Why AI threatens public key encryption (PKE), and how will that affect you? (1) What is PKE? You book your first vacation at a hotel in Hawaii. You enter your credit card number to that website. You may not be aware of it, but before your computer sends that data over the internte, it ENCRYTS it, so it won't get stolen. But here's a problem: you never met the hotel in Hawaii, so how does your computer encrypt your information so that (1) the hotel is able to *decrypt* it, and (2) no one else manages to decrypts it, even though you send it over the internet for all to see? PKE is how it's done: The hotel has two keys: - One key seals messages, and cannot open them. The hotel in Hawaii posted it and your computer used it to encrypt your credit card number. - The other key is a secret key, and it's kept with the hotel in Hawaii. Only this secret key can open messages that were sealed with the public key. (2) Enter super-AI: What's this got to do with super intelligence? All PKE schemes rely on some clean and beautiful mathematical assumption to work safely. For example: finding a divisor of a large number (say, finding out that 1,234 divides 28,495,528 with no remainder). Note: A PKE is safe only as long as the math problem remains hard. The problem is that AI got really really good at solving hard math problems. Much better than the smartest human mathematician, and it's already shocked mathematicians by showing that what they considered hard problems are not that hard to solve. (3) How will that affect all of us? What if AI shows us that each of the math problems underlying PKE is not that hard to solve? It'll be a huge earthquake. I'll repeat: IT'LL BE A HUGE EARTHQUAKE. We won't be able to rely on them to order our next vacation (in Bali), or to buy stuff from a new online store, or for a million things we do today. If PKE math is easy to solve, the Internet will need to rush pretty quickly to find new ways of doing business without PKE, without sending private information to counter parties. The good news: you can do that, using things like ZK STARKs and hash functions and digital signatures based on them. So it's a bit like a big meteor hitting earth. Dinosaurs go bust but some creatures survive and thrive.
