If you ask your teachers, parents, or grandparents about technology, they’d probably tell you that when they were younger they didn’t believe that computers could ever do the things we find so simple today—calling someone and being able to see their face, being able to play whatever music we want, or having a tool as powerful as Google in your pocket. Such explosive change has happened in such little time, but technological innovations haven’t slowed down since then. In fact, it keeps getting faster. It’s crazy to think just how far technology has come. For those born in the digital age, we see computers, phones, and more as just regular household items, and so we often take what they can do for granted. We see all this as normal, but just like the generation before us, we often have this idea that things will always stay just like this. But things are changing, and they’re changing fast.
Only a few years ago the idea of computers that used quantum physics was something out of science fiction, something that could only be possible in a few decades, and yet now, slowly, quantum computers are becoming a reality. But for all the good this would bring, no revolutionary invention comes without a price. So before we head to the future, let’s take a quick journey into the computers of the past.
Computers have changed so much in such little time, and now as we face the introduction of quantum computers we are also faced with a challenge. We don’t normally think much of it, but the process of protecting our data from hackers when we send it through the internet is very complicated. We often think of hacking as this extraordinary skill, but it’s really just decrypting encrypted data. Our computers have a built-in system that encrypts the messages we send to people. Basically, our computers scramble the message into something unreadable then send the message to the people we want. The computers of the recipients then decode the message through a certain digital “key” we give them. However, decoding the message, even with the key, isn’t a simple task. The encryption doesn’t just have a one-to-one relationship with the message, as the computer uses several mathematical theories to encrypt the message. The “key” is more like an instruction on where the computer can start solving and decoding the message. There are actually two keys – a public key and a private key. The public key is given to everyone, while the private key is only given to the people whom you want to see the message. If you think of the keys as more like instructions, the public key gives very vague instructions that don’t really help at all, while the private key gives much more specific instructions with information that the computer can use to solve the encryption quickly. All of this works because even with our powerful computers, decrypting a message through brute force without those starting instructions would take far too long, and there’s simply too much for our current computers to compute. However, that’s not the case for quantum computers.
Regular computers work with something we call bits, the ones and zeroes that we so commonly see when talking about computers. These bits can only be either one or zero and through this, the computer is able to read and process information. However, on a quantum level, particles aren’t just in one state, they can be in two different states at once. Qubits are the quantum computer equivalent of bits, and they can be both one and zero at the same time. This small change makes it so that every qubit increases the computing power exponentially instead of just linearly, making quantum computers far more powerful. While it’s true we can’t fully utilize this yet due to the fact that when we observe the particles on a quantum level they stay in one state, scientists have still found ways to make quantum computers work in certain tasks, and one of those tasks happens to break the most common of our modern security systems. Because quantum computers are so powerful, they can easily brute force their way through our encryptions, and anyone who can do this will have the power to hack into pretty much anything with little effort.
So should we be worried? Well, not really. The fact that we know about this means that the experts are all aware of it and there are many people working behind the scenes to solve this issue. The world hasn’t quite finished developing quantum computers, so there’s still much time for them to find solutions. While we don’t see much of it, the world is large and there are many things happening behind the scenes that the average person doesn’t know about that keep the world working. So yes, it can be scary to know how powerful quantum computers are and what we might be able to do with them, but at the end of the day, they are just another piece of technology. People of the past have thought that the innovations of their age would create chaos and massive issues as well, and yet here we are. We just have to learn to adapt and use them properly. If we do, then quantum computers, and all other new technology, will make our lives better, not worse.
Quantum computers are far stronger than any computer today, bringing with it a lot of new possibilities. We could use them to advance our progress even further, with their immense computing power allowing us to discover new things about our universe and create new inventions at an even quicker rate. Eventually, just like with the computers we have today, it will be available to everyone, and perhaps we’ll be able to enjoy things we can’t even imagine to be possible today. However, as with all other technology, when used for harm, it can pose a serious problem. Data privacy concerns are only the beginning, and as we slowly discover more about quantum computers we may learn of even graver dangers. But despite these potential dangers, at the end of the day, technology is just a tool we must learn how to use. Quantum computers bring with them new problems to solve, but they also bring us new solutions. Instead of being afraid of the future, let’s embrace it and try to adapt to these cutting-edge technologies the best we can.