The machines that will design new medicines will also break the internet's locks
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Recently in Geneva, the world's largest forum on AI for Good, gathered around a simple question: how can technology best serve society? While the sentiment goes back to pre-industrial times, the conversation has firmly moved to algorithms. What about the machines that will come next?
Executive Director of Quantum Communications at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII).
Quantum technology has crossed a line. It is no longer a distant promise, but a growing portfolio of real applications. Quantum and quantum-inspired solutions are being applied to the simulations that underpin nuclear power, to protein design in drug discovery, and traffic forecasting in congested cities.
Quantum sensors are being tested for medical imaging, navigation where satellite signals fail, and monitoring carbon storage sites deep underground. These are no longer mere laboratory curiosities: they are increasingly emerging as working programs, with industrial partners and delivery dates.
For those of us in the industry, these developments are both timely and long anticipated. But they also force us to confront a less comfortable reality: the same machines that will one day simulate new molecules will also break the public-key cryptography that secures much of the modern internet.
By some estimates, up to 80% of the world's digital infrastructure is exposed. The world's digital economy – not to mention every AI model celebrated in Geneva, runs on encrypted data. Every health record or financial transaction owes its confidentiality to mathematical assumptions that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer will overturn.
The threat timeline is worse than most realize. Rather than waiting for when the machine arrives, the clock started the moment adversaries began harvesting encrypted traffic: the so-called “store now, decrypt later” approach.
Data that remains valuable for years, from medical records to state secrets, may already be beyond rescue. Nobody knows exactly when “Q-Day” comes. But those who harvest our data today have time on their side.
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This is why quantum-safe security cannot be a footnote to quantum computing. It is the other half of the field, and it needs to mature on the same schedule.
Two defenses exist, and they are not interchangeable. Post-quantum cryptography replaces vulnerable algorithms with mathematics believed to resist quantum attacks; it is software, it scales, and it is the workhorse of the migration now beginning worldwide.
Quantum key distribution takes a different route: it distributes encryption keys using quantum states of light that cannot be intercepted without being disturbed. In this way, these schemes deploy a “quantum trip-wire", an eavesdropper reveals herself by the simple act of listening-in
Far from being in competition, both algorithmic and physics-based solutions have roles to play in tomorrow's networks. Serious infrastructure will layer both.
