Who will make the world safe for encryption?
With the first programmable quantum computer realized the day may come when Shor’s algorithm can be implemented with some accuracy:
“A team at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) used berylium ions, lasers and electrodes to develop a quantum system that performed 160 randomly chosen routines. Other quantum systems to date have only been able to perform single, prescribed tasks. Other researchers say the system could be scaled up. ‘The researchers ran each program 900 times. On average, the quantum computer operated accurately 79 percent of the time, the team reported in their paper.’”
I might be alone in this, but I fear the day when quantum computers become practical—much more than the day when the Singularity emerges; I have at least a sense of anticipation for the latter and it will represent a progress, an evolution of sorts. In contrast, all the uses for a quantum computer I know are evil—just like the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb. There is never a peaceful reason to enrich uranium more than 10%, and there is never a moral reason for a quantum computer to work more than 1% (or some other low number) of the time.
Will some other breakthrough make encryption—specifically, cheap and affordable encryption; for the wealthy and powerful, there is always OTP—available to the masses again, once quantum computers inevitably make public key encryptions (SSL and PGP, for the two big ones in use widely today) unusable except as children’s playthings?