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( votes)Today’s artificial intelligence is as self-aware as a paper clip. Despite the hype—such as a Google engineer’s bizarre claim that his company’s AI system had “come to life” and Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tweet predicting that computers will have human intelligence by 2029—the technology still fails at simple everyday tasks. That includes driving vehicles, especially when confronted by unexpected circumstances that require even the tiniest shred of human intuition or thinking.
The sensationalism surrounding AI is not surprising, considering that Musk himself had warned that the technology could become humanity’s “biggest existential threat” if governments don’t regulate it. But whether or not computers ever attain human-like intelligence, the world has already summoned a different, equally destructive AI demon: Precisely because today’s AI is little more than a brute, unintelligent system for automating decisions using algorithms and other technologies that crunch superhuman amounts of data, its widespread use by governments and companies to surveil public spaces, monitor social media, create deepfakes, and unleash autonomous lethal weapons has become dangerous to humanity.
Compounding the danger is the lack of any AI regulation. Instead, unaccountable technology conglomerates, such as Google and Meta, have assumed the roles of judge and jury in all things AI. They are silencing dissenting voices, including their own engineers who warn of the dangers.
The world’s failure to rein in the demon of AI—or rather, the crude technologies masquerading as such—should serve to be a profound warning. There is an even more powerful emerging technology with the potential to wreak havoc, especially if it is combined with AI: quantum computing. We urgently need to understand this technology’s potential impact, regulate it, and prevent it from getting into the wrong hands before it is too late. The world must not repeat the mistakes it made by refusing to regulate AI.
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Although still in its infancy, quantum computing operates on a very different basis from today’s semiconductor-based computers. If the various projects being pursued around the world succeed, these machines will be immensely powerful, performing tasks in seconds that would take conventional computers millions of years to conduct.
Because of the technology’s immense power and revolutionary applications, quantum computing projects are likely part of defense and other government research already.
Semiconductors represent information as a series of 1s and 0s—that’s why we call it digital technology. Quantum computers, on the other hand, use a unit of computing called a qubit. A qubit can hold values of 1 and 0 simultaneously by incorporating a counterintuitive property in quantum physics called superposition. (If you find this confusing, you’re in good company—it can be hard to grasp even for experienced engineers.) Thus, two qubits could represent the sequences 1-0, 1-1, 0-1, and 0-0, all in parallel and all at the same instant. That allows a vast increase in computing power, which grows exponentially with each additional qubit.
If quantum physics leaves the experimental stage and makes it into everyday applications, it will find many uses and change many aspects of life. With their power to quickly crunch immense amounts of data that would overwhelm any of today’s systems, quantum computers could potentially enable better weather forecasting, financial analysis, logistics planning, space research, and drug discovery. Some actors will very likely use them for nefarious purposes, compromising bank records, private communications, and passwords on every digital computer in the world. Today’s cryptography encodes data in large combinations of numbers that are impossible to crack within a reasonable time using classic digital technology. But quantum computers—taking advantage of quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition, entanglement, and uncertainty—may potentially be able to try out combinations so rapidly that they could crack encryptions by brute force almost instantaneously.
To be clear, quantum computing is still in an embryonic stage—though where, exactly, we can only guess. Because of the technology’s immense potential power and revolutionary applications, quantum computing projects are likely part of defense and other government research already.
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