As expensive as a plane flight: Looking at some claims that quantum computers won't work.
As expensive as a plane flight: Looking at some claims that quantum computers won't work.
8 comments
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Bruce Schneier has been saying for something like 25 years that technological advances always favor attackers over defenders.
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Well yeah, that's why red teaming is so much fun.
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"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.
8 comments