Let it never be said that he makes small swings. President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders today to drive research in the quantum computing industry, with the purported aim of accelerating scientific research and safeguarding the country against cybersecurity threats that advances in the tech could pose.
Quantum computing, moreover, is expected to dovetail with advances in AI, and in geopolitical terms could become a key battleground in the technological race between the US and China, which has similarly made the field a national priority. Investment in the tech, it’s worth noting, could also personally benefit Trump’s family.
“We are going to be investing in American quantum leadership like never before,” Trump declared at a signing ceremony at the Oval Office.
Per the Wall Street Journal, the first executive order directs federal agencies to work with the private sector and academics to build a powerful quantum computer capable of conducting scientific research by 2028. Such a feat would prove that quantum machines have practical applications; so far, experiments have demonstrated that quantum computers can solve complex equations, but they’ve generally had little real world use.
If quantum computers live up to their potential, they’ll develop the ability to solve problems that classical computers can’t, and at a faster rate. Rather than using traditional bits representing 0s and 1s, quantum computers use q-bits that can be in both states at once, allowing them to store more information. These q-bit can also be “entangled” with each other and share the same state, so that when one of the q-bit’s states changes the other one immediately changes too, dramatically speeding up calculations. This has spooky implications in our information age. A quantum computer could effortlessly unravel our current encryption algorithms, for instance, causing what experts fear could be a veritable apocalypse in cybersecurity.
That’s where the second executive order comes in. It directs government agencies to accelerate “post-quantum cryptography” (PCQ) and develop algorithms that can resist attacks from a powerful quantum machine, moving up the date to achieve this to 2031 from the 2035 target set by the Biden administration.
It’s sounds sci-fi, but it tracks with the mood of the quantum computing industry. Earlier this year, Google, a leader in this space, moved up its date that it needs to develop PCQ systems to 2029.
The order also instructs the Pentagon to deploy so-called quantum sensors by 2028, which are devices designed to detect extremely subtle changes in the physical environment as an alternative to traditional GPS systems.
The pair of new executive orders come a month after the US Commerce Department announced that it would buy $2 billion worth of stakes in nine different quantum computing firms. There may be a hint of a conflict of interest, if not an ulterior motive: one of the funding recipients was PsiQuantum, one of the investors in which is 1789 Capital — the VC firm where Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, is a partner.
The elder Trump, for his part, did not appear personally compelled by the quantum research. As his energy secretary Chris Wright stumbled his speech that began by introducing a landmark Einstein paper, he wryly interrupted: “Nobody cares.”
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