A new generation of fear entrepreneurs in the IT industry are promoting anxieties and fatalism about the threat quantum computing poses to the future of encrypted data, cyber-security and our way of life.
You can’t make this stuff up. Just when we can breathe a sigh of relief as we appear to have overcome the Covid pandemic, ‘the quantum apocalypse’ draws us back into new anxiety about life on Earth – just like Al Pacino in ‘The Godfather’ trying to escape his criminal past, but being pulled back in.
However, this is not a Hollywood movie. It is a real thing. And just like the doomsday predictions of environmentalists, ‘the quantum apocalypse’ is being presented as a real existential threat to life as we know it.
So, what is this ‘quantum apocalypse’? Well, to put it simply, it is the imagined outcome of a world where encrypted, secret files are suddenly cracked open by quantum computers.
It is essential to understand that quantum computers are not just ‘more powerful supercomputers’. They represent a new paradigm in computing. They use properties of quantum mechanics to compute in a fundamentally different way to today’s digital, ‘classical’ computers. Instead of the traditional bits made of ones and zeros, they use quantum bits that can represent different values simultaneously. The complexity of quantum computers could make them much faster at certain tasks, allowing them to solve problems that remain practically impossible for modern machines – including breaking many of the encryption algorithms currently used to protect sensitive data such as personal, trade and state secrets.
At this point, these possibilities remain theoretical. But that does not mean that this is pure speculation. Several countries, including the US, China, Russia and the UK, are working hard and investing vast sums of money in developing these super-fast quantum computers to gain a strategic advantage in the cyber-sphere. Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Intel, and IBM are working on solutions, along with more specialised companies like Quantinuum and Post-Quantum.
In reality, quantum computing is extremely difficult to achieve. Last year, Google famously boasted it had achieved “quantum supremacy” by finding a task a quantum computer could do that was essentially impossible for a classical computer. The company announced that it had used its 53-bit quantum computer Sycamore to solve a maths problem in 200 seconds that would take a classical computer 10,000 years.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, compared it to the launch of Sputnik or the first flight by the Wright brothers – the threshold of a new era of machines that would make today’s mightiest computer look like an abacus. While this was an important milestone, it is far from ushering in a new era of quantum computing. Experts from industry and academia were quick to criticise it for various reasons.