Hot Tub Thoughts on Quantum, AI, and Douglas Adams

It was Saturday morning. I was in the hot tub with an americano, watching the trees move in the crisp mountain air. The water bubbled. Steam came off the surface.

I don’t know what started it. I think about this kind of thing sometimes. That morning it was two machines that still sound like science fiction: quantum computers and AI language models.

It’s the sort of thought you only have when you let your brain float. Part curiosity, part absurdity. Douglas Adams might have called it perfectly normal behavior for a species that invented both the digital watch and Vogon poetry.

Hot

If you’ve used ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, you’ve used a large language model. It predicts the next word, then the next, well enough to sound like a person. They don’t think the way we do. They’re very good at the appearance of it.

Getting them there takes server farms the size of warehouses and electricity bills that could run a small town. Nearly all of that power ends up as heat, and the buildings are designed around getting rid of it.

Cold

Quantum computers go the other way. A qubit can be 0 and 1 at once until it’s measured, which lets a handful of them hold a great deal. They’re also fragile. Noise, heat, almost any disturbance, and the answer is gone. Many of them run colder than deep space, and much of the work goes into correcting their own mistakes.

Promising and temperamental. Not ready to run anything yet.

Both

What if the two met? Maybe quantum hardware helps language models with what they’re worst at: searching enormous spaces, sampling from probabilities too tangled for ordinary chips. Maybe it’s faster. Maybe it’s just strange.

One of these machines needs a building’s worth of cooling. The other needs to be colder than space. I was thinking about both of them from a hot tub.

In true Hitchhiker’s Guide fashion, the best place to wonder about it wasn’t a lab or a conference hall. It was a hot tub on a Saturday morning, thinking about life, the universe, and everything.

Further Reading

If you’d like to dip into Douglas Adams’ own cosmic musings, here are a few of my favorite books:

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (paid link)
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (paid link)
• Life, the Universe and Everything (paid link)
• So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (paid link)
• Mostly Harmless (paid link)

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