Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything

by Michio Kaku

NIST has already announced they expect that by 2029 quantum computers will be able to break 128-bit AES encryption, the code used by many companies.

To refute the last statement, Einstein would say, “God does not play dice with the universe.” But according to legend, Niels Bohr fired back, “Stop telling God what to do.”

First, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which sets technical standards for the U.S. government, issued a statement about quantum computers, saying that the real threat from quantum computers is still years away. But the time to start thinking about them is here and now. In the future, it might be too late to retool an entire industry on a moment’s notice once quantum computers start cracking your codes.

Soon after Google made its claim of achieving quantum supremacy, the Chinese announced that they broke an even larger barrier, performing a calculation in 200 seconds that would take a digital computer half a billion years.

But photonic computers have one serious drawback: they are an ungainly collection of mirrors and beam splitters that can easily fill up a large space. For each problem, you have to rearrange the complex collection of mirrors and beam splitter into a different position. It is not an all-purpose machine that you can program to perform instant calculations. After each calculation, you have to tear it down and rearrange the components precisely, which is time-consuming.

But the great advantage of the photonic computer, which may eventually outweigh other factors, is that it can operate at room temperature.

It did this without ever producing a prototype or demonstration project showing that it actually works. The big advantage of silicon photonic computers would be that they can use the tried-and-true methods perfected by the semiconductor industry.

In summary, there is intense competition among corporations and even governments to get a head start on this new technology. The rate of progress in this field has been astounding. Every major computer company has their own quantum computer program. Prototypes are already proving their worth and are even being sold on the marketplace. But the next big challenge is for quantum computers to solve real-world practical problems that can alter the trajectory of entire industries.

One theory is that this journey of the exciton is made possible by path integrals, which we saw earlier were introduced by Richard Feynman. We recall that Feynman rewrote the laws of the quantum theory in terms of paths. When an electron moves from one point or another, it somehow sniffs out all possible paths between these two points. Then it calculates a probability for each route. Hence, the electron is somehow “aware” of all possible paths connecting these points. This means that the electron “chooses” the path with the most efficiency. There is also a second mystery here. The process of photosynthesis happens at room temperature, where random motions of atoms in the environment should destroy any coherence among the excitons. Normally, quantum computers have to be cooled down to near absolute zero in order to minimize these chaotic motions, yet plants function perfectly well at normal temperatures.

While incremental improvements are being made to the lithium-ion battery, the basic strategy introduced 200 years ago by Volta is still with us. The hope is that quantum computers may enable scientists to systematize this process, making it cheaper and more efficient, so that millions of experiments may be conducted virtually.

One method for tracking epidemics is to put sensors in sewer systems around the world. Viruses can easily be identified by analyzing the sewage, especially around crowded urban areas. Rapid antigen tests can spot the outbreak of a virus within about fifteen minutes. However, the data emerging from millions of sewer systems can easily overwhelm digital computers. But quantum computers excel at analyzing mountains of data to find that missing needle in the haystack.

In the future, even the toilet in your bathroom may be sensitive enough to detect the signs of cancer cells, enzymes, and genes circulating in your bodily fluids, so that cancer becomes no more lethal than the common cold. Every time you go to the bathroom, you might be unwittingly tested for cancer. The “smart toilet” might be our first line of defense.

Digital computers are incapable of reproducing the complex sequence of events that must be played out at the molecular level in order for the immune system to work properly. But quantum computers may be powerful enough to unravel, molecule for molecule, how the immune system does its magic.

But in the future, we may treat cancer like the common cold, as a preventable nuisance.

Historians began to write that we were on the verge of fulfilling an ancient dream. The Greek god Hephaestus created a fleet of robots to do chores around his castle. Pandora, who opened a magic box and unknowingly unleashed disaster upon the human race, was actually a robot built by Hephaestus.

But then “AI winter” set in. In spite of all the breathless press releases, AI had been oversold to the media, and dark clouds of pessimism set in. Scientists began to realize that their AI devices were one-trick ponies. They could only do one simple task each.

But AI and quantum computers complement each other. AI has the ability to learn new, complex tasks, and quantum computers can provide the computational muscle it needs. A quantum computer may have formidable power, but it does not necessarily learn from its mistakes. But a quantum computer equipped with neural networks will be able to improve its calculations with each iteration, so it can solve problems faster and more efficiently by finding new solutions.

Evolution has created a treasure trove of proteins by purely random interactions to carry out various tasks. However, it took billions of years to do this. Using the memory of a quantum computer as a “virtual laboratory,” it should be possible to improve on evolution and design new proteins to improve their function in the body.

But there is a loophole in the Second Law. The fact that everything must decay only applies to a closed system. But in an open system, where energy can flow in from the external world, the increase of chaos can be reversed.

Since we will probably have another ice age in 10,000 years or so, it means that the rise of human civilization accidentally took place because we entered an interglacial period between two ice ages.

The joke is: every twenty years, physicists claim that fusion power is just another twenty years in the future.

However, with the arrival of quantum computers, many scientists hope that some of the stubborn glitches preventing the production of fusion power may be solved, paving the way to make fusion reactors a practical and economic reality.

So AI and quantum computers can work hand in hand to increase the efficiency of fusion reactors, which in turn may energize the future and help reduce global warming.

Did God have a choice in making the universe? Einstein considered this to be one of the most profound and revealing questions one can possibly ask. Could God have created the universe in any other way?

When Einstein was stuck on a problem, he would often say, “God is subtle, but not malicious.” But when he had to face the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, sometimes Einstein would think, “Maybe God is malicious after all.”