You can’t imagine something like that. Just when we can breathe a sigh of relief because we seem to have overcome the Corona crisis, the “quantum apocalypse” pulls us back into new fears for life on earth – like Al Pacino in “The Godfather” who tries to solve his criminal Escape the past but get sucked back in.

However, this is not a Hollywood film. It’s a real thing. And just like environmentalists’ predictions of the end of the world, the “quantum apocalypse” is presented as a real, existential threat to life as we know it. So what is this”Quantum Apocalypse“? To put it simply, it’s the vision of a world where encrypted, secret files can suddenly be cracked by quantum computers.

It is important to understand that quantum computers are not just “more powerful supercomputers”. They represent a new paradigm in data processing. They use the properties of quantum mechanics to calculate in a fundamentally different way than today’s digital, “classical” computers. Instead of the traditional bits, which consist of ones and zeros, they use so-called quantum bits (or qubits), which can represent several different values ??at the same time. Their complexity could make quantum computers much faster at certain tasks and allow them to solve problems that are virtually unsolvable for modern conventional computers in finite time – including cracking many of the encryption algorithms currently used to protect sensitive data such as personal, business and government secrets are used.

At the moment, however, these possibilities are still rather theoretical. But that doesn’t mean it’s pure speculation. Several countries, including the US, China, Russia and the UK, are working hard to develop these super-fast quantum computers, investing huge sums of money to give themselves a strategic advantage in the cybersphere. Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Intel and IBM are working on solutions, as are young, specialized companies like Quantinuum and Post-Quantum.

In reality, quantum computing is extremely difficult to achieve. Last year, Google boasted that it had already achieved “quantum supremacy” by finding a problem a quantum computer could solve that was virtually impossible for a classical computer to solve. The company announced that its 53-qubit Sycamore quantum computer solved a math problem in 200 seconds that would have taken a classical computer 10,000 years.

The new “fear entrepreneurs”

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, compared this with the launch of Sputnik or the first flight of the Wright brothers as the beginning of a new era of machines that would make today’s most powerful computer look like an abacus. Although this was an important milestone, it is far from the beginning of a new era in quantum computing. Experts from industry and science criticized this For different reasons.

In reality, we are at least a decade or more away from a quantum computer capable of solving important real-world problems. However, that doesn’t mean there’s no reason to announce a new existential threat to life on Earth in the here and now. But that’s where the new “fear entrepreneurs” like Harri Owen, chief strategy officer come in post-quantumand Ilyas Khan, Managing Director of the Cambridge and Colorado based Honeywellsubsidiary Quantinuum comes into play. They fear that quantum computing will render most existing encryption methods useless. Anyone who develops such a capability will immediately be able to cripple a government’s defenses and gain access to private and banking information. like Khan puts itthey are “a threat to our way of life”.

If such a scenario occurred, if the current fear of data hacking and The strategy If “harvest now and decode later” became a reality, it would indeed be a threat to our way of life. However, this is unlikely for a number of reasons. Not only because quantum computing is complicated and enormously expensive and is still decades away from being feasible. It’s also unclear why collecting data that can’t be decrypted for 30 years is such a big risk today.

The real point, however, is that governments are nonetheless keenly aware of this potential risk. Efforts to reduce risk have been underway for a number of years. In the USA, for example, since 2016 – advertised by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) – a competition with the goal of developing the first algorithms safe from quantum computers by 2024. In the United Kingdom, all government data classified as “top secret” is already “post-quantum” encrypted, using new forms of encryption that researchers hope will be safe from quantum computing. The National Cyber ??Security Centerwhich leads this research, also advises governments and businesses on their long-term encryption and security needs.

This is an important antidote to the fatalism peddled by the “quantum apocalypse” fearmongers. The overhaul and modernization of computer systems are technical problems that can be solved by mankind. The doomsday scenario, on the other hand, is reminiscent of the exaggerations with the “Millennium Bug”, which at the beginning of the new century was considered the harbinger of a great catastrophe, which proved to be manageable. The scale of this large, internationally coordinated effort and the massive expenditure of billions of dollars to address a potential technology-driven crisis was unprecedented. However, the precedent it set was the spread of the culture and politics of fear that we now accept as inevitable.

The “quantum apocalypse” is the latest fear, serving to fuel the fatalism that now dominates the public imagination. This fear is the real threat to our way of life, not some theoretical possibility supposedly beyond human control or action. The real danger is that we succumb to the selfish fatalism that is supposed to justify such exaggerated threats in the future. That would prevent us from realizing what a remarkable thing quantum computing will be for humankind and what a boost it can provide to our problem-solving capacities in the 21st century.

Norman Lewis is a writer, speaker, and consultant on innovation and technology. Most recently, he was a Director at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, where he built and led the Crowdsourced Innovation Service.