A deep dive into the race to develop a quantum computer, which could help address climate change and food scarcity, break current encryption protocols, and more
Stephen Witt / New Yorker :
Context & Ripple Effects
Stephen Witt's New Yorker piece lands at the end of a long public arc: CERN's push for a reliable quantum device to handle Large Hadron Collider data, Fortune's 2019 survey of the competing approaches at IBM, Google, and Microsoft, and a decade-old warning from Quanta that modern encryption would need to adapt. What changed by the time of the piece — and crystallized in the FT's later guide to qubits, quantum algorithms, and "Q-day" — is that the field's stakes are now framed as much in security terms as scientific ones.
The article's value is synthesis: it ties the engineering race to its downstream consequences, from climate and food applications to the moment current encryption protocols break.
First-order effects
- IBM, Google, and Microsoft, already pursuing distinct hardware approaches per the Fortune overview, now compete for narrative as much as benchmarks — a New Yorker-level feature raises the stakes of claiming credible progress.
- CERN and other compute-hungry scientific institutions remain the demand-side anchor, still facing the 50-100x processing shortfall the WIRED UK reporting identified for LHC data.
Second-order effects
- The "Q-day" framing from the FT guide forces security vendors and governments to treat encryption migration as a planning problem now, not a post-break emergency — the Quanta warning becomes procurement policy.
- Whoever demonstrates a useful quantum advantage first converts scientific prestige into leverage over the applications the article names, from climate modeling to materials for food systems.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, quantum computing follows the classical-industry script: a small set of platform owners, a dependency chain of users who must re-architect security before the threat arrives, and compute itself as strategic leverage between states.
- The encryption question is the structural one — a successful quantum machine doesn't just add capability, it invalidates the trust layer the current internet runs on, making the post-quantum transition an industry-wide retrofit.
The trend: Quantum computing is moving from a physics race among IBM, Google, and Microsoft toward a security-and-infrastructure story, with encryption migration becoming the forcing function.