What Can We Actually Do With It?

Quantum computers aren't here to play video games or scroll social media faster. They are designed to solve massive, impossible puzzles that would take a normal supercomputer thousands of years to figure out (Biamonte et al., 2017).

1. Medicine & Drugs

Right now, discovering new medicine involves a lot of trial, error, and physical testing. Quantum computers have the potential to simulate exactly how a drug will react with human molecules inside a virtual environment, potentially curing diseases in months instead of decades.

2. Financial Markets

The global stock market is incredibly chaotic and volatile. Major banks want to use quantum algorithms to instantly find the absolute best place to invest billions of dollars across thousands of assets, minimizing risk in a way human analysts simply cannot calculate.

3. Unhackable Security

Current passwords and banking encryption rely on math problems that are hard for normal computers to solve. Quantum computers will easily smash through them. However, they also allow us to create "Quantum Key Distribution"—a new type of security network that is literally impossible to hack due to the fundamental laws of physics.

References

  • Biamonte, J., Wittek, P., Pancotti, N., Rebentrost, P., Wiebe, N. and Lloyd, S., 2017. Quantum machine learning. Nature, 549(7671), pp.195-202. [DOI Link - Access via UEL]