In science and business, quantum computers are considered the big thing after next, as a technology that can change a lot, has huge potential, but is considered very expensive and complicated.
From China to America, from Germany to Japan, institutes, companies and governments are investing a lot of money in the developments.
The aim is to lay the foundations for a new generation of technology.
Stephen Finsterbusch
Editor in Business.
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Last year, a record sum of 25 billion dollars flowed into the global development of quantum technology from the public sector alone.
Another billion dollars came from venture capitalists.
This emerges from a recent report by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
The sum exceeds the total investments of the previous three years.
Against this background, the governments in Germany, France, China and Canada have launched development programs worth billions over the coming years.
Beijing operates a communications satellite based on quantum technology.
American IT companies such as Google, Microsoft and IBM invest a lot of money in research and cooperate with numerous European research institutes.
Quantum computers are considered to be significantly more powerful than today's supercomputers. According to all forecasts, quantum networks can be used to transport data in previously unimaginable quantities, and quantum-based sensors can be used to measure physical quantities such as pressure, time, space, temperature, speed, acceleration, and electric and magnetic fields with a previously unknown level of precision.
However, the development of these technologies and their foreseeable use are not entirely uncontroversial, even according to the assessment of the German Academy of Science and Engineering Acatech.
Special quantum systems can easily crack current techniques for encrypting digitized data.
They can also significantly increase the potential of artificial intelligence, and even technology freaks in Silicon Valley are not quite comfortable with the possibilities of AI.
Kay Firth-Butterfield, head of the WEF's Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning department, calls the dawn of this new computing era a "historic transformation".
If only man could actually gain insight into the innermost being of matter.
This is to be welcomed, but must be accompanied by debates about the ethical, legal and social framework of this technology.
Technologies based on quantum physics have been used for more than half a century, for example in laser devices, magnetic resonance imaging or computer chips. They are considered to be first-generation quantum technologies. It uses quantum mechanical effects primarily passively.
Science is now starting to actively produce and use quantum mechanical effects such as so-called superposition, entanglement or overlaying.
Or in other words: A particle can be in two completely different places at the same time, communicate with a kind of twin particle over thousands of kilometers in previously unknown ways, or evade its exact determination altogether.
Therefore, there is talk of a second generation of quantum technology - and that could become the big thing after next in the world of technology.