Quantum Computers will not destroy the digital information world (forever). They will make looking back more wondrous, scary, profitable.
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Q Day can be a Good Day
Secure messaging with digital computers has a deadline, they say.
Q Day.
Or, the next major solar flare. Take your pick.
I’ll stick to Q day.
This, however, is not a useful outlook because;
- Post Quantum Cryptography is a real thing.
- Governments and big banks are the most vulnerable. They won’t let that happen if they can stop it. Though I don’t like them very much rn, I too wouldn’t want mass panic and mad maxing.
Being useful at scale is the most important thing quantum computing needs to be.
Not being destructive at scale.
So let’s put aside the weapons-grade cracking of cryptographic safes, for tactical gain.
Let’s imagine how quantum computers will be the safe-crackers of then ancient encryption systems like RSA, for the benefit of humanity.
The Wonder of Breaking Ancient Encryption
Historical narratives form the fabric of a society’s culture.
To build richer historical narratives, it is important to look back and see which data banks are now accessible to us.
Many of the data banks of the past are encrypted behind systems like RSA. What if we could crack them and shed more light to our dark world?
The way we cracked Caesar Ciphers and shed more light on Ancient Rome.
That is the power we shall have when quantum computing becomes a major reality and no more a tiny, sub-atomic one.
It will be an adventure worthy of a modern pirate movie. With buried treasure, mean faced scientists, some who crack us up like Captain Jack Sparrow, and a sea of quantum uncertainty.
Yes, stakes will be high. No, it needn’t be a global disaster (contrary to most arguments on X. That place is a war zone. Of words).
The big truth of the recent past is hidden by big orgs
When Philip Zimmermann created PGP in 1991, he had no idea that with social media, people would freely give away tons of their data to big private corporations monitored by government agencies.
Give your data directly to governments?
No.
Give it to a big corp on the governments roll call and pay roll?
Yes.
So today, there are more secrets in the upper echelons of social organizations, than there are at the individual level.
So much data has been siphoned from the experiences of individuals and automated inside super computing complexes, that a term has emerged for the quasi-sentient systems that know us like never before.
The ‘Algorithms’.
This is why targeted advertising works so well today. And if computers ever figure out how to cheaply reproduce, Amazon and friends will get rich forever.
There will be an Amazon data centre on the moon. Trust that.
So the alogrithms know us – humans – so well, that people can even be helped by ChatGPT better than doctors. Meanwhile, we know so little about governments and the inner workings of deep state economics that; wars look staged, many policies are racial-targeted and not towards any grand projects for all, science is hype ( merged with big media to sensationalize us).
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Q Day will first be BAD
Encrypted documents of shady deals, ugly deeds and outright career ending revelations, is why people have caches of millions of encrypted messages.
Ready to quantum-crack them if and when Shor’s Algorithm gets the physical flesh needed to turn it into a truth revealing monster.
Like the one in Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls.
It will be a day of reckoning for those government or corporate agencies with too many skeletons in the closet.
They’ll likely not go down easy.
But confess they will.
But maybe our imaginations are running away with us.
Afterall, when USAID closed, no wild secret documents leaked.
Somebody took some money here and another some money there. Now that the Big Beautiful Bill is off the floor and in the Constitution, I hope some of it’s money helps build Uncle Shor’s Algorithmic Monster.
For the greater good.
If any big org data is too sensitive, it can be kept under wraps under wraps by loyal humans.
No need for fruitless further encryption. Because decorum.
If anybody hates it that much, they and their buddies should get into Power.
With a capital P.
The realest power is not having to encrypt shit.
Q Day will be a good day to make money
Now imagine an AI system built around Q day that reveals all the spicy details of abc and xyz. A sort of gossiping chatbot.
Global, cheeky, and unstoppable.
Telling you things that will raise your hair in horror, tickle your inner Punisher, or make you crack up in laughter.
That’s one Q Day usecase right there.
Because after the dirty laundry has been revealed, it only makes sense to profit from the gossip.
And like all gossip, that too will get old and society will realise, it needs to wash all that dirty laundry or throw it out.
Can’t put it back in the cupboard.
That would be silly.
Tiktok hasn’t rotted our brains that much.
