Digging into the future of TikTok bans

Welcome back to What’s Next in Tech. In this edition, dig into the future of TikTok bans—including whether Montana’s ban of the app is even enforceable. Then, learn what one woman's experience with an experimental brain implant suggests about the need to enshrine neuro rights into law. Plus, find out about IBM’s goal to build a 100,000-qubit quantum computer.

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Is Montana's TikTok ban even enforceable?

Montana recently banned TikTok in the most dramatic move US legislators have made against the company to date.

US policymakers have been scrutinizing the app intensely in recent months over concerns about Chinese espionage, and under the new changes, marketplaces like Google Play and Apple’s App Store could face fines of  $10,000 per day if they make TikTok available to users in Montana from 1 January next year.

So are we really proceeding down a path where we might have to delete and re-download certain apps as we cross state lines? What is the future of TikTok bans, and could they ever actually be enforced? MIT Technology Review’s senior tech policy reporter dug into it all. Read the story.

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A brain implant changed her life. Then it was removed against her will.

Sticking an electrode inside a person’s brain can do more than treat a disease. Take the case of Rita Leggett, an Australian woman whose experimental brain implant designed to help people with epilepsy changed her sense of agency and self. 

Leggett told researchers that she “became one” with her device. It helped her to control the unpredictable, violent seizures she routinely experienced, and allowed her to take charge of her own life. So she was devastated when, two years later, she was told she had to remove the implant because the company that made it had gone bust.

The removal of this implant, and others like it, might represent a breach of human rights, ethicists say in a paper published earlier this month. And the issue will only become more pressing as the brain implant market grows in the coming years and more people receive devices like Leggett’s. Read the story.

IBM wants to build a 100,000-qubit quantum computer

What’s happening: Last year, IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor containing 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. Now, the company has set its sights on a much bigger target: a 100,000-qubit machine that it aims to build within 10 years.

Why it matters: The project is part of IBM’s plans to push quantum computing into the realm of full-scale operation, where the technology could potentially tackle pressing problems that no standard supercomputer can solve. 

The potential: The idea is that the 100,000 qubits will work alongside the best "classical" supercomputers to achieve new breakthroughs in things like drug discovery, fertilizer production, battery performance. Read the story.

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Images: Stephanie Arnett/MITTR; Stephanie Arnett/MITTR | Getty; Stephanie Arnett/MITTR | IBM