The Genie in the Bottle: What Quantum Computing Means for All of Us

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First Thoughts.

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Source: Futurism.com

If greater-than-human artificial general intelligence is invented without due caution, it is all but certain that the human species will be extinct in very short order. --Michael Vasser doing his best Jeremy Renner impression for Big Think, 2015.

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Let's take this slow

First of all, Windows Central apparently thought up my paranoid ideations last fall, compete with the Genie title. Damn. Secondly, I'm remembering "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Clarke wrong. Then ending is much, much more horrifying.

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Anyhoo

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's turn to the consequences of QC tech these sages did not foresee. The NSA warns that quantum computing could render encryption obsolete. Does that include the blockchain? If an insanely fast-living cyber mind is capable of brute-forcing a hash like cake, what is to stop this thing from being a deity within the decentralized mesh?

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🎶This was a triumph ...🎶

An EMP? I kid, I kid (or do I?).

On a side note, our favorite guy-who-wants-us-to-live-in-Bioshock, Zoltan Istvan, has an interesting article on Motherboard that points out that the end of encryption and privacy could be a good thing from the stand point of government transparency, watching the Watchmen and whatnot.

I feel like a special X-ennial getting to grow up starting with a rotary phone and a cause tube to considering the benefits of a magnet inserted under the pad of my pinky. One of my primary focuses on life is mulling the best way to prepare my son to be a verifiable-through-decentralization, cybernetics-adaptable, sovereign entity as witness to the terrifying destiny that humanity has wrought upon itself. What a time to be alive!

So what?

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Get ready for upgrades or tough times, meatbags!

References

  1. Futurism: The Race to Prove Quantum Supremacy May Be Won in the Next Year
  2. Rigetti
  3. IBM Q
  4. Google Quantum A.I.
  5. Google Plans to Demonstrate the Supremacy of Quantum Computing
  6. NSA Warns of the Dangers of Quantum Comouting
  7. Liberty Might Be Better Served by Doing Away with Privacy
  8. Vasser, not Jeremy Renner
  9. "Is quantum computing a genie we will wish we kept in the bottle?" Jerks
  10. "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Clarke
  11. Oh, shit, a global EMP?
  12. Grindhouse Wetware
  13. "Still Alive" by Jonathan Coulton

Previously from the Written Bird

Check the later links, some of them might still be fresh and piping hot!

1. After a rocky start
2. Blockchain and Parenthood
3. Across the Fruited Plain
4. Not Quite Kafka, Not Quite Spiderman
5. The Blockchain is a Rudimentary Universe
6. THE BIRTH OF GOD
7. The Free People and the Hegemon

Vote or don't, follow or don't, resteem or don't. Do what thou wilt. Steem on!

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