reverse-project the past, allowing the denizens of Devs to tune in to any bygone event in lifelike clarity. Its Laplaces demon made real, except for the fact that its powers of perception fail past the point at which Lily is seemingly scheduled to do something that the computer cant predict.

I asked Dr. Scott Aaronson, a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin (and the founding director of the schools Quantum Information Center) to assess Devs depiction of quantum computing. Aaronsons website notes that his research concentrates on the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, so hed probably be one of Forests first recruits if Amaya were an actual company. Aaronson, whom I previously consulted about the plausibility of the time travel in Avengers: Endgame, humored me again and watched Devs despite having been burned before by Hollywoods crimes against quantum mechanics. His verdict, unsurprisingly, is that the quantum computing in Devslike that of Endgame, which cites one of the same physicists (David Deutsch) that Garland said inspired himis mostly hand-wavy window dressing.

A quantum computer is a device that uses a central phenomenon of quantum mechanicsnamely, interference of amplitudesto solve certain problems with dramatically better scaling behavior than any known algorithm running on any existing computer could solve them, Aaronson says. If youre wondering what amplitudes are, you can read Aaronsons explanation in a New York Times op-ed he authored last October, shortly after Google claimed to have achieved a milestone called quantum supremacythe first use of a quantum computer to make a calculation far faster than any non-quantum computer could. According to Googles calculations, the task that its Sycamore microchip performed in a little more than three minutes would have taken 100,000 of the swiftest existing conventional computers 10,000 years to complete. Thats a pretty impressive shortcut, and were still only at the dawn of the quantum computing age.

However, that stat comes with a caveat: Quantum computers arent better across the board than conventional computers. The applications where a quantum computer dramatically outperforms classical computers are relatively few and specialized, Aaronson says. As far as we know today, theyd help a lot with prediction problems only in cases where the predictions heavily involve quantum-mechanical behavior. Potential applications of quantum computers include predicting the rate of a chemical reaction, factoring huge numbers and possibly cracking the encryption that currently protects the internet (using Shors algorithm, which is briefly mentioned on Devs), and solving optimization and machine learning problems. Notice that reconstructing what Christ looked like on the cross is not on this list, Aaronson says.

In other words, the objective that Forest is trying to achieve doesnt necessarily lie within the quantum computing wheelhouse. To whatever extent computers can help forecast plausible scenarios for the past or future at all (as we already have them do for, e.g., weather forecasting), its not at all clear to what extent a quantum computer even helpsone might simply want more powerful classical computers, Aaronson says.

Then theres the problem that goes beyond the question of quantum vs. conventional: Either kind of computer would require data on which to base its calculations, and the data set that the predictions and retrodictions in Devs would demand is inconceivably detailed. I doubt that reconstructing the remote past is really a computational problem at all, in the sense that even the most powerful science-fiction supercomputer still couldnt give you reliable answers if it lacked the appropriate input data, Aaronson says, adding, As far as we know today, the best that any computer (classical or quantum) could possibly do, even in principle, with any data we could possibly collect, is to forecast a range of possible futures, and a range of possible pasts. The data that it would need to declare one of them the real future or the real past simply wouldnt be accessible to humankind, but rather would be lost in microscopic puffs of air, radiation flying away from the earth into space, etc.

In light of the unimaginably high hurdle of gathering enough data in the present to reconstruct what someone looked or sounded like during a distant, data-free age, Forest comes out looking like a ridiculously demanding boss. We get it, dude: You miss Amaya. But how about patting your employees on the back for pulling off the impossible? The idea that chaos, the butterfly effect, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, exponential error growth, etc. mean that you run your simulation 2000 years into the past and you end up with only a blurry, staticky image of Jesus on the cross rather than a clear image, has to be, like, the wildest understatement in the history of understatements, Aaronson says. As for the future, he adds, Predicting the weather three weeks from now might be forever impossible.

The plot of this series is one that wouldve been totally, 100 percent familiar to the ancient Greeksjust swap out the quantum computer for the Delphic Oracle. Dr. Scott Aaronson, professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin

On top of all that, Aaronson says, The Devs headquarters is sure a hell of a lot fancier (and cleaner) than any quantum computing lab that Ive ever visited. (Does Kenton vacuum between torture sessions?) At least the computer more or less looks like a quantum computer.

OK, so maybe I didnt need to cajole a quantum computing savant into watching several hours of television to confirm that theres no way we can watch cavepeople paint. Garland isnt guilty of any science sins that previous storytellers havent committed many times. Whenever Aaronson has advised scriptwriters, theyve only asked him to tell them which sciencey words would make their preexisting implausible stories sound somewhat feasible. Its probably incredibly rare that writers would let the actual possibilities and limits of a technology drive their story, he says.

Although the show name-checks real interpretations of quantum mechanicsPenrose, pilot wave, many-worldsit doesnt deeply engage with them. The pilot wave interpretation holds that only one future is real, whereas many-worlds asserts that a vast number of futures are all equally real. But neither one would allow for the possibility of perfectly predicting the future, considering the difficulty of accounting for every variable. Garland is seemingly aware of how far-fetched his story is, because on multiple occasions, characters like Lily, Lyndon, and Stewart voice the audiences unspoken disbelief, stating that something or other isnt possible. Whenever they do, Katie or Forest is there to tell them that it is. Which, well, fine: Like Laplaces demon, Devs is intended as more of a thought experiment than a realistic scenario. As Katie says during her blue pill-red pill dialogue with Lily, Go with it.

We might as well go along with Garland, because any scientific liberties he takes are in service of the seriess deeper ideas. As Aaronson says, My opinion is that the show isnt really talking about quantum computing at allits just using it as a fancy-sounding buzzword. Really its talking about the far more ancient questions of determinism vs. indeterminism and predictability vs. unpredictability. He concludes, The plot of this series is one that wouldve been totally, 100 percent familiar to the ancient Greeksjust swap out the quantum computer for the Delphic Oracle. Aaronsonwho says he sort of likes Devs in spite of its quantum technobabblewould know: He wrote a book called Quantum Computing Since Democritus.

Speaking of Democritus, lets consult a few philosophers on the topic of free will. One of the most mind-bending aspects of Devs adherence to hard determinismthe theory that human behavior is wholly dictated by outside factorsis its insistence that characters cant change their behavior even if theyve seen the computers prediction of what theyre about to do. As Forest asks Katie, What if one minute into the future we see you fold your arms, and you say, Fuck the future. Im a magician. My magic breaks tram lines. Im not going to fold my arms. You put your hands in your pockets, and you keep them there until the clock runs out.

It seems as if she should be able to do what she wants with her hands, but Katie quickly shuts him down. Cause precedes effect, she says. Effect leads to cause. The future is fixed in exactly the same way as the past. The tram lines are real. Of course, Katie could be wrong: A character could defy the computers prediction in the finale. (Perhaps thats the mysterious unforeseeable event.) But weve already seen some characters fail to exit the tram. In an Episode 7 scenewhich, as Aaronson notes, is highly reminiscent of the VHS scene in Spaceballswe see multiple members of the Devs team repeat the same statements that theyve just heard the computer predict they would make a split second earlier. They cant help but make the prediction come true. Similarly, Lily ends up at Devs at the end of Episode 7, despite resolving not to.

Putting aside the implausibility of a perfect prediction existing at all, does it make sense that these characters couldnt deviate from their predicted course? Yes, according to five professors of philosophy I surveyed. Keep in mind what Garland has cited as a common criticism of his work: that the ideas I talk about are sophomoric because theyre the kinds of things that people talk about when theyre getting stoned in their dorm rooms. Were about to enter the stoned zone.

In this story, [the characters] are in a totally deterministic universe, says Ben Lennertz, an assistant professor of philosophy at Colgate University. In particular, the watching of the video of the future itself has been determined by the original state of the universe and the laws. Its not as if things were going along and the person was going to cross their arms, but then a non-deterministic miracle occurred and they were shown a video of what they were going to do. The watching of the video and the persons reaction is part of the same progression as the scene the video is of. In essence, the computer would have already predicted its own predictions, as well as every characters reaction to them. Everything that happens was always part of the plan.

Ohio Wesleyan Universitys Erin Flynn echoes that interpretation. The people in those scenes do what they do not despite being informed that they will do it, but (in part) because they have been informed that they will do it, Flynn says. (Think of Katie telling Lyndon that hes about to balance on the bridge railing.) This is not to say they will be compelled to conform, only that their knowledge presumably forms an important part of the causal conditions leading to their actions. When the computer sees the future, the computer sees that what they will do is necessitated in part by this knowledge. The computer would presumably have made different predictions had people never heard them.

Furthermore, adds David Landy of San Francisco State University, the fact that we see something happen one way doesnt mean that it couldnt have happened otherwise. Suppose we know that some guy is going to fold his arms, Landy says. Does it follow that he lacks the ability to not fold his arms? Well, no, because what we usually mean by has the ability to not fold his arms is that if things had gone differently, he wouldnt have folded his arms. But by stipulating at the start that he is going to fold his arms, we also stipulate that things arent going to go differently. But it can remain true that if they did go differently, he would not have folded his arms. So, he might have that ability, even if we know he is not going to exercise it.

We should expect weird things to happen when we are talking about a very weird situation. David Landy, San Francisco State University professor

If your head has started spinning, you can see why the Greeks didnt settle this stuff long before Garland got to it. And if it still seems strange that Forest seemingly cant put his hands in his pockets, well, what doesnt seem strange in the world of Devs? We should expect weird things to happen when we are talking about a very weird situation, Landy says. That is, we are used to people reliably doing what they want to do. But we have become used to that by making observations in a certain environment: one without time travel or omniscient computers. Introducing those things changes the environment, so we shouldnt be surprised if our usual inferences no longer hold.

Heres where we really might want to mime a marijuana hit. Neal Tognazzini of Western Washington University points out that one could conceivably appear to predict the future by tapping into a future that already exists. Many philosophers reject determinism but nevertheless accept that there are truths about what will happen in the future, because they accept a view in the philosophy of time called eternalism, which is (roughly) the block universe ideapast, present, and future are all parts of reality, Tognazzini says. This theory says that the past and the future exist some temporal distance from the presentwe just havent yet learned to travel between them. Thus, Tognazzini continues, You can accept eternalism about time without accepting determinism, because the first is just a view about whether the future is real whereas the second is a view about how the future is connected to the past (i.e., whether there are tram lines).

According to that school of thought, the future isnt what has to happen, its simply what will happen. If we somehow got a glimpse of our futures from the present, it might appear as if our paths were fixed. But those futures actually would have been shaped by our freely chosen actions in the interim. As Tognazzini says, Its a fate of our own makingwhich is just to say, no fate at all.

If we accept that the members of Devs know what theyre doing, though, then the computers predictions are deterministic, and the past does dictate the future. Thats disturbing, because it seemingly strips us of our agency. But, Tognazzini says, Even then, its still the case that what we do now helps to shape that future. We still make a difference to what the future looks like, even if its the only difference we could have made, given the tram lines we happen to be on. Determinism isnt like some force that operates independently of what we want, making us marionettes. If its true, then it would apply equally to our mental lives as well, so that the future that comes about might well be exactly the future we wanted.

This is akin to the compatibilist position espoused by David Hume, which seeks to reconcile the seemingly conflicting concepts of determinism and free will. As our final philosopher, Georgetown Universitys William Blattner, says, If determinism is to be plausible, it must find a way to save the appearances, in this case, explain why we feel like were choosing, even if at some level the choice is an illusion. The compatibilist perspective concedes that there may be only one possible future, but, Flynn says, insists that there is a difference between being causally determined (necessitated) to act and being forced or compelled to act. As long as one who has seen their future does not do what has been predicted because they were forced to do it (against their will, so to speak), then they will still have done it freely.

In the finale, well find out whether the computers predictions are as flawless and inviolable as Katie claims. Well also likely learn one of Devs most closely kept secrets: What Forest intends to do with his perfect model of Amaya. The show hasnt hinted that the computer can resurrect the dead in any physical fashion, so unless Forest is content to see his simulated daughter on a screen, he may try to enter the simulation himself. In Episode 7, Devs seemed to set the stage for such a step; as Stewart said, Thats the reality right there. Its not even a clone of reality. The box contains everything.

Would a simulated Forest, united with his simulated daughter, be happier inside the simulation than he was in real life, assuming hes aware hes inside the simulation? The philosopher Robert Nozick explored a similar question with his hypothetical experience machine. The experience machine would stimulate our brains in such a way that we could supply as much pleasure as we wanted, in any form. It sounds like a nice place to visit, and yet most of us wouldnt want to live there. That reluctance to enter the experience machine permanently seems to suggest that we see some value in an authentic connection to reality, however unpleasurable. Thinking Im hanging out with my family and friends is just different from actually hanging out with my family and friends, Tognazzini says. And since I think relationships are key to happiness, Im skeptical that we could be happy in a simulation.

If reality were painful enough, though, the relief from that pain might be worth the sacrifice. Suppose, for instance, that the real world had become nearly uninhabitable or otherwise full of misery, Flynn says. It seems to me that life in a simulation might be experienced as a sanctuary. Perhaps ones experience there would be tinged with sadness for the lost world, but Im not sure knowing its a simulation would necessarily keep one from being happy in it. Forest still seems miserable about Amaya IRL, so for him, that trade-off might make sense.

Whats more, if real life is totally deterministic, then Forest may not draw a distinction between life inside and outside of his quantum computer. If freedom is a critical component of fulfillment, then its hard to see how we could be fulfilled in a simulation, Blattner says. But for Forest, freedom isnt an option anywhere. Something about the situation seems sad, maybe pathetic, maybe even tragic, Flynn says. But if the world is a true simulation in the matter described, why not just understand it as the ability to visit another real world in which his daughter exists?

Those who subscribe to the simulation hypothesis believe that what we think of as real lifeincluding my experience of writing this sentence and your experience of reading itis itself a simulation created by some higher order of being. In our world, it may seem dubious that such a sophisticated creation could exist (or that anything or anyone would care to create it). But in Forests world, a simulation just as sophisticated as real life already exists inside Devswhich means that what Forest perceives as real life could be someone elses simulation. If hes possibly stuck inside a simulation either way, he might as well choose the one with Amaya (if he has a choice at all).

Garland chose to tell this story on TV because on the big screen, he said, it would have been slightly too truncated. On the small screen, its probably slightly too long: Because weve known more than Lily all along, what shes learned in later episodes has rehashed old info for us. Then again, Devs has felt familiar from the start. If Laplace got a pass for recycling Cicero and Leibniz, well give Garland a pass for channeling Laplace. Whats one more presentation of a puzzle thats had humans flummoxed forever?

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Making Sense of the Science and Philosophy of Devs - The Ringer

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Has coronavirus sent your kids suddenly home? Are they craving something to do nearly 24/7? Most schools and daycare centers are closed, and many parents have hours and hours of unstructured time with their kiddos. Despite this being a time of crisis, parents have an opportunity to create special memories with their children.

Now is an easy time to resort to lots of screen time, but experts recommend setting healthy limits. Studies show that too much screen time can impact brain development and attention span in children and even delay expressive language development in toddlers.

One challenge is that most parents have fewer community resources available to them than usual. Many libraries, gyms, museums, programs, and even parks are closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Parents and caregivers are getting more creative than ever before to keep young minds engaged and hands busy. Here are some fun ideas.

Some are calling the coronavirus quarantine an unprecedented opportunity to let children be children and to have fun. Get them outside in the yard. Now is a wonderful time for children to build forts, do art projects, and dig in the dirt for worms (if possible). Imaginative play involves powering down the devices, providing children with open-ended toys or objects, and conceding to a little bit of chaos.

If your children arent used to playing this way, you can help spark their imaginations to get them started. It might also be helpful to rotate the toy supply of younger children. This makes newly rotated items more exciting and reduces clutter in their play area.

Spring is a wonderful time to get that veggie patch going and you can get the kids involved.

Many grocery stores sell seeds, so this might not even require a special trip to the garden supply or hardware store. Some helpful ways to get children excited about gardening involve including them in planning, reading books about gardening, creating a photo journal of the garden, or starting a compost pile.

One of the easiest and least expensive ways to plant a garden with a minimal amount of work and supplies is with direct seeding. Peas, spinach, lettuce, radishes, carrots, beets, melons, beans, turnips, green onions, and squash are all great candidates. If space is limited, do you have a patio, balcony, deck, or courtyard space you can use? If so, give container gardening a try with pots and planters.

No room for a backyard garden? Try container gardening on a balcony or deck. Image by Phichit WongsunthifromPixabay

Art projects with kids are a wonderful way to engage creativity, but they often consume a lot of resources.

Raiding the recycling bin for artistic inspiration is an easy way to repurpose materials, reduce waste, and avoid trips to the store. Reuse plastic bottles, mason jars, aluminum cans, and cardboard to craft new creations. Make bird feeders out of toilet paper tubes, an egg carton dragonfly, or tin can creatures.

Despite exercise being excellent for the immune system, now is an easy time to become a couch potato.

There are so many resources available online for doing physical activity, such as learning Thai Chi or Qigong, Zumba dance, ballet, karate, yoga, and meditation. Although this does involve some screen time, the kiddos can be active at the same time.

There are many ways to engage children in caring about the planet.

Greenpeace has a Plastic-free Future Global Classroom initiative with lesson plans and games for children of all ages. There are opportunities to celebrate Earth Day remotely. You can even organize a virtual event and promote it on the Earth Day website.

Due to social distancing, many people are feeling disconnected and lonely.

Think about your friends and family that might feel most isolated right now and consider fun and creative ways to connect them with the kids. This can involve making collages out of old magazines, tin can creatures from the recycling bin, or recording songs. Some families are using video conferencing to connect in unique and fun ways, such as playing hike-and-seek or singing happy birthday.

Do you have any torn or soiled linens or clothing? If so, what creations can the kids make from them?

If you have a dog, there are many fun toys you can make, such as a braided toy from repurposed linens. If you have a young child, sewing buttons on socks is an excellent way to improve sewing skills and a good start to creating a sock puppet! Older kids may enjoy sewing a simple pillow, drawstring bag, bean bags, or stuffed creatures.

What activities are keeping your kiddos busy? Share whats working best in the Earthling Forum.

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How to Keep Your Kiddos Busy During the COVID-19 Pandemic - Earth911.com