Quantum Computing and Godmother’s Milk and Honey

It is one of those almost-within-reach scientific breakthroughs, that could, with a scintilla more funding, with only a little more political willpower, and, possibly with some touch of divine magic, completely change the world into an egalitarian, peaceful, utopian state in which free speech, Kantian values, and godmother’s milk and honey flow freely and forever.

We have had, since before Y2K, enterprise resource planning, with its potential to streamline organisations and make them more efficient, followed closely by the explosion of the internet, which provided, albeit targeted to maximize eyeballs and bovine-like attention, roughly speaking free information.

Then, we had the brief but intense belief in the promises of robotic process engineering, with its potential to transform mundane work and eliminate repetitiveness, and that, unfortunately for all, was followed by the Global Financial Crisis. It was out of that turmoil from which Bitcoin emerged, the ultimate expression of societal distrust.

Then came the existential tipping point offered by blockchain technology, a concept often invoked but entirely misunderstood. It’s promise was profound – to provide a fair and equitable form of financial ledger free of an autocratic central monetary authority, without having to be governed by evil overseers. And then, finally, when the blockchain narrative had begun to run out of gas, came the emergence of genAI and the irrepressible prophesising of Sam Altman.

But then, deep cracks began to form in AI’s business model. DeepSeek’s sudden release in January 2025 shocked Silicon Valley to its core and it would not be long before there would emerge yet another game-changing replacement narrative. This time, from the archives, the soothsayers of Seattle and San Bernadino reconjured up the enigmatic ghost of quantum computing.

In theory, whereas a transistor in any computer today is only able to be either on or off, necessitating the ubiquitous use of binary as the fundamental number system underpinning all computer technology worldwide, quantum computing could offer exponentially greater processing power, by making use of quantum bits, qubits, capable of existing in multiple states simultaneously.

The challenge, however, that scientists have faced in catapulting this technology beyond the theoretical and into practical applications has been in designing an actual stable qubit, that is not prone to error and noise. That was, until last month, when Microsoft declared a major breakthrough in qubit design, stating that it is “on track to build an FTP [fault-tolerant prototype] of a scalable quantum computer in years, not decades”.

Microsoft’s confidence has been echoed by its Big Tech competitors, including IBM, whose vice-president of quantum computing Jay Gambetta predicted last year that the company will demonstrate a fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029. Hartmut Neven, head of Google’s quantum efforts, similarly claimed in February that “within five years we’ll see real-world applications that are possible only on quantum computers”.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has made a more conservative estimate, stating in January 2025 that he believes that practical uses of quantum computing are at least two decades away. One needs to remember though that the mere whisper of quantum computing as a concept is a direct threat to Nvidia, the pioneer of graphics processing units (GPUs) used widely across most AI applications. Since 2008, Nvidia’s GPUs have rapidly accelerated the training of deep learning models, making them the third largest company in the world at the end of 2024. Never one to miss out though, Huang has hedged his bets and just hosted Nvidia’s first ever Quantum Day on the 20^th of March, with the aim of “mapping the path toward useful quantum applications”.

Given, however, the recent US equity market sell-off, it is just about the right time to replace the genAI narrative with a new, fresh one. And hence the phenomenon of the Big Tech firms suddenly battling for airtime to announce their latest quantum computing lab.

But as these companies pivot and attempt to rationalise their absurdly high P/E multiples, they are downplaying the challenges to practically realising useable quantum computing. Inadvertently, they are also ignoring the most dangerous implication of this probabilistic, quantum mechanics, multiple-simultaneous-state, Schrodinger’s Cat – both-dead-and-alive-at-the-same-time – kind of paranormal world.

If, and it’s a huge if, some lab in Boston were actually to make a breakthrough such that quantum computing were viable, then instantaneously, all encryption, in all systems, in all nation states, on all servers, in all missiles, on all bank accounts and across all WhatsApp chats, would instantly be rendered null and void.

Because, at its core, encryption technology is based on how large 100-digit, or more, prime numbers are distributed through the number system, a problem that has remained unsolved since it was first observed by the Ancient Greeks. We simply don’t see any pattern to prime number distribution, and so these numbers are used pervasively throughout all encryption technologies because they produce, as exponents, unsolvable one-way functions. This concept sits at the heart of cryptocurrency but also at the heart of NSA security as well as that which secures our privacy on a daily basis.

And, herein, lies the greatest of all ironies as it pertains to Big Tech propagating one narrative after the next to keep their stocks in suspended animation and their billionaire owners ever closer to the trillionaire mark. That the singularity of which they speak, the AI ‘Aha’ moment, in which the computer is indistinguishable from the human, in which we progress as a species beyond mundane tasks towards utopian idealism, is also precisely the moment when all encryption systems will fail.

The quantum computing narrative is perhaps the most invidious of all recent quasi-scientific narratives, for, in thinking it through carefully, its true meaning is to collapse all prior narratives in upon themselves. It is, truly, the black hole of scientific narratives propagated by the mega corporations that now supersede all nation states, and effectively run the world.   

By David Buckham

David Buckham is founder and CEO of Johannesburg-based international management consultancy Monocle Solutions and author of 6 published books.