Production: Pablo Cantudo / Interview: Laura Marcos
Q: What is the relationship between AI and quantum computers?
A: Exactly that is the relationship with artificial intelligence: a quantum computer requires a very large computing capacity. In fact, the ideas of artificial intelligence were born a long time ago, but only now that we have fast enough computers, those ideas can be carried out.
In fact, if we had much faster computers, we could probably get to a lot more things. That’s where quantum computers come in, because if we build them, or when we build them, we will be able to do calculations that cannot be done today.
Q: What tasks can a quantum computer perform?
A: Calculations that are complicated and that can have a great impact on us are those made by supercomputers: the supercomputer in Barcelona, or the one in China, which is the fastest in the world. Well, there calculations are made on drug design, chemical reactions, material design, meteorology … These types of calculations that take place in these places, some of them cannot be done easily today and if we had a quantum computer, we could make.
Q: How are quantum computers involved in pharmacology?
A: In some drug designs you need to know how a series of chemical reactions works, and for that you have to solve some models; These models are very complicated, in such a way that many of them, with the usual computers, cannot be made. There, quantum computers would have their applications.
Q: What role could quantum computers play in cybersecurity?
A: If we had a powerful enough quantum computer, all encrypted communications would no longer be secure. A quantum computer could decrypt any information, and that is why you have to consider what to do as soon as these computers come out.
There are several alternatives, and one of them is quantum physics. There is a property that allows you to encrypt information in a way that not even a quantum computer can decrypt it. Therefore, another field of research is that of quantum cryptography, which shows us how to encrypt information using this theory.
Q: When can we start using quantum computers?
A: There is still a long way to go for quantum computers to deliver on all their promises. Today, there are prototypes, but they don’t make very interesting calculations because they are so small. You have to make them bigger, and that is going to take a while. Many years, it may be 10 or 15 years, it is not known yet. What we do know is that, possibly, once we have them, society will change and give rise to applications that today are impossible to imagine.
I can think that in the fairly distant future we will have computers at our tables based on quantum physics, but I can’t imagine what they will do.
Q: What could a quantum computer do?
A: They will probably have other utilities that we could not even imagine today. 50 years ago, no one could imagine that today they would have a computer on the table with which they could send messages or file income tax returns. I imagine that something similar will happen with quantum computers, that their most important applications are yet to be discovered.
Q: How do you imagine the quantum world?
A: I have a rather ethereal, abstract image, in which things do not have a reality; reality is being written as we live it. It is like the book that is not written and that, as we look at it, is writing itself. And on the other hand, I have a very mathematical vision. Quantum physics has mathematical principles behind it that allow us, not to understand, but to predict, develop and build with it everything we want to build.
