Present at the Future (32 page)

Internet experts call this the “Balkanizing effect,” the creation of destinations on the Internet that are off-limits to others. One prime example, says Wu, is China. “The Chinese government, to a degree which wasn’t true in the early Internet, has imposed the level of watchfulness and control over the Internet which is somewhat unprecedented.” Balkanization is often at the country level. “Countries have different ideas of what they would like the Internet to be,” and so the Chinese seek to control what their citizens can see on the Web or where they can surf. Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman of Harvard University Law School tested the Internet filtering capabilities of the Chinese government in 2002 and found almost 20,000 Web sites that were accessible from the United States but were not accessible from China. The sites ranged from those of the American Cancer Society and the MIT Alumni Association to the Irish Chronicle site and the official Web site of the state of Mississippi.

Wu does not quite see Balkanization as a threat but rather as a phenomenon, particularly at the country level. “It’s not that countries won’t be able to talk to each other; it’s just that they will talk to each other less. When the Internet was much smaller a decade ago, there were only so many people on it, and so everybody always talked to each other. It’s becoming more and more of a national medium. So the Internet in Germany and in France is in German or in French,” or in China it’s in Chinese and in Japan it’s in Japanese. It just takes on more national characteristics.

“It’s not necessarily bad. Japanese people love using the Internet from their strange-looking cell phones,” Wu says. Chinese people, for some reason, love chat rooms. Americans love blogs. They just like saying what they want to say. And so the different countries are kind of shaping the Internet to their own culture. It used to be a medium that was floating in outer space, and [when] you went there, you became this netizen.” Now it’s becoming part of national cultures. “And I don’t necessarily think that’s a crisis. I think that’s kind of natural, and I think that over the [next] 10 years, we’ll see more of that.”

REDESIGN?

The Internet is facing challenges that its original designers never dreamed of, says Horrigan, like the mobile devices that didn’t exist decades ago at the dawn of the Internet. “Originally the Internet assumed that the things that connected to it, the computers, were always plugged in, they never move. And clearly none of that’s true today, because we are a very mobile world and we have mobile devices and we have very small embedded devices that are going to be connected to the Internet very soon.” In addition, the rapid growth of video-sharing sites, such as YouTube, places great stresses on the Internet never envisioned by its inventors. “It’s these sorts of assumptions that are starting to break down and causing people to think if we stood back and had a chance to design this thing over again, how would we do it?”

One of the strengths of the Internet design, says Wu, is that it really hasn’t been optimized for anything. “When it began it was used for e-mail and bulletin boards, and the World Wide Web grew on top of it, and then instant messaging grew on top of it, chat rooms grew on top of it, Google. All these things grew and grew and grew, and even phone service has been replicated. So that original design turned out to be a lot sturdier than people thought. And the question is whether it’s possible to improve on it.

“The Internet was something that we were able to tinker with and innovate with at one point, and it’s now such a commercial success that we aren’t able to do that,” says Horrigan, speaking for Internet designers and researchers. “So we naturally gravitate toward the places that we can innovate, which is on top of the Internet.”

And there are a lot of people who believe that the Internet is just fine and that we will just go off and build new services on top of it. But the real debate gets down to can we, in fact, solve all the problems that we foresee by only working on top of today’s Internet? Or do we really have to reconsider how it’s designed at the core?

One of those problems that seems to never go away is ability to use the structure of the Internet’s network of computers to launch cyber attacks—to attack someone’s computer and bring it down. Take a recent cyber attack on CNN.com, says Peterson, where hackers “commandeered a thousand ‘zombies,’ machines that were infiltrated around the world, and were made to start sending traffic to CNN.com. Such a load was put on their system that no one else could get to it. The CNN Web site and its services and employees were effectively shut down. This is a common cyber attack called ‘denial of service.’

“That problem is an impossible one to make go away by building on top of the Internet, because there’s already access to the underside of the Internet [so] that you can still send those packets. And so if all you can provide [is to] enhance services on top, it’s very difficult to correct something that’s inside,” says Peterson.

“There’s always this debate,” says Wu, “as to whether things can be improved on top of the Internet or whether you have to rip up the highway and fix it that way.” Wu says it’s not wise to rip it up and start over. The Internet’s original, very simple design has a lot of utility left in it. “I’ll give you one example. When I worked in the telecom industry, no one ever thought the Internet would be useful for phone service, for dialing people up. Everyone thought, It’s just a lousy design; it’ll never be useful. But with the right amount
of bandwidth, companies like Skype and other [Voice over Internet Protocol] companies have been very successful. It’s really surprised a lot of engineers.

“Sometimes it’s very hard to improve on simplicity. I’m not a security expert, and I think maybe security [like cyber attacks] is one area where it’s hard [to improve]. But it has been surprising: video, voice, blogging, search engines, all these things have been built on top of a very simple design, which just says keep the Internet dumb and let the intelligence run at the edges.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THE UNIVERSE AS COMPUTER

If quantum mechanics were a singer it would be James Brown. Quantum mechanics is the James Brown of sciences.

—SETH LLOYD

What is the ultimate computer? The biggest, baddest calculating machine we could ever produce? When futurists talk computers, they inevitably focus on the computer of their dreams (drumroll, please): the quantum computer.

And they have a good model of just how powerful such a computer could be: the universe itself.

Yes, believe it or not, “the universe is computing,” says Dr. Seth Lloyd, professor of quantum mechanical engineering at MIT and author of Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos. From the very beginning of time to the present day, the universe has been creating itself in much the same way that a quantum computer works. “These little tiny quantum fluctuations that tell the universe to do this or that say, ‘Let’s form a galaxy here,
or let’s split this piece of DNA here over in this other place’—these little accidents programmed the universe.

“And it’s this process of programming the universe with quantum fluctuations that gives rise to the computation we see around us, which produces all sorts of complexity and structure and beautiful things and horrible things, and most of all, amazing things.”

HACKING THE UNIVERSE

Lloyd’s understanding of the universe as a quantum computer stems from building tiny laboratory quantum computers for almost a decade and “coaxing individual atoms and photons to store bits and to compute and watching them work their magic. And in doing that, I realized that essentially, not only the atoms that we’re trying to build quantum computers out of but [also] every single atom out there, and every photon, every electron, every elementary particle carries with it bits of information. And whenever they collide or bonk off of each other, those bits flip. So the universe is actually already computing, and it’s storing information in the microscopic motions of everything—the vibrations of the air, the vibrations of radio waves—and every time those vibrations change or those bits flip, the universe is computing. That’s why we can build quantum computers. We’re actually hacking into the ongoing computation that the universe is performing.”

Only a physicist—or should I say “ultimate geek”?—would brag about hacking the universe. Lloyd says that if we can just get a handle on how all these calculations are made by the universe, how to coax the molecules and atoms and photons of our universe, how the universe did that to make everything that we have now—we’ll understand much more about computers and maybe even be able to build a giant quantum computer someday for ourselves.

“In fact, in order to understand the way in which the universe computes, we actually have to build quantum computers. If you talk to them very nicely and ask them very politely, essentially by shining radio waves on them, you can get those bits to flip and to perform computations. But you can’t make them compute unless you understand very well how nature is computing already.”

The idea that every atom in the universe registers bits of information dates back into the latter part of the nineteenth century. “This was a discovery made by the great statistical mechanisms [of ] James Clerk Maxwell in Cambridge and Edinburgh, Ludwig Boltzmann in
Vienna, and Josiah Willard Gibbs at Yale—they came up with the formulas to describe this funky quantity called entropy. Which, till then, had been known as merely something that stuck up the wheels of steam engines and caused them to do less work than you might want them to do. They realized that entropy had to do with the microscopic motions of atoms and molecules, and, phrased in modern terms, the formulas they came up with to describe it meant that entropy was the number of bits of information required to describe the motions of these atoms and molecules. And then Boltzmann went and constructed his equation, called the Boltzmann equation, which actually describes how those bits flip when molecules and atoms collide.

IT’S NOT YOUR AVERAGE PC

Lloyd’s laboratory quantum computers are very crude, made out of about a dozen atoms strung together in a molecule. And they don’t work at all like your PC or Mac. “Quantum computers don’t run Windows yet. In fact they run something more like Linux, a very basic version of Linux.”

Your PC works by breaking up the information you type in, speak, or put in with your joystick when you’re playing Tetris. “It busts it up into the smallest possible components called bits. A bit is a distinction between a zero or a one, or in a computer, a switch that’s open or closed, or yes or no, on or off, heads or tails. It’s the smallest possible chunk of information. In a conventional computer, a bit can be stored by pouring a bunch of electrons into a bucket called a capacitor.”

That bucketful of electrons would represent a 1. When you empty that bucketful, the empty bucket would represent a 0. So you’ve switched the bit from a 1 to a 0, the binary language of computing.

CUE THE QUBITS

A quantum computer works by moving electrons around too. But instead of a whole bucketful of them, to represent a 1 you just have
a single electron. That’s not so strange; it’s just taking the ordinary notion of how a bit is stored in your PC and shrinking it down to the level of a single electron.

But then something very funky happens next, because quantum mechanics is very weird. It’s very counterintuitive and strange: One of the central counterintuitive features is that an electron can be both here and there at the same time.

That’s not a misprint. In quantum mechanics an electron can be both here and there at the same time. Don’t ask how; no one knows. Just take it on faith, or rather on science. It’s been tested and proven over and over again to be true. “If quantum mechanics were a singer, it would be James Brown. Quantum mechanics is the James Brown of sciences,” says Lloyd.

“So if the electron is over here—and that’s one—and the electron over there is zero, then the electron is here and there at the same time, in some funky quantum mechanical sense. That’s a bit that registers zero and one at the same time, a so-called quantum bit, or qubit [pronounced cue-bit].”

Now how do you make use of that if you don’t know which one it is? Don’t we have to know where the bit or qubit is a 1 or 0 to store data?

“If only life were so certain, that would be great,” Lloyd says. “In fact, sometimes not knowing what’s going on is helpful. I certainly find that in my own research. And quantum computers use that in a very simple but nice way, but still counterintuitive, to do things classical computers can’t.

“And a good way to think of this is to imagine what does a bit mean? A bit on its own doesn’t mean anything: zero, one, yes, or no. It depends on what it does.” A bit may also represent an instruction. “So a bit in a computer could tell the computer [to] add two plus two. Or tell the computer to add three plus one. And if you take a quantum computer and you feed in this funky quantum bit, this qubit that reads zero and one at the same time, then it instructs the
quantum computer to do this and to do that at the same time. Say, to add two plus two and to add three plus one at the same time. That’s something no classical computer could ever do.”

This multitasking—the ability to do many things at the same time—is what gives quantum computing its real power. “The ability to do many things at once allows the quantum computer to explore many, many, many more possibilities than any classical computer could,” says Lloyd.

BREAKING THE CODES

And just what do you do with all of this computer power?

“Code breaking is the killer app of quantum computation,” Lloyd says. Killer app is another geeky phrase, a high-tech rendering of the ultimate computer program—that is, the killer application, the one so good that it does away with all the competition. Get it? We’ll let Lloyd illustrate. “With a relatively small quantum computer with a few tens of thousands or hundred thousands of qubits able to form a few billion operations—which is peanuts for an ordinary computer—you would be able to break all the public key codes that are used, for instance, to send information securely over the Internet. And it’s not surprising that the NSA [National Security Agency] and the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and other three-letter agencies are very interested in quantum computers.”