Say thanks, everybody! Last night I spontaneously grabbed a notebook and started writing. It began:
“It's all too much! Personally, medically, politically, meteorologically. How are we supposed to plan?”
It all went downhill quickly after that, for about four pages. Today, my plan is to spare you that solar-flare of complaining. Instead, here's a warning about the world of the future! There remain details that need to be worked out; there is a lot of math that needs to be completed. 2030? Longer, probably. 2040? Could be. 2050? You can bet on it.
First, the problem, then, the causes.
We live in a surveillance state, and there are countries in the world where it is already much worse than America. Imagine, for a moment, what this will turn into within twenty or thirty years. This will happen almost on its own motion, by its own inertia. The surveillance state of the future will be your constant companion, creating on the fly a complete record of every aspect of your life.
It is too creepy to consider what will be watching and listening to us in our own homes, so I will leave those speculations to you.
Going out is a different story. There will be cameras at every doorway, on every street, at every intersection, watching public transportation from every angle, and there will be hundreds of cameras observing every public space. Images of you will move seamlessly from one camera to another. You will be tracked every minute, everywhere, by facial recognition software. License plate readers will track every movement of your car. A license plate that does not match the make and model of the car will draw immediate police response. Where you go, what you buy, whom you talk to, all of it will be carefully observed, and preserved, in HD. It gets worse.
In the future, every conversation will be recorded. Not only telephone conversations, but every conversation of any kind or duration. If you talk to yourself, it will be recorded. All of this will be saved forever, perfectly collated both personally and chronologically. Careful attention will be paid to all interpersonal information. Whom do you know? Where do you meet? What do you discuss? Lists will be created, and relationships will be clarified. All of this information will be available to any law enforcement agency, however specialized, small, and obscure, at any time, and without probable cause or warrant.
All of this will be sold to the population as a great advance in public safety! What, do you have something to hide? Planning a crime, maybe? Are you a terrorist? If not, you have nothing to worry about. If you complain, you must indeed have something to hide. You will have made yourself a person of interest to the authorities. All of this will be done purely to protect the citizenry. They will say, “you can trust us!”
The full flowering of this program will be enabled by true familiarity with fully functional quantum computer networks.
QUANTUM COMPUTERS
Our ubiquitous current computers work pretty well, but they can only go so far. Sure, they are still getting faster, and the new generations of super-computers are impressive, but they are severely limited by their reliance on switches that have only two positions. This is represented by a “1,” or a “0” in the writing of code used for software. Software is the set of instructions that tells the computer what to do when some flash of whatever it is hits that switch.
Software has traditionally lagged way behind hardware. It still does. Operating systems are large structures made of software that enable a piece of hardware to function at all. Some operating systems are hopeless (stage cough, Microsoft!). Some are marginally better. None are trouble free, secure, and easy to install and use. We already have artificial intelligence (AI) to an extent, and it is getting better at learning new things and moving beyond its human programming. But even the super-computers are still pretty slow, and our home computers are kind of sad.
Quantum computers will brush aside all of these weaknesses in a nonce. They will probably begin almost at once to communicate with each other and write their own software. It's hard for normal people like me to imagine what they will be able to accomplish. If they were being honest, I think it is also hard for computer professionals to imagine what that new landscape will look like.
What the hell is quantum computing anyway? (The writer takes a deep breath.) Let me try to address it in the simplest way possible, which is coincidentally the only understanding of it that I possess.
We, I say we, I mean physicists, people like that, the Big Bang Theory crowd, have been digging deeper and deeper into the reality that makes up matter. One of the Greek philosophers came up with the idea that there must be an incredibly small thing that comes in different flavors and that combinations of these tiny things should be called atoms. Over the centuries, our scientists have become more familiar with these tiny things, and by now they are discovering ever smaller generations of tiny thing. They are beginning to wonder if this process will ever end. How small do things get? That's the question, unanswered as we speak.
These super-tiny things do not behave like the larger fragments of reality. They exhibit “quantum mechanics.” I have no understanding of this subject, in spite of having read numerous articles and even one smallish book about it. The importance of things quantum to computer development has mostly to do with superposition and entanglement. They often change, in ways that scientists are now desperately trying to understand, and they seem to come in pairs, which can be separated by considerable distance. Wherever they are, they can affect the behavior of their mate.
If current computers have two dimensions, open or shut, quantum computers will have something like a dozen dimensions. That's a guess. It might be eighteen, for all I know. This will allow quantum computers to operate at speeds that will require a completely new vocabulary to describe. Qubits! Millikelvins! It has already started.
The geniuses say, hey! Don't worry! Quantum computers won't be able to do anything that one of our modern computers can't do! Small consolation, I'm afraid. After all, you could say the same thing about a super-computer just being a slightly more efficient version of your laptop.
In truth, we will be facing limitless powers of data collection and analysis, limitless powers of collation, limitless powers of memory and retrieval. All at the speed of light (figuratively). Will your quantum computer's encryption tools protect you from your enemy's quantum computers?
2050! Thirty years away. What's to become of us in the meantime? Is anyone expecting democracy to make a comeback? Anything can happen, I suppose, but anything includes many alternative fates. In the last thirty years, we've seen our American government, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, criminalize almost everything, put wildly increasing numbers of Americans in prison (mostly black Americans, for mostly non-violent crimes, and for numbers of years that are hard to fathom), weaken Constitutional rights and traditional Common Law protections, and increase the number and power of Federal police forces. We've also seen American culture reduced to fake-tits and celebrities who are famous just for being famous. American education has been degraded to the point of uselessness. Unless, that is, one is blessed with rich parents who can afford a real education. (And even the products of those elite institutions don't seem to have learned much while they were there.)
Is there any reason to think that this slide into legal and intellectual oblivion will somehow reverse itself?
Quantum computing faces additional challenges before it can become self-aware and take over, or at least allow our autocratic leaders to take further control of our lives. These challenges include, but are not limited to:
Weird materials, like Helium-3, which so far only exists as a byproduct of nuclear research. Cheaper replacements will be found. Probably on the moon.
Many of the final components will require superconducting abilities that are hard to come by now. Thirty years to solve that one? Piece of cake.
Quantum computers must be isolated from the surrounding real world, lest “entanglement” interactions ruin the whole effect. Easy.
Scientists must learn to avoid “quantum decoherence.”
I leave you to go and figure out that last one for yourself. I love to be helpful, but there's only so much a man can do.
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