And Quantum Bias

A Comedy That Saw the Future

In an episode of Better Off Ted, the fictional megacorp Veridian Dynamics installs motion sensors to reduce energy costs—sensors that, tragically, fail to detect employees with darker skin tones. Rather than admit failure or redesign the system, leadership implements a troubling solution: assigning white employees to walk in front of their Black colleagues to trigger the sensors. This solution is dubbed—without irony—Operation White Shadow.

This absurd scenario, though satirical, mirrors our current reality. While the episode aired in 2010, its themes—technological bias, quick-fix solutions, and systemic invisibility—have only grown more relevant.

Now imagine we aren't talking about office lighting. Imagine we're talking about quantum reality.

A Quantum Thought Experiment

Quantum computers store information in qubits, which exist in a superposition of 0 and 1. Entangling multiple qubits allows the computer to explore countless potential solutions simultaneously.

This power, comes at a cost. Qubits are fragile—they can be disrupted by thermal fluctuations, electromagnetic interference, and even cosmic rays. Their vulnerability makes quantum error correction essential. We must add extra qubits, not to solve computational problems, but to maintain the system's integrity.

Now, what if your error-correction scheme can't see certain types of errors? Or worse—what if it only corrects some types of data while silently allowing others to decay?

The White-Shadow as Error Correction

In Better Off Ted, the sensors fail to see certain employees—not because they are invisible, but because the system was not designed to recognize them. The workaround ("White Shadows") serves as a crude, manual error correction process.

This mindset reflects a dangerous pattern we see in both quantum computing and society:

Instead of fixing the fundamental design flaw, we patch it.
Instead of retraining the sensors, we reassign the humans.
Instead of examining why the system excludes, we seek ways to quietly work around the exclusion.

And in that silence, we encode bias into the logic of the future.

Technology’s Blind Spots Are By Design

AI facial recognition still struggles with non-Caucasian faces. Medical algorithms misdiagnose people of color. Hiring tools discard non-Western names. These aren’t accidents—they are reflections of who built the systems and what they trained them on.

Quantum computing is not immune. If the training data, assumptions, and hardware design ignore diversity, then the collapse of the wave function will favor some outcomes over others. Not by physics. By prejudice. By incompetence. By design.

What We Must Learn

Error correction is only as good as the system’s awareness. You can’t correct what you can’t detect.
Representation in design prevents systemic failure. The problem wasn’t that the sensors were broken—the problem was that no one thought to test them on everyone.
The universe doesn’t play favorites—but our tools might. In quantum mechanics, all states are equally valid until observed. In society, the observer too often decides what’s valid.

Conclusion: We Are the Observers

As we enter the quantum era, we must take responsibility for the systems we build. Not just their outputs, but their blind spots. A future where some are rendered invisible to the machine is not science fiction. It is already here.

Let us be better observers. Let us see what others refused to look for. Let us design with empathy—not as an after thought, but as a first principle. Belonging should be our initial condition.