asr comments on Superintelligence Reading Group - Section 1: Past Developments and Present Capabilities - Less Wrong

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Comment author: NxGenSentience 19 September 2014 05:41:19PM 1 point [-]

Did you read about Google's partnership with NASA and UCSD to build a quantum computer of 1000 qubits?

Technologically exciting, but ... imagine a world without encryption. As if all locks and keys on all houses, cars, banks, nuclear vaults, whatever, disappeared, only incomparably more consequential.

That would be catastrophic, for business, economies, governments, individuals, every form of commerce, military communication....

Didn't answer your question, I am sorry, but as a "fan" of quantum computing, and also a person with a long time interest in the quantum zeno effect, free will, and the implications for consciousness (as often discussed by Henry Stapp, among others), I am both excited, yet feel a certain trepidation. Like I do about nanotech.

I am writing a long essay and preparing a video on the topic, but it is a long way from completion. I do think it (qc) will have a dramatic effect on artifactual consciousness platforms, and I am even more certain that it will accellerate superintelligence (which is not at all the same thing, as intelligence and consciousness, in my opinion, are not coextensive.)

Comment author: asr 19 September 2014 06:16:56PM *  5 points [-]

Did you read about Google's partnership with NASA and UCSD to build a quantum computer of 1000 qubits?

Technologically exciting, but ... imagine a world without encryption. As if all locks and keys on all houses, cars, banks, nuclear vaults, whatever, disappeared, only incomparably more consequential.

My understanding is that quantum computers are known to be able to break RSA and elliptic-curve-based public-key crypto systems. They are not known to be able to break arbitrary symmetric-key ciphers or hash functions. You can do a lot with symmetric-key systems -- Kerberos doesn't require public-key authentication. And you can sign things with Merkle signatures.

There are also a number of candidate public-key cryptosystems that are believed secure against quantum attacks.

So I think we shouldn't be too apocalyptic here.

Comment author: NxGenSentience 20 September 2014 12:03:26PM 3 points [-]

Asr,

Thanks for pointing out the wiki article, which I had not seen. I actually feel a tiny bit relieved, but I still think there are a lot of very serious forks in the road that we should explore.

If we do not pre-engineer a soft landing, this is the first existential catastrophe that we should be working to avoid.

A world that suddenly loses encryption (or even faith in encryption!) would be roughly equivalent to a world without electricity.

I also worry about the legacy problem... all the critical documents in RSA, PGP, etc, sitting on hard drives, servers, CD roms, that suddenly are visible to anyone with access to the tech. How do we go about re-coding all those "eyes only" critical docs into a post-quantum coding system (assuming one is shown practical and reliable), without those documents being "looked at" or opportunistically copied in their limbo state between old and new encrypted status?

Who can we trust to do all this conversion, even given the new algorithms are developed?

This is actually almost intractably messy, at first glance.

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