It is an interesting point of family history that clan Davidson's crest bears the motto "sapienter si sincere" which may be roughly translated as "wisely if sincerely."
Doug Gabriel & Mike McKibben have recently posted a video discussion with an update on the current state of the art with McKibben & company's (relatively) new secure quantum encryption messaging system, along with various other commentary on historical and current events surrounding the topic. The product in question is named "MySQIF", which I beleve may be a rif on the term SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) ,
Input & opinions about this product from the more technically inclined about privacy and encryption (not my forte) would be most welcome:
Polymorphic encryption is interesting and tasty mathematics. There are drawbacks. These include an increase in computational complexity arising from constantly changing encryption algorithms, difficulty in key management as multiple variations of keys are generated, potential for performance issues, and the risk of being misused by malicious actors to create harder-to-detect malware. It is the sort of tech favoured by, well, tech guys.
The claims of unbreakable-by-quantum-computing are interesting. They rely upon a mundane understanding of time, which is inconsistent with what we know of quantum physics. People who make claims about “several lifetimes” to decrypt shouldn’t be taken seriously, in part because lifespans are not what people seem to think.
Nevertheless, there are more reasons to think McKibben will be able to persuade the goofs in the gooferment to widely adopt his tech than he has been in some of his other claim-rich projects. I’m not rushing to download any new apps on this score.
Thank you for your comment and the interesting set of threads it seems likely to inspire in other contexts.
Appreciate the summary. I always get a little leery when people start throwing the term "quantum" around, but I am not a mathematician or a physicist, so I can't very well pick their statements apart at a deep technical level...
Well, a quantum is the singular of "quanta" and that's where we get the term "quantum mechanics" which is about tiny little units of energy that are so infinitesimal that they cannot be further subdivided. When we first began to split atoms at the beginning of the 20th Century (around 1932) we already knew quite a bit about the components of the atom, or, anyway, we had names for these parts. They include protons, neutrons which are about the mass of a proton plus the mass of an electron, and electrons.
Despite our enthusiasm for atoms being discrete units of matter, they aren't. It has turned out that if you slam enough energy into a target you get lots of ejected subatomic particles. High energy physics may be summarised, poorly and without nuance, as the business of slamming more and more energy into targets, including streams of matter moving in the opposite direction. So, high energy physicists are always in favour of a bigger "cyclotron" or "synchrotron" depending on the nature of the path involved. Over time we have found a minor symphony of subatomic particles such as quarks, leptons, and bosons which mediate the interactions amongst them. It doesn't sound like a lot of "notes" on which to build a symphony, until you discover that quarks come in flavours such as up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. Each flavour has a different mass and a different charge.
So, when a physicist talks about a quanta of energy that person is thinking of a very tiny amount of energy. When an electron "jumps" from one electron shell to another, it either emits or absorbs a photon with the exact amount of energy involved in that jump. So, a "quantum leap" isn't a huge leap, but a very tiny (measurable but really small) leap.
As a result of the strange world we are examining when we look at quantum physics, we have had to re-think basic things like: is the universe composed of four dimensions? is time linear? is there only one dimension of time? does time always move at the same rate? are there parallel dimensions of reality?
One of the people I met in the last month of Anno Domini 2000 was David Deutsch at Oxford, whose work I had been familiar with for many years. David and my friend Sarah Lawrence are mentioned in the dedication of physicist and novelist James P. Hogan's book _Paths to Otherwhere_ which is a brief introduction of sorts to some of the concepts you encounter when you begin having discussions with quantum physicists. It is based in part on David's book _The Fabric of Reality_ which is now quite dated in some ways, but which covers some of the basic thought experiments and pathways of future discovery then in vogue (1994-1996 roughly).
Quantum computing was invented, in part, by David. It reflects an understanding of how computation takes place across multiple universe lines. The fact that it works at all is substantial evidence for the number of dimensions being greater than 4. The fact that it doesn't work exactly as it was first conceived is evidence that the earlier conception was based on mistaken assumptions.
I'm hopeful that this partial narrative and partial rambling mess is helpful in some ways. Basically, you are right to be sceptical of quantum computing. It is definitely something and it is also definitely not what it is hyped to be.
On a similar note, all the artificial intelligence guys I worked with in the 1990s were not inclined to use that term, at all. We said, "artificial inanity" if someone pressed us to use "a.i." as initials for the work. What you know see being called "a.i." is a kind of large language model that is able to work with enormous amounts of data in certain contexts, including linguistic data - piles of which are stolen from ordinary users by their apps all the time. So it is able to construct passages that look like encyclopaedia entries, but are in fact mostly amphigory.
There is no consciousness to any "a.i." and they are not "about to wake up." Summing ones and zeroes is unrelated to the nature of consciousness.
Thank you for that messy rambling narrative. It does resonate. And I am probably going to steal & start using that "artificial inanity" moniker. Sounds like something Uncle Clif would say (that's a compliment, btw)!
I have never expected any "real" intelligence to arise from that space - to me it's all just really high-octane pattern recognition/matching...
Thanks so much for the shout out, Jim! I really appreciate it and the awareness that you spread about the importance of privacy!
You’re welcome. Same back at ya for your great efforts to share your wealth of knowledge about privacy technology. You are good.
sapient points, thank you!
It is an interesting point of family history that clan Davidson's crest bears the motto "sapienter si sincere" which may be roughly translated as "wisely if sincerely."
Doug Gabriel & Mike McKibben have recently posted a video discussion with an update on the current state of the art with McKibben & company's (relatively) new secure quantum encryption messaging system, along with various other commentary on historical and current events surrounding the topic. The product in question is named "MySQIF", which I beleve may be a rif on the term SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) ,
Input & opinions about this product from the more technically inclined about privacy and encryption (not my forte) would be most welcome:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0M2eAVIN9g
Polymorphic encryption is interesting and tasty mathematics. There are drawbacks. These include an increase in computational complexity arising from constantly changing encryption algorithms, difficulty in key management as multiple variations of keys are generated, potential for performance issues, and the risk of being misused by malicious actors to create harder-to-detect malware. It is the sort of tech favoured by, well, tech guys.
The claims of unbreakable-by-quantum-computing are interesting. They rely upon a mundane understanding of time, which is inconsistent with what we know of quantum physics. People who make claims about “several lifetimes” to decrypt shouldn’t be taken seriously, in part because lifespans are not what people seem to think.
Nevertheless, there are more reasons to think McKibben will be able to persuade the goofs in the gooferment to widely adopt his tech than he has been in some of his other claim-rich projects. I’m not rushing to download any new apps on this score.
Thank you for your comment and the interesting set of threads it seems likely to inspire in other contexts.
Appreciate the summary. I always get a little leery when people start throwing the term "quantum" around, but I am not a mathematician or a physicist, so I can't very well pick their statements apart at a deep technical level...
Well, a quantum is the singular of "quanta" and that's where we get the term "quantum mechanics" which is about tiny little units of energy that are so infinitesimal that they cannot be further subdivided. When we first began to split atoms at the beginning of the 20th Century (around 1932) we already knew quite a bit about the components of the atom, or, anyway, we had names for these parts. They include protons, neutrons which are about the mass of a proton plus the mass of an electron, and electrons.
Despite our enthusiasm for atoms being discrete units of matter, they aren't. It has turned out that if you slam enough energy into a target you get lots of ejected subatomic particles. High energy physics may be summarised, poorly and without nuance, as the business of slamming more and more energy into targets, including streams of matter moving in the opposite direction. So, high energy physicists are always in favour of a bigger "cyclotron" or "synchrotron" depending on the nature of the path involved. Over time we have found a minor symphony of subatomic particles such as quarks, leptons, and bosons which mediate the interactions amongst them. It doesn't sound like a lot of "notes" on which to build a symphony, until you discover that quarks come in flavours such as up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. Each flavour has a different mass and a different charge.
So, when a physicist talks about a quanta of energy that person is thinking of a very tiny amount of energy. When an electron "jumps" from one electron shell to another, it either emits or absorbs a photon with the exact amount of energy involved in that jump. So, a "quantum leap" isn't a huge leap, but a very tiny (measurable but really small) leap.
As a result of the strange world we are examining when we look at quantum physics, we have had to re-think basic things like: is the universe composed of four dimensions? is time linear? is there only one dimension of time? does time always move at the same rate? are there parallel dimensions of reality?
One of the people I met in the last month of Anno Domini 2000 was David Deutsch at Oxford, whose work I had been familiar with for many years. David and my friend Sarah Lawrence are mentioned in the dedication of physicist and novelist James P. Hogan's book _Paths to Otherwhere_ which is a brief introduction of sorts to some of the concepts you encounter when you begin having discussions with quantum physicists. It is based in part on David's book _The Fabric of Reality_ which is now quite dated in some ways, but which covers some of the basic thought experiments and pathways of future discovery then in vogue (1994-1996 roughly).
Quantum computing was invented, in part, by David. It reflects an understanding of how computation takes place across multiple universe lines. The fact that it works at all is substantial evidence for the number of dimensions being greater than 4. The fact that it doesn't work exactly as it was first conceived is evidence that the earlier conception was based on mistaken assumptions.
I'm hopeful that this partial narrative and partial rambling mess is helpful in some ways. Basically, you are right to be sceptical of quantum computing. It is definitely something and it is also definitely not what it is hyped to be.
On a similar note, all the artificial intelligence guys I worked with in the 1990s were not inclined to use that term, at all. We said, "artificial inanity" if someone pressed us to use "a.i." as initials for the work. What you know see being called "a.i." is a kind of large language model that is able to work with enormous amounts of data in certain contexts, including linguistic data - piles of which are stolen from ordinary users by their apps all the time. So it is able to construct passages that look like encyclopaedia entries, but are in fact mostly amphigory.
There is no consciousness to any "a.i." and they are not "about to wake up." Summing ones and zeroes is unrelated to the nature of consciousness.
Thank you for that messy rambling narrative. It does resonate. And I am probably going to steal & start using that "artificial inanity" moniker. Sounds like something Uncle Clif would say (that's a compliment, btw)!
I have never expected any "real" intelligence to arise from that space - to me it's all just really high-octane pattern recognition/matching...