How to plan in the age of the quantum computer?

We’ve gotten used to the average user’s computer gaining 10 times its computing power every year, but there have been a few announcements recently that brutally override that.

It is normal for big IT companies to announce one new generation of supercomputers based on traditional technology after another, but now it seems that the time has come for IT 2.0, or quantum computers.

Instead of 10,000 years,
such a computer can calculate
a computational problem that is
unsolvable today in 2 minutes.

But what will be the consequences?

For example, it is likely that the encryption used today in banking security – and encryption in general – can be put in brackets.

But it will have its good points.

Complex simulations and forecasts will be put on a new footing.

In the pharmaceutical industry, active ingredients and therapies will be simulated en masse, and diseases that are still considered widespread diseases today will become curable.

Traffic management and self-driving in cities are developing and road accidents are falling. This will mean fewer drivers, nurses, and doctors.

We will be able to forecast the weather accurately. AI-assisted mate choice is emerging in mate search, resulting in far fewer broken families and adopted children, but more balanced relationships.

There will be rapid advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and predictive design. More efficient technologies, solar panels, building- and urban-management systems are emerging.

It becomes natural to create digital twins of our buildings and our world and to build a “nerve system” for them.

Our buildings will feel and react to us and their surroundings, as wind farms do today.

Algorithms take over simpler, rule-based jobs such as law, banking, administration, or medical diagnostics. Your mobile phone will constantly monitor your health and let you know if you need an intervention, without the need for a doctor.

It will probably be a privilege to work in our children’s lifetimes, and jobs that are based on technology that is driven by human emotion, beauty, and creativity will become really valuable.

Architecture is being split into design – which is getting a lot of new IT tools -, virtual construction, and data science. Anyway, this has already happened, but few people understand it.

And I could go on.

This is not the distant future, but the next 20-30 years.

A very different world is coming, and a company’s competitiveness will be largely determined by its digital competencies and the information it has about its built environment.

It’s not today’s story, but if you haven’t already, check out this video of Google’s MEGA supercomputers, narrated by Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Michael Pena*:

(Photo credit: Flickr)