Real-World Rollout

The practical effects will unfold over decades, and the first real-world steps are already underway:

• New encryption standards exist — NIST finalized its first post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024 (ML-KEM for key exchange and ML-DSA for digital signatures).
• Deployment is quiet — these will gradually replace today's encryption in browsers, phones, and banking apps through routine software updates, so most people will never notice the switch.
• AI could leap forward — quantum machine learning might tackle the hard optimization problems that slow today's models.