The Quantum Computing Race Is Too Important to Lose

L ast month, IBM announced a 127-qubit quantum processor. While it is still an incredibly infant computer with near-zero practical applications, the fact that it exists is a testament to human achievement and a signal that more and more powerful computers are to come. Quantum computing is shaping up to be the next stage of computer development. However, it is not currently obvious that the U.S. will dominate this next stage. As in many other fields, China is nipping at our heels. If it triumphs, the future could look very different — and much worse.

To understand the state of play, it is first necessary to understand what quantum computers are.

Though their name may sound fast, they are not necessarily faster at computing. Rather, by employing quantum physics, they unlock unique ways to solve problems that would not otherwise be possible. Some really smart people figured out that the fundamental laws of physics break down and work differently at an incredibly small scale. The scale of quantum. Then, some other really smart people figured out that algorithms can be written for quantum computers that physically are impossible to compute on a traditional computer. Algorithms that have real, practical applications. Algorithms that have the potential to launch science and engineering decades into the future or tear down the Internet and global financial system. And this disruptive technology isn’t science fiction — some fledgling quantum computers have already been built.

Let’s start with the good. A popular example of quantum computing is its potential impact on weather forecasting. A powerful enough quantum computer could simulate the climate down to each individual water droplet for the entire globe. This is an unfathomable amount of information for a regular computer to process.

On the negative side, quantum computers don’t merely break our current security faster than the supercomputers we have today. They make our current way of encrypting data completely useless.

When using Wi-Fi and cellular communications, the signal travels through the air in radio-frequency waves, allowing anyone to observe it. Texts, Facebook posts, and banking logins could be picked up as easily as tuning a car radio to the right channel. But don’t fret! This tactic, called “traffic sniffing,” does not glean much information because the data is encrypted.

Encryption is symbolized by the lock symbol in the URL box at the top of your webpage. Without the lock symbol, anyone in the vicinity could read the traffic. With it, malicious actors would only see garbled junk. This encryption is incredibly robust to computer attacks. A supercomputer would need roughly the lifetime of the universe to decipher the encryption used for ordinary web traffic. A quantum computer, though, could decrypt the traffic instantaneously.

Fifth-graders and our current supercomputers have at least one thing in common: They find factoring large numbers difficult. For that reason, factoring is the basis of modern “public-private key” encryption. However, through a little proof called Schor’s algorithm, the properties of quantum mechanics allow factoring in an instant. This is unfortunate because “public-private key” cryptography has one extremely useful property: No information needs to be shared beforehand between the parties.

In the web-traffic example above, a computer does not need to be hard-coded with any knowledge of Facebook to securely connect to the website. They can be complete strangers. All of the implementations of “public-private key” cryptography are broken by quantum computers.

A number of other encryption schemes exist, but they all require some sort of shared secret key. This is usually through a password shared beforehand — which quickly turns the encryption into a chicken-and-egg scenario. How can one securely share the password to establish a secure way to communicate without a secure channel to send the password through in the first place? The best minds at MIT tried a method, but it still requires a password exchange in the first place.

Public-private key cryptography is entrenched in society. Ordinary websites, as mentioned above, generally rely on it. A phone’s connection to the network — which is established tens to hundreds of times a minute even when your phone is asleep in your pocket — is also protected in this manner. Likewise, a quantum computer could send everyone who types in “google.com” to another website instead since the Domain Name System, which assigns URLs to websites, is protected by public-private key cryptography as well. Access to a cryptocurrency wallet is protected by public-private key cryptography, too. It is just too darn useful.

Thankfully, powerful enough quantum computers to break cryptography are likely a ways off.

This timeline could be ten, 50, or 400 years into the future. Yet for some information, maintaining confidentiality decades into the future is imperative. A Social Security number lasts a lifetime. Business intellectual property could be relevant for decades to come. Governments want confidential information to remain confidential. Information that safely transits the Internet today could be watched, stored, and kept for the future. Therefore, securing ourselves against quantum computers is not a problem for the future but for the present. To varying degrees, work is being done today. But is it fast enough?

On the cutting edge of technology, it is hard to tell. The breakthrough will certainly be at the places where money and research are being poured in. In 2019, a joint Google/NASA venture claiming “quantum supremacy” was published in Nature. It claimed that their 53-qubit quantum processor could solve a problem in 200 seconds that would take today’s supercomputers 10,000 years.

Before becoming too excited, flash back to the start of this article. The problem chosen was very specific and hard for normal computers to solve. Quantum computers are good at specific types of problems.

If we don’t want to get outpaced in this critical future technology, we need to step up our quantum game. Quantumcomputingreport.com lists 30 public companies and 233 private companies working on quantum computing. The United States is not the only player in the field, however. Chinese companies such as Alibaba and Baidu are at the top of the list. A study released by Querca in July 2021 lists China ahead of the United States in funding, committing $10 billion vs. $1.2 billion. Their global estimate is $24.4 billion, which means China is currently doing 41 percent of the world’s quantum computer spending and the U.S. is only doing 5 percent.

As with all new technology, quantum computing holds much promise for the future — and some peril. To ensure that the world maximizes the former and minimizes the latter, it is imperative that the U.S. lead the way, as it has for most of the world’s technological development over the past few decades. We’ve by no means been perfect at ensuring progress and minimizing its costs.  But our country is founded in ideals of freedom and justice. It is important that the wielder of such a powerful technology be such.

Both private and — within reason — public sectors should support U.S. efforts in the quantum-computing field. This race is too important to lose.