As Yogie Bera is said to have mused, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future" (although I'm not sure why you'd want to make predictions about the past...?). The truth is, no one knows exactly what will happen in the future, and no one but God knows when the final curtain will drop on our little portion of the stage, but the future will arrive and be made plain to see soon enough.
Until then, it's a lot of fun to speculate (insert grin...=). We don't need to speculate on AI and Quantum computers, however, because they are already in our midst. AI—Artificial Intelligence—always brings to mind movies like I, Robot, where the robot has reached the level of sentience and is smarter, better, and really cute as though toy merchandising was in mind. Or movies like The Terminator, where the robots are evil and want to destroy mankind. At present, we don't have either one, but we do have mega computers running AI software which can scan, identify through facial recognition, identify through body movements like gate and mannerisms, track, and file reams of data on locations visited, emails/messages sent, phone apps used, pictures taken, all your fashion/ family/ fan/ film/ flag/ flight/ food/ friend/ foe/ follow/ football/ forceful/ fractious/ freakish/ fun/ furry preferences (and that's just the "f's"). In short, they are collecting absolutely everything they can about you in order to sell this information to the highest bidder, and if that highest bidder be government or other corporations, so be it.
Quantum computers, on the other hand, are not normal computer chips with hard drives, they use "quantum mechanics," not chip circuitry. A regular computer uses a series of 0s and 1s to store information. Quantum computers use qubits (quantum bits), which is the "state" of an atom, not a harddrive, and each qubit can exist in multiple states. As we get deeper into this, it becomes almost absurdly complex, but suffice it to say that all this takes place at a molecular level, not a mechanical level as it does in harddrives. Currently quantum computers need to operate at absolute zero ( —460º F ) or even colder, so don't expect one on your desktop or in your backpack any time soon, but the likes of Google and other megatech corporations have the earliest working prototypes.
Why would Google want one? Easy: quantum computers can hold and analyze billions of logic operations around 100 million times faster than a traditional computer. That means they can scan, identify through facial recognition, identify through body movements like gate and mannerisms, track, and file reams of data on locations visited, emails/messages sent, phone apps used, pictures taken, all your fashion/ family/ fan/ film/ flag/ flight/ food/ friend/ foe/ follow/ football/ forceful/ fractious/ freakish/ fun/ furry preferences and everything you do while it's happening, not after the fact. The Chinese want to combine this type of computing power with AI to be able to predict behavior in order to prevent crimes (can we say, Minority Report ?) If you connect the dots with statements by law professors from Harvard and the University of Arizona in an Atlantic article praising social media censorship and suggestiong the only reason big tech corporations did so was because the government failed to censor, it does give one pause.
Are the predictions of The Terminator and other such dystopian nightmares will come true? Some scientists like Stuart Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, and Carl Shulman think so. In their 2013 article for the FHI (Future of Humanity Institute) Report, "Racing to the Precipice: a Model of Artificial Intelligence Development" they suggested that the current model of believing risk-taking is more important than skill in developing AI magnifies the potential problems downstream. I tend to agree that the heart of man being deceitful above all things (Jeremiah 17:9) combined with the love of money being the root of all kinds of evil (1 Timothy 6:10), and the notion that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, can use AI + Quantum computers to bring about the type of government the likes of which world has never seen, described in the books of Daniel, Matthew, 2 Thessalonians, and Revelation.
I don't want to ask the question most heard on trips by parents, "Are we there yet?" As suggested above, no one knows on this side of heaven. Jesus did say, however, "From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts out its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see all these things, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away" (Matthew 24:32-35).
