Quantum technology is causing quite a stir the last couple of years in the scientific field. Most of us don’t really understand it, but don’t feel too bad, because scientists don’t really understand how much of it works either. We have been told if we use quantum computing we could create an breakable encryption and if we used quantum computing on present encryption, we could break any encryption. This is why it is so troubling for the United States that China has been able to send a quantum encrypted message to a satellite and that message is said to be unbreakable. It is hard for us to judge the state of quantum computing in the United States. We don’t know what secret projects there may be which are tapping into quantum computing and we also don’t know how far we have gotten.

A Professor from Calgary University in Canada who is also Quantum Optics group leader at the Russian Quantum Center said something that startled many of the other physicists. Until now we have been hearing how wonderful it would be to have quantum computers because they would be so much faster than the ones we have now. The professor stated it would be dangerous, because no encryption we have today can hide from it. I am sure one of the things the United States government is worrying about is all their encrypted projects. If it is true a quantum computer is invented, the United States would be entirely at risk along with any other powers. Think about this, how do you protect what we have secret from a break in with a quantum computer which can decode anything? It seems for the present the only way to do this is to take everything off line and then store it in places where very few people with only the highest access can see it. The race to a quantum computer might be more important than anything else which is going on right now.

Here is the irony about a quantum computing, it wouldn’t be much use to us right now is replacement for desktops if one is invented. I think we’ve all noticed computing has reached the stage where it is good enough for the average person. What do I mean by this? We now have the ability to use computers for all the needs of our everyday lives and for recreation. Most of them are fast enough to accomplish any of the tasks we would like to perform. Even if we had a computer which was a thousand times faster would it make much of a difference in our word processing or our trips to the social network? Probably not, it would be far more useful to the scientists and the military than it would be to us. We have become satisfied with using cell phones in place of our laptops and PCs. I wouldn’t look to the computer manufacturers to come out with a quantum computer for the home anytime soon, even if quantum computers were being used by government agencies.

Here is a scary thought, I think many of us have already heard about the two Google computers which contained artificial intelligence and began talking to each other in a language they had made up causing Google to shut them down. Can you imagine a powerful quantum computer being run by artificial intelligence and communicating with other powerful quantum computers in a language nobody understood? We have just realized this could actually happen. In a way, it reminds me of the movie “WarGames”, where a computer communicated with another computer and decided they should launch missiles at each other, of course everything turned out all right in the end of the movie. How could we be sure this wouldn’t happen if we gave artificial intelligence control of our computers everywhere? I used to think this was a crazy idea, the idea of artificial intelligence doing something which we didn’t understand, but now that I see it happened in real life I realize it has to go on the list of future dangers.

Another scientist stated quantum computing is both a tool of creation and destruction and he went on to say new breakthroughs sometimes allow both evil and good things to happen. That has always been the problem. Many things we discover or invent which seem to be incredibly good at the time may have a dark side which makes them extremely dangerous. When we invented the atom bomb we thought it was a good thing at the time, because it would end World War II without us losing more soldiers, if it worked. No one envisioned at the time there would be an arms race for nuclear weapons in the future. We should have known this, but we didn’t. Steam engines were thought to be revolutionary inventions and we welcomed them with open arms, but then we found out the hard way they could be very dangerous and there were many boiler explosions which took the lives of thousands of people. We thought the Internet was the greatest invention since apple pie and it certainly has its good points, but it has allowed all sorts of crime to take place and there are still no worldwide treaties to correct this.

Innovation moves at a much brisker pace than policy and this is one of the problems the world is facing. It seems there are gray areas with a lot of the inventions which come out and many of them are tied into computing or the Internet in some way or another. We have learned since our cars have become computer savvy we are put them at risk for hacking. The same is true with smart homes which access the Internet. What is going to happen when someday a rogue organization or a rogue country decides to either crash all the cars in a particular country at once or knock down all the commercial flights?

We have become a vulnerable society. We are vulnerable to attacks from computers, we are vulnerable to being attacked with nuclear weapons and we are vulnerable to automation destroying our jobs among other things. These are only a few of our vulnerabilities and there are plenty more. Is there any way future innovations can save us from these dangers? There is really no way to answer this question unless we can see into the future, but over the last sixty years or so things have just been getting worse as far as dangers go. Perhaps the answer is to colonize in space, maybe we could all get along a lot better out there, we seem to get along on the international space station and on many past spaceflights we have cooperated. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.