Will Quantum Computers Change the World?

September 26, 2018 – Recent breakthroughs in Quantum Computing has the world buzzing and now something once thought unobtainable in our lifetime may only be a few years away. Since the breakthroughs, big tech companies such as Google, and IBM are now pouring money into the research and development of quantum computers. Quantum Computing is the next revolutionary breakthrough in science and will reportedly turn everything we know about computers on its head.

What is Quantum Computing?

It can get very complex, but here are the basics to Quatman Computers according to Richard Joza of the University of Cambridge: Quantum computing is based on the fact that, in the microscopic world, things don’t have to be as clear-cut as we’d expect from our macroscopic experience. Tiny particles, such as electrons or photons, can simultaneously take on states that we would normally deem mutually exclusive. They can be in several places at once, for example, and in the case of photons simultaneously exhibit two kinds of polarisation. We never see this superposition of different states in ordinary life because it somehow disappears once a system is observed: when you measure the location of an electron or the polarisation of a photon, all but one of the possible alternatives are eliminated and you will see just one. Nobody knows how that happens, but it does. Superposition frees us of from binary constraints. A quantum computer works with particles that can be in superposition. Rather than representing bits — such particles would represent qubits, which can take on the value 0, or 1, or both simultaneously. “If you do something to [such a quantum system], it’s as though you are doing it simultaneously to 0 and to 1,”

What does this mean for the general public?

In theory, the properties of qubits would allow a quantum computer to perform calculations at far higher speeds than current supercomputers. That makes them good tools for understanding what’s happening in the realms of chemistry, material science or particle physics. That speed could aid in discovering new drugs, optimising financial portfolios and finding better transportation routes or supply chains. It could also advance another fast-growing field, artificial intelligence, by accelerating a computer’s ability to find patterns in large troves of images and other data. So when we seen these futuristic movies with an insanely advanced societies, Quantum Computers would likely be at the base of that growth.

What are the concerns?

The biggest and most alarming issue about Quantum Computers is what it can do to secured networks and the cryptography world. Early speculations is that this new technology can be weaponized and used against countries military defenses on a massive scale. Because of that, there is an somewhat of an arms race to obtain quantum computation. China is pouring massive amounts of funding towards the technology, but the biggest breakthrough has come out of Australia from Professor Michelle Simmons from the University of New South Wales. She along with officials from NASA, The Pentagon, and staff from Google and IBM all recently attended a summit at the White House regarding the future of Quantum Computing. Because of it being likened to the Manhattan Project, global leaders have begun to open a dialogue and combine their efforts on the matter. The National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences in Hefei, Anhui Province, is being developed and slated to be completed by 2020.