Quantum Computing, Honeywell, and JP Morgan Chase

QUANTUM COMPUTING, HONEYWELL, AND JP MORGAN CHASE

by Joseph P. Farrell
March 18, 2020

 

This is a really important story that was shared by K.J. (to whom a big thank you!). Honeywell, it seems, has created the world’s most powerful quantum computer, replacing Google’s claim. Or at least, that’s the story. And we’ve all been seeing these stories for some time now, about how quantum computers are the next leap forward, able to handle orders of magnitude more calculations than ordinary Tray super-computers, and do so much faster.

So what’s the big deal here? Why another story about quantum computing and “the latest breakthrough”?

I have to admit, when I saw K.J.’s email, I thought the same thing, and was tempted to file the article in my “runners up folder”, but something kept gnawing at me telling me “you need to read this”. So I did, and I found out why K.J. sent it to me. See if you spot it:

Honeywell has built the most powerful supercomputer in the world

Beyond all the usual fanfare about qbits and so one, there is something that made me stop and sit up and …well… moan, and it was this little gem:

Honeywell is currently ranked 77th on the Fortune 500. The company’s investment in quantum, which Uttley calls “technical debt,” has the potential to help its own engineers on any number of levels. But finding clients for a quantum computer presents challenges of its own. You have to find companies with people who can use quantum computers, in the first place. It’s accessible via cloud—Honeywell has its own API interface—but someone has to know what they’re doing. And then there has to be a clear situation in which they’ll need to use a computer capable of processing information at an exponentially faster rate than any classical computer in existence.

JP Morgan Chase fit the bill. The financial services giant has been beta testing Honeywell’s quantum computing abilities for three months now, and Uttley throws out a number of ways they could be using it: having AI run internal hypotheticals on the stock market, more powerful fraud protection. (Emphasis added)

Now, if you’ve been a regular follower of this website, or of various interviews – especially those with former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts, you’ll know that one of the things we have occasionally mentioned on her quarterly wrap-ups is the phenomenon of high frequency trading, and the fact that now, most trades in equities, securities, or commodities markets are executed by computers and trading algorithms designed largely by – you guessed it – “quants”, a nifty term for all those quantum physicists who entered finance, and brought their quantum mechanics models with them and used them to design these trading algorithms. If you’ve been looking for a reason why markets sometimes bear no connection to  reality, think no further than this, for quantum mechanics little resembles the work-a-day reality most humans live in. It’s a bizarre world of path integrals, phase space collapse, non-locality and entanglement, and above all, The Observer Effect for want of a better term.

As a result of this move to High Frequency Trading done by computers, “dark pools” emerged as banks and brokerages began to locate their computer trading facilities as physically close as possible to the actual market, since speed is everything, and a few nanoseconds can determine the success and/or profitability of a trade, even at the speed of electricity. The closer the facility, the speedier the transaction. It’s like getting a three foot bonus “start” out of the starting gate at a horse race.

As a result of that, high frequency trading actually becomes disconnected from the reality of real human performance in real human markets, enabling those with the access to the machines and programs a power to drive markets – and prices – in the way they want, thus rendering prices disconnected from human realities, and disconnecting the one signal humans use – price – from reality.

Now add quantum computing to the mix, and you get the picture. If an “AI” can “run internal hypotheticals on the stock market,” that ability to drive markets – any market, stocks, securities, commodities, you name it – in ways that are orders of magnitude more disconnected than ever before, creating, via this development, that “human-machine interface” so longed for and sought after by the transhumanists. But I strongly suspect that it will lead to something else, too: a “two economies” situation, the one real and human, and the other increasingly virtual and disconnected.

See you on the flip side…