In recent months, the world has turned its gaze to artificial intelligence (AI) and its current hit ChatGPT, flooding all forms of digital media with a wide range of ideas and theories that include all the way to the end of humanity as we know it. .

This feverish interest in artificial intelligence has blinded public opinion, preventing it from seeing the most disruptive technology in our entire history. I’m talking about quantum technology, which includes computing, simulation, sensors, optics, nanotechnology, machine learning, metrology, quantum communication and cryptography, among others.

Quantum technology is revolutionizing practically all existing and developing technologies, and as a result, all human affairs. In other words, quantum technology will push us into a new era, the quantum age.

To understand as a species what it means to enter an era dominated by quantum technologies, it is necessary to take a historical look at our evolution hand in hand with analog and digital technologies.

The first evidence of analog technologies goes back to ancient measuring systems such as length and weight in a continuous range of values, used by the ancient Egyptian civilization. Also old sundials, water and pendulum clocks that used continuous movements are a faithful reflection of analog technologies. In the 19th century, the electric telegraph appeared, and later the invention of telephony by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. Finally, in the 20th century, analog technology reached its maximum expression with radio broadcasting and analog electronics.

After a century of the analog era and when it reached its peak thanks to television, with all its problems of sensitivity to environmental noise that sabotaged the clarity of transmission and image, the development of binary computing gave birth to the first digital technologies. It is the beginning of the digital era (our era), where the basic unit of information is represented by zeros and ones (bit), which enables unprecedented speed and precision of information processing.

Now you can store large amounts of information in small spaces, as well as copy and transfer information quickly and without loss of quality. It is an age where people enjoy the Internet, e-mail, smartphone, tablet, social networks, Microchats, smart TVs, and all kinds of apps like Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, Google, WhatsApp and hundreds more.

The digital revolution has radically changed business models and the way people connect and communicate with each other. The digital age is also a hyper-connected age with massive data production shaping big data (big data).

In response to the huge amount of data and its security problems, artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly important, since it is possible to derive enormous economic and scientific benefits from this revolutionary technology.

This is where quantum technology emerges as the big new answer, as quantum computers can train AI algorithms much faster. We are talking about quantum artificial intelligence and the beginning of the quantum era.

This new era promises significant progress in terms of data processing capacity and security in its handling. Now the basic unit of information is a qubit that represents multiple states at the same time. Not as part of the digital age that can only be represented by zeros and ones.

Thanks to the phenomenon of quantum superposition and entanglement, quantum computers can perform multiple tasks at the same time, potentially allowing them to solve problems that are unsolvable by traditional digital computers.

Everything points to the fact that in the quantum era we will witness an incomparable transformation of the worldin which we will see the cure for cancer and many other diseases, the solution to the enigma of aging, the answer to climate change, the discovery of the secrets of the universe, life and much more. (OR)