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posted ago by Narg ago by Narg +49 / -0

It seems likely that AI will accelerate the timeline for large-scale Quantum computing, meaning it could be happening any time now.

https://gizmodo.com/how-should-we-prepare-for-the-looming-quantum-encryption-apocalypse-2000744543

Two sample comments:

First, an issue that makes the idea of wiping your cloud and social media data soon worth considering:

Bill Fefferman

Theoretical computer scientist at the University of Chicago.

. . . we need to counter the threat of “harvest now and decrypt later” attacks. The idea is that attackers can download and store encrypted information that is widely available online. This data will not be accessible to them today but will be when large-scale quantum computers arrive that can break the encryption.

And HERE's a possibility that would eliminate the threat entirely via a law of nature:

Tim Palmer

Theoretical physicist at Oxford University who devised the alternative model Rational Quantum Mechanics (RaQM).

The ability to break RSA encryption assumes that the quantum advantage of Shor’s algorithm will continue on computers with thousands of (error-corrected) qubits. This in turn assumes quantum mechanics itself holds at these scales. I believe it doesn’t.

. . . in particular, when more than a few hundred qubits are entangled, there is not enough information in the quantum wavefunction to allocate even one bit of information to each Hilbert Space dimension. When this happens, the quantum advantage of Shor’s algorithm will saturate and cannot be improved by entangling more qubits.

So the reason I am excited by the Google announcement is because it will hasten the day that quantum mechanics may be shown, experimentally, to fail. If this happens, I will have a much simpler theory to take its place—one where the mysteries of quantum mechanics are explained by simple number theory.