Aziz Huq Considers a Potential 2025 ‘Black Swan’ Event: a Breakthrough in Quantum Computing

The Incredible, World-Altering ‘Black Swan’ Events That Could Upend Life in 2025

January 3, 2025 POLITICO Magazine

2024 often felt manic, with assassination attempts on Donald Trump, war in the Middle East and the implosion of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. But there’s no reason to think 2025 will be any calmer.

That’s not just because Trump is likely to preside over a volatile second term in the White House. Based on his first term, that is to be expected. But there will also, undoubtedly, be unexpected shocks that no one can predict in advance.

So we asked an array of thinkers — futurists, scientists, foreign policy analysts and others — to lay out some of the possible “Black Swan” events that could await us in the new year: What are the unpredictable, unlikely episodes that aren’t yet on the radar but would completely upend American life as we know it?

Our experts floated all sorts of catastrophes, from the threat of AI to deadly epidemics, but they also raised the notion of progress, including in some surprising global hotspots.

The following scenarios may or may not take place in 2025, but they shouldn’t immediately be dismissed. When we undertook this exercise last year, a number of predictions proved eerily prescient.

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‘Decisive Breakthrough in Quantum Computing’

BY AZIZ HUQ

Aziz Huq teaches law at the University of Chicago and is the author of The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies.

Science fiction offers startlingly accurate premonitions of what the rest of us, mired in the everyday, fail to see coming. Think of Emily St. John Mandel’s modern plague novel Station 11, published before the Covid pandemic. Or in Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin’s The Private Eye, where a different plague sweeps over America: Information security breaks and all private data becomes public.

Vaughan and Martin’s story is brought to mind by recent news of quantum computing breakthroughs, first in China and then by Google stateside. Realizing a practicable quantum computer might well render obsolete many of the cryptographic protections used to shield personal and corporate data today: Those little padlocks you see beside URLs? They would, overnight, become a fiction.

Consider then what might follow if the decisive breakthrough in quantum computing, the one that rendered it a practical reality for states and large firms, is made in China’s Tsinghua University in late 2025. Imagine it is weaponized in an ongoing trade war to strip away many of the privacy protections of Americans’ personal data. Vaughan and Martin’s brilliant tale depends on a world in which trust has evaporated. They suggest individuals and nations alike pursue a fearful isolation in its absence. Like all great science fiction, it resonates not because of the leaps of imagination taken. It resonates because it is so close to home.