Why Is Silicon Valley Still Waiting for the Next Big Thing?

In the fall of 2015, the company said it had reached "quantum supremacy."

Some compared it to the first flight at Kitty Hawk. A computer that could perform a calculation in only three minutes and 20 seconds was built by Google.

The world is still waiting for a quantum computer that does something useful, more than two years after the announcement. It is most likely to wait a long time. The world is waiting for self-driving cars, flying cars, advanced artificial intelligence and brain implants that will let you control your computing devices using nothing but your thoughts.

Silicon Valley has been accused of being ahead of reality. The tech industry's critics have noticed that its biggest promises seem further and further on the horizon. The great wealth generated by the industry in recent years has been a result of ideas that came a long time ago.

The big thinkers of tech have lost their swagger.

The answer is that those big thinkers are quick to respond. The projects they are tackling are more difficult than building a new app. The tools that have helped you cope with the Pandemic have shown the industry hasn't lost a step.

Margaret O'Mara, a professor at the University of Michigan, said that the economic impact of the Pandemic would have been different if there had not been the infrastructure that allowed so many white-collar workers to work from home.

The next big thing should be given time. Take quantum computing. Jake Taylor, who oversaw quantum computing efforts for the White House and is now chief science officer at the quantum start-up Riverlane, said building a quantum computer might be the most difficult task ever undertaken. This machine defies the laws of physics.

A quantum computer relies on the strange ways that some objects behave at the subatomic level or when exposed to extreme cold, like metal chilled to nearly 500 degrees below zero. Scientists tend to break if they only try to read information from these quantum systems.

Dr. Taylor said that while building a quantum computer you are constantly working against nature.

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The chief scientist of the start-up Riverlane oversaw quantum computing efforts for the White House.

The most important tech advances of the past few decades were not new. They were allowed to gestate for years inside government agencies and corporate research labs before reaching mass adoption.

The age of mobile and cloud computing has created many new business opportunities. There are more complicated problems now.

The louder the voices in Silicon Valley, the more they talk about the problems as if they were just another app. That can increase expectations.

A University of Toronto professor who helped oversee the development of self-driving cars at Uber and is now chief executive of the self-driving start-up Waabi said that people who aren't experts may have been misled by the hype.

Artificial intelligence and self-driving cars don't face the same physical obstacles as quantum computing. Researchers don't yet know how to build a quantum computer that can do anything the human brain can do, and they don't know how to design a car that can safely drive itself in any situation.

It will take years of additional research and engineering before a technology like augmented reality can be used.

The first mouse-driven personal computers were created in the 1970s, according to Andrew Bosworth, vice president at Meta. Meta has to design a completely new way of using computers before putting all its pieces into a tiny package.

Over the past two decades, companies like Facebook have built and deployed new technologies at a rapid pace. These were mostly software technologies built with bits of digital information.

It is far more difficult to build hardware that works with physical atoms. The creation of augmented reality glasses is a once-in-a-lifetime project according to Mr. Bosworth.

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The computer industry is starting to tackle "once-in-a-lifetime" challenges, according to an executive at Meta.

Technologists like Mr. Bosworth believe they will eventually overcome those obstacles and they are more open about how difficult it will be. Sometimes that is not the case. It can be hard to separate hand-waving from realism when an industry has seen it all in daily life.

Hand-waving is an important part of pushing technologies into the mainstream. The belief needed to build technology is attracted by the hype.

If the outcome is desirable, and it is technically possible, then it is ok if we are off by three years or five years. You want entrepreneurs to be optimistic, to have a little bit of that Steve Jobs reality-distortion field, which helped to persuade people to buy into his big ideas.

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Margaret O'Mara is a professor at the University of Washington.

The hype is a way for entrepreneurs to get the attention of the public. There is no guarantee that people and businesses will pay for new technologies if they are built. They need to talk. Most people inside and outside the tech industry will admit to being more patient.

It takes less than 10 minutes for our brains to imagine what a new technology can do. Mr. Levie said that we immediately compressed all of the compounding infrastructure and innovation needed to get to that point. We are dealing with cognitive dissonance.