James Heappey, the UK Minister of the Armed Services, made the comments at the Global Air & Space Chiefs' Conference.
LONDON—The aircraft on display at the Royal International Air Tattoo (RIAT) this weekend all lack a quantum computing system, and if they cannot quickly take on board the emerging technology when it becomes available they risk becoming obsolete, a UK minister says.
“I’m conscious that all of you are off for an orgy of technology and kit and noise down in Gloucester,” said James Heappey, the UK Minister of the Armed Services, speaking July 13 at the Global Air & Space Chiefs’ Conference here.
But he urged the audience of air and space chiefs and their staffs to not get too excited about the technology on display or even the next generation of fighters in development if they lack the ability to harness the power of quantum computing in the future.
“The danger is in that the generation of planes that we will be sold at Fairford over the next 72 hr., none of them have quantum computing in yet,” Heappey said. “All of them will be in service when quantum computing arrives.”
Quantum computing remains in early development, but proposes to revolutionize the power of computers by exploiting quantum phenomena to make enormous calculations quickly and efficiently.
“When those computers, instead of computing ones and zeros they are computing on atoms,” Heappey continued, “then the vastness of the noise of the ocean, or the vastness of the business of the skies or the vastness of everything that’s happening with a human population on land can be understood and crunched by computers that are working at a speed that we can’t imagine. It will enormously change what our armed forces can do. And we’ve got to be ready to spiral that into our machines when that moment comes.”
Heappey compared the impact of quantum computing in military operations to the arrival of the tank and the machine gun.
“We have to be able to buy aircraft, design aircraft where the moment that those computers are good to go, you can rip out whatever is there and chuck in the quantum computer,” Heappey said. “I think this is going to change warfare in the most profound way.”
