3 Ways Quantum Computing Will Change Our World

Quantum computing is set to take the world by storm, once it’s finally ready. Though that date seems to be changing every week, the fact is that it’s coming and these next-gen computers, which can do the work of classic machines at many times the speed, will alter certain aspects of our world beyond recognition.

3 Encryption

Quantum computing will likely have the biggest immediate impact on encryption, and anything that is encrypted—which is all data, pretty much. Thing is, no matter how good encryption is, in the end, if you have enough time, you will be able to decrypt it using brute-force methods. These boil down to attacking the cipher over and over until you figure out the code.

Since quantum computers have many times the computing power of even the most advanced regular machines, you can greatly speed up this process. This is something we discuss in detail in our article how encryption won’t protect your data forever. Where a regular supercomputer would need billions of years to crack most commercial ciphers, a quantum computer could do it in seconds.

Once quantum computers come online, this effectively means the end of privacy as we know it now, or at least secured with our current technologies. Your messaging history, your emails, any files you have in storage, will all be readable, as will any records of you kept by others, like insurance companies or even the government.

Many institutions have started quantum-proofing their encryption (a process that involves adding even more complicated math to already tricky computations), but the question remains if enough of them are doing it. There are also questions about how effective it will be. Even in the best case scenario, though, the way we store data and our assumptions about privacy are going to change.

2 Artificial Intelligence

Another area in which greater computing power is going to make a massive difference is artificial intelligence. Where large-language models like ChatGPT struggle now is in computing power: your standard LLM is given a pool of information and then combs through it, finding the information it needs to meet a user’s query.

With quantum computing, this process would be sped up immensely, allowing LLMs to more quickly make connections, as well as more of them. While it still would be limited by the size of the pool of data it has at its disposal, what it could do with it would expand massively, bringing us into uncharted territory.

More uncharted territory can be found in the other part of AI research, the development of AGI—Artificial General Intelligence. This is a computer that could think at the level of a human, or even better. Quantum computers are so powerful that this may become something that is actually possible and allow us to live in a sci-fi future even in this century.

1 Combating Climate Change

Quantum computing may also help us figure out another major challenge facing us, namely the ever more acute climate change crisis. The weather system of our planet is complex and unpredictable at the best of times, with all our models working only some of the time, at best. Even the smallest change can have a knock-on effect that may make a model next to useless.

With the changes in weather patterns we’ve seen the past few years, these already limited models have been pushed to their limit. There’s just too much data to take into account for our current computers to create good long-range predictions—science magazine Eos ​​​​​​​has more detail on the problem.

Quantum computers, though, could be up to the task. Putting more raw computing into the task may allow us to not only get a better handle on what’s happening now, but also discover ways in which we could hope to improve the situation. Smarter modeling would definitely help us avoid making the situation any worse, for sure.

Quantum computing is set to change the world in many ways, some of which we can barely fathom. These three fields, though, will likely not only see rapid change, but may radically alter the way we live. In the end, though, only time will tell what quantum computing’s impact will be. At least we’ll still be able to play Doom.