Quantum Computing and Journalistic Bias (Part 2)
In these series of articles I will be exploring articles on quantum computing from a variety of different sources, and showing how no one really knows the future, and to read everything you see with a grain of salt.
Please do read Martin Gile’s article (linked below) before you read this one, as this is a response and analysis to his work.
Giles, Martin. “Explainer: What Is Post-Quantum Cryptography?” MIT Technology Review, MIT Technology Review, www.technologyreview.com/s/613946/explainer-what-is-post-quantum-cryptography/.
New forms of quantum cryptography, MIT Technology Review, Opinion/News Analysis piece
It is important to note that the author Martin Giles has been mentioned multiple times in this discussion, and he can be seen arguing many different sides. Martin Giles is considered to be one of the most well informed and respected writers on quantum technology, as prior to becoming a journalist, he led a research and publishing at a venture capital firm focused on business technology, specifically relating to quantum computing. His opinions do change quite drastically over time, but even so, as this is such a new field, it is almost impossible to not change opinions on the subject as new scientific papers come out that often fundamentally change our understanding of quantum computing. In the above-mentioned article, Giles discusses quantum computing from the viewpoint of cryptography, deeply delving into the subject and elaborating how quantum computing will change the field. Giles takes a far more apocalyptic position in this article than he has in previous articles. He begins by explaining how modern cryptography works, pertaining to keys — very long computer hashes that are very easy to find, but very hard to crack with classical computers. Using quantum computing, Giles explains, would allow people to crack those codes far faster, hashing through every encryption possibility in only a few hours, something that would take classical computers years. Throughout the article, Giles refers to the term “Y2Q,”, which is what researchers reference as the year in which code breaking with quantum computers becomes viable, and the world’s security encryptions need to be updated. Y2Q is a reference to Y2K, in which the scientific community and a large amount of the population believed that all computing systems would break down, plunging the world into chaos. Almost everything important on the internet is now encrypted, but if Y2Q were ever to rain upon us, Giles argues, everything from cars to military hardware, to phones, to stock brokerages, could be hacked with ease.
Luckily, despite all of the fears surrounding Y2Q, there are advancements being made in creating quantum safe encryption. The first method that Giles explains, is to simply increase the size of the encryption key from 128 to 256 bits, which would square the number of possibilities, effectively rendering quantum machines to the exact same position that classical computers are in today. Another way, Giles explains, would be simply to create different encoding methods that would be inherently very difficult for quantum computers to crack. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology back in 2016 started to develop standards for post-quantum encryption. While they have narrowed down the initial post-quantum theoretical solutions greatly, it will not be until around 2022 before they can properly decide what the best encryption methods will be. An additional problem as Gilesas, Giles explains, lies in the fact that because so much nowadays is encrypted, to transfer all of that data from one encryption method to another will take a lot of time. Last time such a data transfer was done, a National Academies study found that “it took more than a decade to completely retire one widely deployed cryptographic approach that was shown to be flawed.” Thus, Giles takes the position that we need to slow the advancement of quantum computers as much as possible, because even if we predict that Y2Q is ten years down the line, we may already be too late to stop the arrival of a future in which encryption technology greatly lags behind the ability of quantum computing to crack its codes.
The intended audience for this article is most certainly broader than many other pieces of writing that have been cited, as this article is not only for scientist experts working in this field and quantum ‘infatuosos’. Looking at the time stamp on all of these articles, we see that as time goes on, and the field of quantum computing comes closer to a more realistic assessment of its strengths and limits, there is a very interesting trend. It seems that, as time goes by, the articles written on quantum computing are written for a wider and wider audience. In recent months, we have seen quantum computing even begin to be mentioned in politics with the US presidential candidate Andrew Yang evoking the threat of the creative destruction that may be caused by quantum computing to further the success of his political campaign. The purpose of this article was to warn people of the danger quantum computing poses to encryption of private data, and the importance of developing encryption standards that can properly withstand hackers using quantum computers. It is important to note, however, that Giles’s views are predicated upon the assumption that quantum computing will not only take shape in a way similar to what has been simulated, but also that quantum computing will relatively soon be at the level needed to execute quantum hacking in a predictable, targeted fashion. While Giles is most likely correct in assuming that quantum computing will take the predicted trajectory, a trajectory in line with the majority of scientific literature on the topic, his time-stamp specifying that quantum computing will become a global threat to cybersecurity within the next ten years does not carry much scientific backing. Scientists have yet to work around the problems that quantum entanglement poses in computing, and there is no telling if it will be solved in the next two years, or the next twenty. Nevertheless, the research that Giles’s argument is based on is as sound as can be asked for on an evolving topic such as quantum computing.
While many authors take a positive stance, many balance it out with a negative stance, mentioning the negative, and possibly world ending aspects of quantum computing. This is not the case with Giles’s article. Giles attempts almost entirely to convince readers that at the moment, quantum computing really does not mean much for humanity. Because of this, one might ask, is his truly a nuanced viewpoint, or is it just postponing worry about the inevitable, will it have the unintended effect of soothing the worries of people so much, that when the day comes that quantum computing changes the world, will people be caught with their guard down?
