Here’s the short version of this newsletter: Recently, I was listening to a Bachelor Nation podcast, Game of Roses, and one of the two hosts (the bad one) leaped one thousand light years outside his lane to prognosticate about quantum computing’s forthcoming impact on media (?!?!?). I know a little about quantum computing, and I was so annoyed by his prediction. My main issue was not even the rickety mansplaining of the tech, but more the bad market analysis Trojan Horsed into the rickety mansplaining. It suggested to me that he doesn’t understand his own job?!
Here’s the shortest possible version of this newsletter: I’m mad about a bad take I heard on a podcast… and I’m leaning in, because that’s what normal, healthy people do!
Ok, now let’s ~slow it down~.
What’s Game of Roses?
It’s a Bachelor podcast where the two hosts recap and analyze Bachelor Nation shows like football games. They give out awards like Play of the Game, MVP, and (as of recently) Creature of the Week; they also calculate weird, made-up performance metrics, like the “Rose Quotient,” though they are more into inventing jargon than actual data analysis. (For that, follow Bachelor Data.) Overall, it’s interesting, buoyed by its good host and undercut constantly by its bad host.
Who’s the bad host of Game of Roses?
“Bachelor Clues,” a.k.a. Chad Kultgen. (The good host is “Pace Case,” a.k.a. Lizzy Pace. A delight!) Recently, I guess the internet lightly attempted to cancel Clues for writing a novel about a creepy guy. That’s not my issue with him, though; I consider him the bad host because, though he’s (probably) SAT-smart, his on-mic persona is clinically incapable of changing his mind.
Like, ever. He will argue back and forth with Pace Case, ping-pong style, when they disagree, but he will never actually shift his position or synthesize it with hers to make a new, better idea. If he doesn’t share her perspective, he doesn’t truly consider it. He just keeps arguing his original thesis. (He loves to say “thesis” and “objectively.”)
It could all be Linda Dong-style performance art, and I can almost look past the inflexibility when he’s talking exclusively about Bachelor Nation shows. He has pretty deep knowledge of the franchise and its history. But when he tries to connect The Bachelor to the news of the day — as he and Pace Case do in their weekly “State of the World” episode — the show becomes unlistenable for me.
I just don’t think he knows a lot about the world! But he still feels called to inflexibly mansplain it to Pace Case and, indirectly, me.
Wait, why did you listen to a podcast you thought would be unlistenable?
Ugh idk I was bored. You can tell I’m still bored because I’m conducting a Q+A with myself.
Hmm. So what did Mr. Bad Host say about quantum computing?
He started off okay, as far as I could tell. (If you want to listen for yourself, it’s the first segment of this episode. )
First he was like, normal computers run on bits, but quantum computers run on qubits, an awkward mashup of “quantum” and “bits” that you say like the Biblical “cubits.” Instead of operating in the binary either-or world of 0s and 1s (like bits do), qubits can encode multiple possibilities in a groundbreaking way that neither Bachelor Clues nor I fully understand.
But basically, they’re exponentially more powerful than bits, and computer scientists are still figuring out how to use them.
Clues brings this up now because Google recently (well, “recently”) used a 53-qubit quantum computer named Sycamore to tackle an “impossible” equation. This fellow would take the best traditional supercomputer in the world ~10,000 years to solve. Sycamore solved it in 200 seconds.
It’s not a great news peg, as it happened in 2019, but I hadn’t heard about this until Clues told me about it. And I used to write about tech for work! We’ll give it to him.
NOW things start to jump the shark, though, because Clues starts prognosticating. “We are on the precipice of quantum computing being given to the general public,” he says. “I think this is going to happen in the next 10 years or so.”
Hmm. I’m not sure! Some quantum computing optimists (quoptimists?) think so, but some knowledgeable people also really don’t. Like, here’s Subhash Kak, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Oklahoma State, in The Conversation in 2019:
As someone who has worked on quantum computing for many years, I believe that due to the inevitability of random errors in the hardware, useful quantum computers are unlikely to ever be built.
Also, a Gartner analyst (I trust Gartner!) told NBC in 2020 that quantum computing is generating interest, but ultimately “so far down the road.”
Meanwhile, quantum computing pioneer Peter Shor had a sort of dual take in a 2020 interview — we need to prepare for the privacy implications of a post-quantum world, where all of our current encryption could be easily decoded. But also, Google’s quantum computer “needs to be a lot better before it can do anything interesting,” because of the random errors (or “noise”) that Kak also mentioned.
One element of these errors and reliability issues, I think, is that qubits are just hard to make and maintain. Making one requires manipulating an electron’s spin, and even once scientists pull that off, qubits remain unstable. Like, as of 2005, they lasted… 500 nanoseconds. In the intervening decade-plus, they’ve gotten more “robust”, but my impression is that there are still many practical hurdles to clear before anyone is out here buying a quantum laptop.
Bottom line… who knows what will happen!
Except allegedly, Bachelor Clues knows. Mainstream quantum computing is coming, it has huge implications for media, and he understands them.
What are the implications for media, according to him?
Okay. So Clues proclaims that with enough computing power, you can generate every image that can possibly be created. Then, AI can stitch all the possible images into sequences, and make all the video possible.
“Literally, all realities will become possible,” he asserts. (I think he means “representations of all realities” there.) “This is 10-15 years away.”
Once that happens, he says:
Any video you want, you will just to say into your phone, ‘I would like a video of me doing this,’ and it will make that video for you instantaneously. The same will be true of all movies, all television, any kind of media you want will be procedurally generated for you. All creative endeavors will be erased. No one will do these things anymore except for pure pleasure. But the business of it will be gone, because the studios that own these algorithms and that have this computational power that will be able to generate any media they want on an individual basis.
In other words, instead of creating things for other people, we’ll just create things for ourselves in solipsistic quantum computing bubbles. The Bachelor broadcast on ABC will disappear; instead, each fan will create custom Bachelor seasons for themselves. For example, Clues says, if you’re a Dale Moss stan, you might ask your computer for a Bachelor season in which Dale is the lead and you are all 32 contestants.
Bam! It’ll be ready in milliseconds.
Pace Case wisely says at this point, “That sounds not real.”
Why doesn’t it sound real?
Clues thinks it sounds “not real” the same way Instagram would have sounded “not real” before it existed. He seems to think he’s just talking about the logical implications of technology. I disagree!
Once Clues launches into his media predictions, he’s not really talking about technology. He’s talking about technology + market forces, or, in normal words, how people would want to use quantum computing technology. If we had the computing power to make media work the way he says it inevitably will — would anyone want it to?
I don’t think so. I think people enjoy “media” or “entertainment” or “art” or whatever you want to call it because, at some core level, it lets our consciousness touch another human consciousness. Like, even when I read fiction, I know it was invented by a real person, and that in some holistic way, it captures their experience on Earth. That’s a big part of why it’s interesting! I’m stowing away in their brain.
For example: I’m reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children right now, and it’s this magical realist epic set in India. So it’s definitely not “real” by any fact-checker’s standard, but Salman Rushdie was really born in Mumbai the same year his narrator was born, and I believe the novel has a meaningful relationship to the “real” place and era in which it’s set.
If Rushdie had never even been to India, I would be way less interested in the novel. And if I knew some quantum algorithm had created Midnight’s Children specifically to please me, it would be even more boring, for the same reason human people-pleasers are boring: being with them is like being alone.
The best thing, for me, is when media/entertainment/art makes me feel connected to other people and their experiences. This gets kind of elided by the word “entertainment,” which places a big emphasis on the consumer’s response: they feel entertained. But even schlocky entertainment is expressive as well as entertaining, and I think that’s key to the entertainment industry being worth trillions of dollars.
Like, look at The Bachelor. Yes, everyone on it is trying, on some conscious or subconscious level, to amass screen time and Instagram followers and fans — they’re trying to entertain their invisible audience and “win” the “Game of Roses” — but they’re also sleep-deprived and under 24/7 surveillance. No one can keep up a false act that long. So there are these moments of authentic expression that sneak through to the viewer, and that’s why it’s interesting. It’s not just “fake” or just “real”; it’s both!
Even Clues knows this. Game of Roses treats everything that happens on Bachelor Nation shows as fake, strategic “game play” by default, but even he gets obsessed with the moments when he thinks he can see the facade drop and the real feeling sneak through. He, too, wants to connect with other humans’ consciousness through media!
Hence his best theory: That the top four women on Peter Weber’s Bachelor season all secretly found Peter repulsive, and that he, Clues, could see it in a million little tics and tells. I believe it! Peter was kind of repulsive… because he was a people-pleaser. (Callback to four paragraphs ago >:) )
What does this have to do with Clues’ job?
I feel like Clues should be aware that human consciousnesses touch through media, and that viewers like it that way, because his whole job is sharing his consciousness with other people. I’m not his biggest fan, but I would never tune into Game of Roses if I thought he and Pace Case were just telling me what I wanted to hear and confirming my biases. I want to hear what they think, not what I think, or what AI thinks I want them to think.
Speaking of Clues’ job — his whole job is also sharing interesting opinions about a show his whole audience watched together. It’s a job that exists because people take pleasure in communal viewing and discussion. So why would he think we want to atomize off and watch custom shows generated just for us, that no one else has ever heard of? Shows with audiences of one, that could never financially support a commentator ecosystem?
He's living proof (or at least a living… indication) that people want the opposite.
I just don’t think the thing keeping us from the futuristic media landscape he described is a lack of computing power. It sounds horrible to me, and I don’t think I’m alone! I feel like he’s ignoring the exact market signals that pay him, and though tech bros do this all the time, it annoys me a lot that Clues presented his take as just a tech explainer — not market analysis at all.
Weird! Any final thoughts?
If you got this far, you’re a hero, and thank you for letting my consciousness touch yours. I swear it’s not always so niche and questy in here.
I’m also proud to say that this week, I didn’t listen to the “State of the World” Game of Roses episode, because I knew Clues was going to make authoritative claims about GameStop stocks and I knew it would drive me nuts.
#growth #innerpeace