That was pretty interesting. I was expecting cost/benefit on adopting quantum computing, which I suspect isn’t going to be terribly useful to the everyday person soon. But it was refreshingly targeted on the Cybersecurity impacts, which are valid for the everyday person, already.
TL;DR - Quantum computing is great, if you’re the bad guy. For the rest of us, there’s a cost/value tradeoff in defending against quantum computing threats. People will tell us it’s too much hassle to upgrade our encryption, but it can be done with reasonable effort.
If quantum computers actually ever make significant progress to the point that they’re useful (big if) it would definitely be able to have positive benefits for the little guy. It is unlikely you will have a quantum chip in your smartphone (although, maybe it could happen if optical quantum chips ever make a significant breakthrough, but that’s even more unlikely), but you will still be able to access them cheaply over the cloud.
I mean, IBM spends billions of on its quantum computers and gives cloud access to anyone who wants to experiment with them completely free. That’s how I even first learned quantum computing, running algorithms on IBM’s cloud-based quantum computers. I’m sure if the demand picks up if they stop being experimental and actually become useful, they’ll probably start charging a fee, but the fact it is free now makes me suspect it will not be very much.
I think a comparison can be made with LLMs, such as with OpenAI. It takes billions to train those giant LLMs as well and can only be trained on extremely expensive computers, yet a single query costs less than a penny, and there are still free versions available. Expense for cloud access will likely always be incredibly cheap, it’s a great way to bring super expensive hardware to regular people.
That’s likely what the future of quantum computing will be for regular people, quantum computing through cloud access. Even if you never run software that can benefit from it, you may get benefits indirectly, such as, if someone uses a quantum computer to help improve medicine and you later need that medicine.
Even if you never run software that can benefit from it, you may get benefits indirectly, such as, if someone uses a quantum computer to help improve medicine and you later need that medicine.
Agreed absolutely.
They hard part to predict is whether there will ever be a quantum home device, since current home devices are already ludicrously powerfulv for typical uses. Maybe if we ever unlock true general purpose AI, some of that’ll need to run at home.
As I said, they will likely come to the home in form of cloud computing, which is how advanced AI comes to the home. You can run some AI models at home but they’re nowhere near as advanced as cloud-based services and so not as useful. I’m not sure why, if we ever have AGI, it would need to be run at home. It doesn’t need to be. It would be nice if it could be ran entirely at home, but that’s no necessity, just a convenience. Maybe your personal AGI robot who does all your chores for you only works when the WiFi is on. That would not prevent people from buying it, I mean, those Amazon Fire TVs are selling like hot cakes and they only work when the WiFi is on. There also already exists some AI products that require a constant internet connection.
It is kind of similar with quantum computing, there actually do exist consumer-end home quantum computers, such as Triangulum, but it only does 3 qubits, so it’s more of a toy than a genuinely useful computer. For useful tasks, it will all be cloud-based in all likelihood. The NMR technology Triangulum is based on, it’s not known to be scalable, so the only other possibility that quantum computers will make it to the home in a non-cloud based fashion would be optical quantum computing. There could be a breakthrough there, you can’t rule it out, but I wouldn’t keep my fingers crossed. If quantum computers become useful for regular people in the next few decades, I would bet it would be all through cloud-based services.
TL;DR - Quantum computing is great, if you’re the bad guy. For the rest of us, there’s a cost/value tradeoff in defending against quantum computing threats. People will tell us it’s too much hassle to upgrade our encryption, but it can be done with reasonable effort.
And a big point is, it is a technology that we have to develop anyway, since big targets like governments, military or big financial or economic companies would want to defend against anyway.
Bruce Schneier has been saying for something like 25 years that technological advances always favor attackers over defenders.
Well yeah, that’s why red teaming is so much fun.
“We’ll form a committee to devise an action plan to inventory current usage of cryptography to support future assessment of the steps needed to build a best-practices playbook for meeting the performance challenges of upgrading to post-quantum cryptography, with a target date after I retire.”
Reminds me of Futurama
I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation’s in.
