Feb 1, 2020
Jack Hidary has been a successful serial technology entrepreneur and is a regular guest on Bloomberg, Fox Business, and CNBC, as well as a frequent keynote speaker, having presented at the business schools of Yale and Columbia, and at TEDx.
Jack and I first connected 20 years back (gosh!) in Davos via the World Economic Forum, having been invited to be members of the group Global Leaders of Tomorrow.
Currently, Jack is a Senior Adviser to Alphabet X Labs—the advanced innovation lab of Alphabet/Google, where he focuses on AI and quantum technologies. He is also an investor in Primary Insight and serves as a trustee of the X Prize Foundation and the co-founder of the Auto X Prize, which inspired the development of highly fuel-efficient vehicles. He’s committed to community and philanthropic causes and established the Hidary Foundation which focuses on medical research in oncology.
In this episode we do a deep dive into his new book, Quantum Computing: An Applied Approach, which has been adopted for a number of courses. It can serve as a textbook for STEM majors, or physics grad students (augmenting Mike and Ike’s textbook on quantum computing and quantum information), or computer science grad students; and it can serve as a primer for non-quantum computing experts who are software engineers, physicists, engineering and business folks, and for independent study.
I found it impressive that Jack came from a background in philosophy and neuroscience at Columbia, to startup founder and serial entrepreneur extraordinaire, to quantum computing, and an amazing textbook, and he explains this trajectory in a way that makes one think, “well, of course!”
We discuss how classical computing is quite different from quantum computing in both type of data and type of processor. We also dive deep into why quantum information science matters, along with quantum sensing, quantum communications, and quantum chemistry.
Additionally, we go into the Black Box problem in artificial intelligence, and Jack covers neural networks, the non-overfitting puzzle, deep learning, and how biases become insinuated into algorithms along with what can be done to find and correct them.
Jack’s vision for quantum computing is as hopeful as it is inspiring, and will likely argument solutions to the “Grand Challenges” facing humanity today. Our discussion of the concept behind moonshots and the advent of the X Prize is not to be missed.Jack defies any simple label or categorization as he has such synthetic and integrative thinking that is coupled with the practical capacity to bring forth new innovations to make the world a better place. There is no fuller approach to living.