- The next revolution will be physical
- Five discoveries could invert the course of civilization
- The greatest scientists may not yet be born
The technology industry has spent the past three years obsessing over what AI might do to jobs, search engines, software development and customer service. Those are important questions, but they may ultimately prove mundane compared to the far greater opportunities beginning to appear over the computational horizon.
The real story may not be what AI does to information.
The real story may be what AI and quantum computing do to physics.
For decades, scientists have understood the broad outlines of many world-changing technologies. The problem has never been imagination. The problem has been complexity. Materials science, chemistry, molecular biology and fundamental physics involve search spaces so vast that even the world's largest classical computers — including today's AI supercomputers — struggle to explore them effectively.
AI changes that equation by helping researchers identify promising pathways. Quantum computing, if it achieves its potential, could help model nature itself at a level of precision that conventional computers simply cannot match.
The distinction is important. Classical computers, including the vast GPU clusters powering today's AI revolution, simulate reality through approximation. Quantum computers operate according to many of the same quantum principles that govern the molecules, atoms and materials they are attempting to model. Put simply, AI may help us decide where to look. Quantum computing may help us understand what we find.
The result could be the greatest acceleration in scientific discovery since the Industrial Revolution.
I'm particularly interested in this because of my work around the emerging Integrated Infrastructure Era and its corresponding six-layer model.
We can already see parts of that future emerging today. Energy, connectivity, compute, AI and sovereignty are increasingly converging into a single integrated system. But for once, rather than focusing on what is immediately in front of us, let's look a little further out and ask a more interesting question:
What becomes possible if AI and quantum computing mature together?
If that happens, five breakthroughs stand above all others.
Breakthrough 1: Room-temperature superconductivity
This would rank among the most important discoveries in human history. Today, enormous amounts of energy are lost moving electricity around the world. Data centers consume extraordinary amounts of power. Electric transportation remains constrained by efficiency and infrastructure.
A practical room-temperature superconductor would transform all of that.
Transmission losses could approach zero. Power grids could move vast amounts of electricity across continents with minimal waste. AI data centers could be located wherever power is cheapest rather than wherever power is available. Magnetic levitation systems could become commonplace. Fusion reactors would become easier to build. Entire industries would be reinvented almost overnight.
Breakthrough 2: Practical fusion energy
Fusion reactors are the machines. Fusion energy is the outcome.
For decades, humanity has known that fusion works. The sun demonstrates that rather effectively every morning. The challenge has been building reactors that produce more energy than they consume while controlling plasma that behaves like an angry deity trapped inside a magnetic bottle.
AI is already being used to optimize plasma control systems. Quantum computing could eventually help model interactions that remain beyond the reach of conventional computers. If the combination succeeds, energy abundance could move from science fiction to infrastructure planning.
Breakthrough 3: Advanced materials and the space elevator
This subject has fascinated me for more than two decades.
When I first started writing about space elevators in the early 2000s, the materials required were almost entirely theoretical. Since then, enormous progress has been made. Carbon nanotubes have become stronger, longer and more practical to manufacture. Yet, we remain a very long way from producing defect-free materials at the scale required for truly transformational applications.
A space elevator, for those unfamiliar with the concept, is essentially a cable extending from Earth into space that allows payloads to climb into orbit without expensive rockets, with their irritating proclivity for exploding at random moments.
The challenge is the cable.
AI-guided materials discovery combined with quantum simulation could dramatically accelerate the search for entirely new classes of ultra-light, ultra-strong materials. Aircraft lighter than aluminium. Infrastructure stronger than steel. Transportation systems far more efficient than today's designs.
And perhaps, finally, the space elevator.
Going up?
Breakthrough 4: Molecular medicine
Much of modern medicine remains surprisingly blunt. We diagnose disease, administer treatment — provided, in the U.S., that the correct insurance approvals are in place and the insurance company’s AI bot has opted not to decline coverage automagically — and then observe the outcome.
Future AI systems combined with quantum-assisted molecular modeling may allow scientists to design drugs with unprecedented precision. Instead of treating broad categories of disease, therapies could be engineered for specific biological pathways and individual patients.
Recently, one prominent Google executive suggested AI could effectively eliminate disease within a decade. (As the Native Americans used to say: I may be Running Scared, but I know he's Talking Bollocks).
By the end of the century, however?
Perhaps.
Cancer, neurodegenerative diseases and countless rare disorders could become dramatically more manageable. Medicine may become less about treating symptoms and more about engineering solutions.
Breakthrough 5: Gravity
The fifth breakthrough is the most speculative — and potentially the most transformative of all.
Gravity.
To be clear, nobody should expect anti-gravity machines next year.
Or next decade.
By 2100?
Mayyyyyybeeeee.
Gravity remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of physics. We understand how it behaves. We do not fully understand how it fits with quantum mechanics.
If AI and quantum systems help uncover new relationships between spacetime, quantum fields and gravitation, the implications could dwarf every other item on this list.
A deeper understanding of gravity could ultimately lead to entirely new approaches to propulsion, space travel, energy systems and infrastructure. Concepts currently sitting on the edge of science fiction — orbital rings, advanced launch systems and radically different transportation architectures — could suddenly move closer to engineering reality.
The odds may be long.
The payoff could be civilization-changing. Or civilization-ending (Boo!). Or civilization-creating (Hoorah!).
Infinity stretch goals
What makes all of these possibilities so fascinating is that they share a common characteristic. None requires magic. None requires rewriting the laws of physics. In most cases, we already know the destination. What we lack is the map.
That is where the combination of AI and quantum computing becomes so powerful. Together, they may give humanity an entirely new way of exploring the physical universe — not by replacing scientists, but by allowing them to search possibilities at a scale that was previously unimaginable.
The AI revolution may ultimately be remembered not for copilots, automated workflows or machines that became exceptionally good at predicting the next word in a sentence.
It may be remembered as the moment humanity acquired a new scientific instrument powerful enough to unlock the next century of discovery.
One of the things (and believe me, it is a long list) I find most irritating about the current wave of Silicon Valley self-mythology is the increasingly messianic tendency of technology leaders to portray themselves as masters of the computational universe.
Listen to the likes of Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel over the sound of your own vomiting, and you could be forgiven for thinking we are already living in the age of scientific gods. Every product launch is presented as a civilizational event. Every incremental advance in predictive-text chatbots is treated as proof that the future has already arrived.
Bluntly, it vexes me to share a planet with these nouveau riche, oiky bloviators.
If historians are writing about our era in the year 2100, I doubt they will devote many chapters to the earlier part of the century and its shitty faux-AI customer-service chatbots.
They will care about what came next. And they will write the biographies of the scientists, engineers, physicists, chemists, materials researchers and visionaries who used these extraordinary new computational tools to solve problems that had defeated humanity for generations.
If AI and quantum computing help unlock room-temperature superconductivity, practical fusion, molecular medicine, advanced materials or a deeper understanding of gravity itself, then the true legacy of this era will not be measured in market capitalizations.
It will be measured in discoveries that change the nature of human quiddity and extend humankind's footprint to the stars. The real ones — not our kitty-corner irradiated death rocks.
That is why I find the current obsession with technology billionaires ridiculous.
In one hundred years' time, how will Jeff Bezos be remembered?
"He had a really big yacht and made the poor people piss in bottles."
And Elon Musk?
"Wasn't he the fellow who did a Hitler salute and wanted to send a million people to die of radiation poisoning on Mars?"
History can be extraordinarily cruel to people who mistake wealth for significance.
Good.
The true legends of the Infrastructure Era have yet to emerge. Some may not even have been born yet. Those are the ones who will matter. Given the current attacks on America's educational and scientific institutions, they are far more likely to go by names like Arjun or Mei than Biff or Randy.
I wish I could emerge from a cryogenic coffer, brushing hoarfrost from my shoulders, to meet them there, in a future built upon their greatest achievements. Sadly, cryonics will not be among the breakthroughs of my remaining lifetime. By the time they arrive, my salty ashes will long since have been scattered into the Thames from Blackfriars Bridge. For it is written in my will, and so shall it be.
But perhaps that is the point. We plant the tree that we will never sit beneath. We inherit wonders from people we never met. And we build the foundations of new digital civilizations for generations we will never know.
Stephen M. Saunders MBE is a communications analyst and USPTO-registered inventor examining how digital infrastructure — 5G, cloud, and AI — is reshaping industry, power and society, as well as underpinning the emerging, ubiquitous global digital economy. As anchor of FNTV and a longtime industry insider, he focuses less on growth narratives and more on execution, risk and how hyperscale technology is distorting markets, governance and society at scale.
Opinion pieces from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.