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

First Thoughts.

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.

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.

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?

🎶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!