The Quantum Apocalypse: Are you ready for Q-Day?
In 1987, a little-known stage actor from the UK signed a contract to appear in a new sci-fi series called Star Trek, The Next Generation. The actor, Patrick Stewart, lived out of a suitcase when he first arrived in Hollywood. He assumed the TV show would be a failure or else the producers would regret casting him, and that he would soon be heading back across the pond with maybe a little money in hand.
We all know what happened. I still remember evenings when I’d eagerly settle down with supper in front of a box TV set, watching Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his crew exploring strange new worlds in that goose-necked spaceship called the Enterprise.
That was our vision of the future, back in 1987—an optimistic Star Trek vision. Our spaceships, our computers, our machines, were going to help us to explore life “out there” in the real universe. Sure, the Enterprise had a “holodeck”, a special virtual reality room, where you could create any sort of world, but the holodeck was only used for occasional recreation. It wasn’t controlled by Big Tech algorithms that manipulated users into spending countless hours watching porn in 3D or nursing a videogame addiction.
In the Star Trek future we imagined, humans had powerful machines, yet were not diminished by them.
Optimists are still hoping for that future, but we might instead get a “quantum apocalypse”. According to a new piece in Wired by Amit Katwala:
Cybersecurity analysts call this Q-Day—the day someone builds a quantum computer that can crack the most widely used forms of encryption. These math problems have kept humanity’s 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.
To be clear, this isn’t far-fetched fearmongering or the overactive imagination of some wacky tech-doomer. A survey of experts predicts a one-in-three chance that Q-Day happens before 2035 (and about 15% think it’s already happened in secret). It could be China that gets there first, or maybe the US. And when it does happen, it will change the world profoundly.
Forget a Star Trek future—it will be panic and chaos.
Quantum machines could be used to shut down energy grids in cities, take down the banking system, disable missile silos, figure out where all the submarines are.
And of course there will be no more secrets. “All confidence in the confidentiality of our communications will collapse,” Katwala writes.
And Bitcoin?
“Bitcoin cannot be upgraded to post-quantum cryptography…The only solution to that seems to be a hard fork—give birth to a new chain and the old chain dies.” But that would require a massive organizational effort…If Q-Day happens before [that], there’s nothing to stop bitcoin going to zero.
Even when the shock and panic of Q-day settles, our sense of trust in our devices, technologies, and networks will be shattered.
Already governments are attempting to implement quantum-proof algorithms to save us from Q-Day, unless Q-day arrives first. If it does, Katwala suggests that major industries like energy, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing will have to switch to paper-based methods for a while to protect sensitive data.
But what about us? How do we protect ourselves as individuals?
We have gotten so used to outsourcing our lives to machines that it can be hard to see ourselves as anything but victims who must depend on the government or corporations to save us from the loss of digital wealth, privacy, and dignity.
Having offloaded so much of our daily existence onto digital management systems, should we be surprised that we are naked, and that others hold the keys to the clothes closet?
Until those keys get stolen by a quantum hacker, in which case somebody else owns them. But we are still naked.
Our lives are far more comfortable than that of a 9th century peasant, yet a new feudalism is emerging in our own time, when godlike power can be held by so few over so many.
If the Q-apocalypse comes, and China has the machine, then we might suffer. If the Q-apocalypse does not come—because we have prepared ourselves with quantum-proof encryption methods—then maybe China will suffer instead; but that does not mean that our own quantum machines will usher in a Star Trek future.
Quantum machines might supercharge AI, create innovations in medicine, accelerate scientific discovery, but what they cannot do is give us our values. They can protect us from other quantum machine attacks, but they cannot protect us from ourselves.
The toxic triad
We are at least fifty years into the “information age”, and we still don’t have a Star Trek sense of morality and ethics around tech use. In our world, tech is often and increasingly deployed to monetize users through algorithms that pull on our mental puppet strings; or else to manipulate users through ideological messaging; or else, at times, to manage populations with coercion or force. These three M’s—the monetizing, the manipulative, and the managerial—are the toxic triad of tech, and we will never have a Star Trek future if they remain our primary motivations in how we deploy tech within our society.
Which means even if a Q-apocalypse never comes, even if chaos never erupts and we blithely carry on as usual, we will still face a problem that began with the internet, grew with the smartphone and AI, and which will continue growing with quantum computers: becoming ever more entangled with machines that often diminish us as human beings.
If we want to protect ourselves against a Q-apocalypse, or Q-society, our instinct might be to go analogue as much as possible. For many of us, going analogue may not be just a fad, not just something we do as part of a temporary “digital fast”, but a requirement for weathering a future storm. Some might choose to convert digital assets into tangible ones—digital money into physical property, for instance. Others might take personal information offline, and quantum-proof their private memories by creating physical photo albums and keeping written diaries, or quantum-proof human knowledge and art by keeping a library of physical books.
These are small and isolated strategies, and they might not necessarily be as effective as we hope, especially if the society around us is swirling in Q-apocalypse disorder, or marching to the drum of a quantum technocracy. Perhaps we need to quantum-proof something more basic—our perception.
This brings us to what might be called the fourth M, the Mephistophelean. Whether you think of it rationally or spiritually, the fourth M is an invisible yet near-constant force that preys on our fears and weaknesses, inviting us to sell our soul for a life of increased safety and convenience, or power—even if the safety and convenience come at the cost of being dominated by machines, or even if the power is mostly illusory or virtual.
But it’s hard to see the Mephistophelean dimension, because it’s hard to give up power, even the illusion of it, and it’s hard to give up even a little safety and convenience. Still, if we can separate ourselves long enough from technology, physically remove it wherever possible from our environment, we might recover a clearer view of what is at stake, and what we need to protect.
In our homes, we can consider ways to remove devices permanently from certain rooms or spaces, or to remove ourselves from them for prolonged periods each day.
In our schools, we can finally recognize that Ed Tech does not work and completely remove devices from the classroom, allowing children and youth to grow up with full attention to each other, a human teacher, and to the subject matter at hand.
In our churches and places of worship, our priests and spiritual leaders might consider eliminating all screens from services and liturgies, allowing only human voices to convey the message in song, prayer, and skilled rhetoric—and maybe to start preaching a little more about the dark side of technology and what it means to be truly “human”.
Eliminating tech wherever possible from our physical environment won’t just mean we’re wasting less time on screens, or saving our kids from becoming a generation of digital addicts and stimulus junkies. We will develop ourselves more fully as human beings, and become more discerning each time Mephistopheles whispers techno-promises into our ears.
Katwala himself closes his Wired piece with these very promises:
the best way to stave off Q-Day may be to share those benefits [of quantum computing] around: Take the better batteries, the miracle drugs, the far-sighted climate forecasting, and use them to build a quantum utopia of new materials and better lives for everyone.
But this optimism overlooks the corrosive influence of the 3M triad, and that fourth M, all of which continually subvert technology toward darker uses. There will be no stable future, never mind a “utopia”, unless it is populated by human beings who have a strong felt sense of the healthy boundaries between themselves and tech—a felt sense that is cultivated from the earliest stages of life.
These are the humans who will have the best chance at thriving, whether they face a Q-apocalypse or a Q-society. These are the people who will understand that what we need are not more AI models, but more human models.
And then, maybe, we’ll get closer to the kind of future we all once hoped for.
Further Reading and Announcements
You can find Amit Katwala’s piece here.
What Would Borgmann Do? Wisdom for Life in the Digital Age by
I Do not Think It Means What You Think It Means - Revisiting the Machine and Human Action by
What's Happening to Students? by
Restoring Raw Experience Part II - The Thing Itself by
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