We also have to ask ourselves, sociologically: what level of technology do we want integrated into our lives? There are plus and minuses and although I don't think the minus is anything scary, you just have to ask yourself, do you have the ability to turn it off and get away from it if you don't want it.

GPS was an R&D investment which is now being used by everyone worldwide. Now the investment is around how do you do an indoor GPS and how can you make it as accurate as the one that sits outside. The augmented reality part of Microsoft's 2019 vision means I can go through a space and have a viewer in my phone or something else that can actually delineate things. If I need to go from A to B for example, how can I get there in the fastest way?

One of the things that makes research investment effective is to make sure you hire some of the smartest people in the world. It doesn't necessarily guarantee a breakthrough, but it increases the probability. If you're going to create a quantum computer, you're going to hire someone who has won a Fields Medal in mathematics, form a team around them.

So that's what we have done. We have 10 researchers at UCSB (University of California, Santa Barbara) and [Fields Medal winner] Michael Freeman who's working with 10 other physicists and mathematicians to not only create the theoretical framework, but also turn it into a real prototype. There are ethical issues with creating a quantum computer in terms of cryptography. There's also computational things like transmitting something from Point A to Point B and recomposing it.

The limitations that exist, either in the infrastructure or computationally, go away with quantum computing. And new sets of issues come around as well. That's the extreme of some of the more high-end things we do in the research realm.