One day soon, at a research lab near Santa Barbara or Seattle or a secret facility in the Chinese mountains, it will begin: the sudden unlocking of the world\u2019s secrets. Your secrets.<\/p>\n
Cybersecurity analysts call this Q-Day\u2014the day someone builds a quantum computer<\/a> that can crack the most widely used forms of encryption. These math problems have kept humanity\u2019s intimate data safe for decades, but on Q-Day, everything could become vulnerable, for everyone: emails, text messages, anonymous posts, location histories, bitcoin wallets, police reports, hospital records, power stations, the entire global financial system.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re kind of playing Russian roulette,\u201d says Michele Mosca, who coauthored the most recent \u201cQuantum Threat Timeline\u201d report from the Global Risk Institute<\/a>, which estimates how long we have left. \u201cYou\u2019ll probably win if you only play once, but it\u2019s not a good game to play.\u201d When Mosca and his colleagues surveyed cybersecurity experts last year, the forecast was sobering: a one-in-three chance that Q-Day happens before 2035. And the chances it has already happened in secret? Some people I spoke to estimated 15 percent\u2014about the same as you\u2019d get from one spin of the revolver cylinder.<\/p>\n The corporate AI wars may have stolen headlines in recent years, but the quantum arms race has been heating up too. Where today\u2019s AI pushes the limits of classical computing\u2014the kind that runs on 0s and 1s\u2014quantum technology represents an altogether different form of computing<\/a>. By harnessing the spooky mechanics of the subatomic world, it can run on 0s, 1s, or anything in between. This makes quantum computers pretty terrible at, say, storing data but potentially very good at, say, finding the recipe for a futuristic new material (or your email password). The classical machine is doomed to a life of stepwise calculation: Try one set of ingredients, fail, scrap everything, try again. But quantum computers can explore many potential recipes simultaneously.<\/p>\n