The resurgence of AI has industry leaders counting the days until quantum computers go mainstream. There's been considerable progress on the quantum computing front since I blogged last year about how The European Quantum Industry Consortium (QuIC) was developing its Quantum Strategic Industry Roadmap. For an update, I reached out to Laure Le Bars, research project director at SAP and also president of QuIC. Le Bars was a recent guest on the Future of ERP Podcast from SAP, hosted by Richard Howells, vice president for thought leadership at SAP, and Oyku Ilgar, marketing director for SAP Supply Chain. Advances in quantum hardware, middleware, and software will lead to a general-purpose quantum advantage machine being developed by 2030.

Back in 1958, in the earliest days of the computing revolution, the US Office of Naval Research organized a press conference to unveil a device invented by a psychologist named Frank Rosenblatt at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory. Rosenblatt called his device a perceptron, and the New York Times reported that it was "the embryo of an electronic computer that [the Navy] expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself, and be conscious of its existence." Those claims turned out to be somewhat overblown. But the device kick-started a field of research that still has huge potential today. A perceptron is a single-layer neural network.