LAUSR

ions has already proved itself to be a leading hardware platform for quantum information processing. Indeed, trapped ions have been used to realize quantum gates — the basic building blocks of a quantum computer — that have the smallest quantum-computation errors of any hardware platform. The approach also stands out because it could allow practical machines to be built that do not require cooling to ultra-low (millikelvin) temperatures. However, there have been few comprehensive demonstrations of quantum-computing architectures capable of being scaled up to thousands of quantum bits (qubits). On page 209, Pino et al. report the construction and operation of a prototype microchip-based, trapped-ion quantum computer that incorporates a promising architecture based on ion shuttling. The concept of quantum computing relies on the strange phenomena of quantum physics, the counter-intuitive predictions of which Albert Einstein referred to as spooky. Quantum computers promise to perform calculations in hours or even minutes that might take millions of years to run on the fastest conventional supercomputer. Full-scale quantum computers containing millions of qubits would have transformative uses in nearly every industry, from simulating chemical reactions and helping to develop pharmaceuticals to disruptive add features, only revisiting this assumption after further reflection or explicit prompting. Similarly, members of a university community might implicitly assume that the incoming president wants them to formulate new initiatives, not criticize existing ones. What are the implications of Adams and colleagues’ findings? There are many realworld consequences of failing to consider that situations can often be improved by removing rather than adding. For instance, when people feel dissatisfied with the decor of their home, they might address the situation by going on a spending spree and acquiring more furniture — even if it would be equally effective to get rid of a cluttering coffee table. Such a tendency might be particularly pronounced for resource-deprived consumers, who tend to be particularly focused on acquiring material goods. This not only harms those consumers’ financial situations, but also increases the strain on our environment. On a grander scale, the favouring of additive solutions by individual decision-makers might contribute to problematic societal phenomena, such as the increasing expansion of formal organizations and the near-universal, but environmentally unsustainable, quest for economic growth. Adams and colleagues’ work points to a way of avoiding these pitfalls in the future — policymakers and organizational leaders could explicitly solicit and value proposals that reduce rather than add. For instance, the university president could specify that recommendations to remove committees or policies are both expected and appreciated. In addition, both individuals and institutions could take self-control measures to guard against the default tendency to add. Consumers could minimize their storage space to restrain their purchases, and organizations could specify sunset clauses that trigger the automatic shutdown of initiatives that fail to meet specific goals. Of note, it is unlikely that a bias towards addition will always apply. In some situations, it should arguably be easier to generate subtractive changes, because those do not require imagining something that isn’t already there. Indeed, when people imagine how a situation could have turned out differently, they are more likely to do so by undoing an action they’ve taken rather than by adding an action they failed to take. Going forwards, it would be worth exploring when our readiness to imagine removing events extends to imagining removing features, thereby helping us to solve problems through subtraction.