Long read: Will quantum be bigger than AI?

“….quantum mechanics – a strange and partly theoretical branch of physics – is a fiendishly difficult concept to get your head around.

It involves tiny particles behaving in weird ways. And this odd activity has opened up the potential of a whole new world of scientific super power.

Its mind-boggling complexity is probably a factor in why quantum has ended up with a lower profile than tech’s current rockstar – artificial intelligence (AI).

This is despite a steady stream of recent big quantum announcements from tech giants like Microsoft and Google among others.

Broadly speaking, we tend to think about quantum more commonly in the form of hardware like sensors and computers, while AI is more software-based – it requires hardware to operate.

Put them together, and we might one day have a new form of technology that’s more powerful than anything we have ever created…”

This type of technology could be generating revenues of $100 bn in a decade’s time. There are a few hurdles to overcome though before quantum computing can be used commercially:

“Quantum and AI have one more thing in common – errors. While we are largely familiar now with the “hallucinations” of generative AI tools, quantum is plagued by a different kind of error.

These are caused because the state in which the particles have to operate is so fragile. The slightest change to the environment, including light and noise, can disrupt them.

It’s tricky to sustain such an environment. This week Elon Musk suggested on X that quantum computing would run best on the “permanently shadowed craters of the moon”.

Quantum computers don’t look anything like traditional machines. There is no design blueprint, but they are currently very big.

They exist in laboratories, and the most commonly adopted format seems to include a kind of jellyfish-inspired shape.

They require extremely cold temperatures and lasers. It’s not the sort of thing you’re likely to have in your home, let alone in your pocket.

They’re also a bit bling – researchers have found that using synthetic diamonds to create qubits, which are the building blocks of quantum computers, enables them to work much closer to room temperature…

These machines are all in their infancy right now, there are believed to be around 200 of them in the whole world (China however has not disclosed how many it has)”

So how can quantum computing disrupt the world in which we live in. Ms Kleinman first gives us a few constructive uses cases including:

“As with AI, there’s a lot of quantum research directed towards improving healthcare.

Quantum computers could one day be able to effortlessly churn through endless combinations of molecules to come up with new drugs and medications – a process that currently takes years and years using classical computers.

To give you an idea of that scale – in December 2024, Google unveiled a new quantum chip called Willow, which it claimed could take five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world’s fastest super computers 10 septillion years – or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years – to complete.

…this could pave the way for personalised medication, where instead of getting a standard prescription, you get a specific drug tailormade for your individual body, that’s most likely to work for you.”

And then Ms Kleinman gives us a nerve-shattering negative use case – in a world with quantum computing, we will not be able to anything secret or private:

“It is widely accepted that current forms of encryption – the way in which we store both personal data and official secrets – will one day be busted by quantum technology being able to churn through every single possible combination in record time, until the data becomes unscrambled.

Nations are known to be already stealing encrypted data from each other with a view to being able to decode it one day.

“It’s called harvest now, decrypt later,” says Prof Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert from Surrey University.

“The theory of how to break current forms of public key encryption await a truly operational quantum computer,” he adds.

“The threat is so high that it’s assumed everyone needs to introduce quantum-resistant encryption now.”

The moment a such a computer exists is sometimes referred to as Q-day. Estimates of when it might arrive vary, but Brian Hopkins at Forrester says it could be soon – around the year 2030.

Companies like Apple and the secure messaging platform Signal have already rolled out what they believe to be post-quantum encryption keys, but they cannot be applied retrospectively to current data encrypted in the traditional way.

And that’s already a problem. In October, Daniel Shiu, the former head of cryptographic design at GCHQ, the UK’s intelligence, security and cyber agency, told the Sunday Times it was “credible that almost all UK citizens will have had data compromised” in state-sponsored cyber attacks carried out by China – with that data stockpiled for a time when it can be decrypted and studied.”