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I met Seth Lloyd in the late 1980s, when new ways of thinking were everywhere: the importance of biological organizing principles, the computational view of mathematics and physical processes, the emphasis on parallel networks, the importance of nonlinear dynamics, the new understanding of chaos, connectionist ideas, neural networks, and parallel distributive processing. The advances in computation during that period provided us with a new way of thinking about knowledge.

Seth likes to refer to himself as a quantum mechanic. He is internationally known for his work in the field of quantum computation, which attempts to harness the exotic properties of quantum theory, like superposition and entanglement, to solve problems that would take several lifetimes to solve on classical computers.

In the essay that follows, he traces the history of information theory from Norbert Wiener’s prophetic insights to the predictions of a technological “singularity” that some would have us believe will supplant the human species. His takeaway on the recent programming method known as deep learning is to call for a more modest set of expectations; he notes that despite AI’s enormous advances, robots “still can’t tie their own shoes.”

It’s difficult for me to talk about Seth without referencing his relationship with his friend and professor, the late theoretical physicist Heinz Pagels of Rockefeller University. The graduate student and the professor each had a profound effect on each other’s ideas.

In the summer of 1988, I visited Heinz and Seth at the Aspen Center for Physics. Their joint work on the subject of complexity was featured in the current issue of Scientific American; they were ebullient. That was just two weeks before Heinz’s tragic death in a hiking accident while descending Pyramid Peak with Seth. They were talking about quantum computing.

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