Podcast
Root Causes 83: Quantum Apocalypse - Does COVID-19 Change the Z Date?


Hosted by
Original broadcast date
April 16, 2020
Lock downs and work-from-home requirements have disrupted the efficiency of operations in all walks of industry, including academics and advanced computing research.
In this episode our hosts debate if and how the pandemic's disruptive nature might change the date on which quantum computers are able to defeat today's encryption.
Podcast Transcript
Lightly edited for flow and brevity.
So, are we ready to do this, gentlemen?
And one of the interesting things about quantum computers is fundamentally they are physical things. Right? We are working on physical engineering problems. We are trying to make our computers hold qubits for longer and we are building actual machines to do that. We are super cooling them. We are working on various other things to try to make them stable and at least a non-trivial part of that is a physical engineering task and that is going to be hurt from a productivity perspective that is going to be hurt more than just purely intellectual work is gonna be hurt. And so, it seems to me that we should expect the Z date to move out because of the COVID-19 pandemic that we are going through right now. That the people who would have been in facilities making their quantum computers better – yeah, maybe they are having some deep thoughts and maybe there is some amount of modeling or testing they could do offline, but they’ve gotta be less productive. Gotta be.
And how long are we all going to be sheltering in place? I don’t know but I know the U.S. Congress just passed an unemployment package that is targeted to last for 39 weeks. Right? So 39 weeks, that’s three-quarters of a year. So hypothetically, if you can’t go into your lab and work on your quantum computer for three-quarters of a year how long is that setting back our milestones? Well, three-quarters of a year. Maybe longer.
So when we are talking about timeframes like ten years it seems like adding a year to that is non-trivial and might be the difference between certain secrets being safe and being not and so I actually suspect – and we are never gonna be able to prove this, but I suspect that one of the odd consequences of this whole thing is that the quantum apocalypse might actually be held off a little as a consequence of what’s going on right now with COVID-19.
So that’s my premise, Alan.
The other side of the equation, which of course is the people working on quantum resistance and the math behind it, a lot of those people are university researchers. I happen to know one, so it might not be a statistically significant sample but that one person I happen to know very well is steaming ahead at full, full charge. In other words, I think, Tim, the ironic thing here - -


