Devs (2020) Uses Quantum Computing and Encryption Concepts, Fact-Checked

Alex Garland's 2020 FX series Devs centers on a tech company called Amaya that builds a quantum computer capable of projecting images of the past and future. The show name-drops real physics. It references the many-worlds interpretation, the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory, and quantum decoherence. It also gets central claims wrong in ways that matter for anyone trying to understand what quantum computers actually do.

The show's central conceit is that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer can deterministically predict the future. This conflates two separate ideas: determinism (the philosophical position that future events are fixed by prior causes) and predictability (the practical ability to compute those events). Quantum computing gives you neither. What quantum computers do give you, and what poses a genuine threat to cryptography, is something the show never mentions: Shor's algorithm.

You can experiment with the RSA Encrypt/Decrypt tool to see the encryption that Shor's algorithm targets.

Devs follows Lily Chan, a software engineer at Amaya, as she investigates the death of her boyfriend Sergei. Sergei had been working on a quantum computer inside a sealed, gold-lined chamber called "Devs." The machine, we are told, uses a deterministic extension of quantum mechanics to project images of the past and future. Garland frames this around the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave interpretation, which is a real theory proposed by Louis de Broglie in 1927 and extended by David Bohm in 1952.

In pilot wave theory, particles always have definite positions, and a "guidance wave" determines their trajectories. The theory is deterministic. It reproduces the same statistical predictions as standard (Copenhagen) quantum mechanics but without wave function collapse. The show also references the many-worlds interpretation, proposed by Hugh Everett III in 1957. In many-worlds, every quantum event branches the universe into parallel histories. There is no collapse. Both pilot wave and many-worlds are legitimate interpretations, and physicists debate them seriously.

David Albert, a philosopher of physics at Columbia University, consulted on the show and appears in a cameo. His involvement grounds some of the physics dialogue in real theory. The problem is not the references. The problem is what the show builds on top of them. The machine in Devs does not just interpret quantum mechanics differently. It uses quantum computing to achieve omniscience, which is a category error. A quantum computer is a physical device that exploits superposition to solve specific computational problems faster than classical computers. It is not a crystal ball.

The show gets a few things correct. Quantum decoherence is real, and the show's depiction of it as the obstacle to maintaining stable quantum states is accurate. Decoherence is what happens when a quantum system interacts with its environment and loses its coherent superposition. This is the single biggest engineering challenge in building real quantum computers. IBM Quantum maintains public documentation on coherence times and error rates for their superconducting qubit systems, and the numbers are measured in microseconds. The show's gold-lined chamber, designed to shield the quantum computer from environmental interference, is a dramatization of a real requirement: quantum processors must be isolated from thermal, electromagnetic, and vibrational noise.

The show also correctly states that quantum computers use superposition. A qubit can exist in a superposition of 0 and 1, and a register of n qubits can represent 2^n states simultaneously. This is real. Where the show goes wrong is in what it claims this enables. Superposition allows quantum computers to perform certain parallel computations through interference, not to "see" all possible futures. The interference pattern is the output. You measure it and get a single result. You do not get a movie of the future.

The show's visual representation of the projection machine, showing grainy images that sharpen as the system collects more data, is a reasonable artistic choice. It does not correspond to any real quantum computing process, but it communicates the narrative idea without pretending to be a technical diagram.

The show's biggest error is conflating determinism with predictability. Pilot wave theory is deterministic in the sense that particle trajectories are fully specified by initial conditions and the guiding wave. But "deterministic" does not mean "computable in practice." Chaos theory established that deterministic systems can be practically unpredictable: the Lorenz system, fluid turbulence, and the three-body problem are all deterministic and all produce behavior that cannot be projected far into the future because of exponential sensitivity to initial conditions. Even if the universe is deterministic at the quantum level, that says nothing about whether a computer can predict macroscopic events like human conversations or stock prices.

The show also implies that a quantum computer's ability to represent many states simultaneously translates into an ability to simulate the future. It does not. Quantum computers solve specific problems by engineering interference patterns that amplify the correct answer and cancel out wrong ones. This works for factoring integers (Shor's algorithm), searching unstructured databases (Grover's algorithm), and simulating quantum systems. It does not work for arbitrary prediction. There is no quantum algorithm that takes "the current state of the world" as input and outputs "what happens tomorrow."

The de Broglie-Bohm theory the show leans on is also nonlocal. It requires instantaneous influence between particles regardless of distance, which means the guiding wave encodes information about the entire universe. Even if you accepted this interpretation, computing the guidance wave for a macroscopic system would require knowing the positions of every particle in the universe. The show never addresses this. Forest, the CEO character, simply builds a bigger computer and the images get clearer. That is not how computational complexity works. The gap between "the universe is deterministic" and "we can compute the future" is not a matter of engineering scale. It is a matter of information theory and chaos.

The actual cryptographic threat from quantum computers is Shor's algorithm, published by Peter Shor in 1994. Shor's algorithm factors integers and computes discrete logarithms in polynomial time on a quantum computer. No classical algorithm is known to do this efficiently. The security of RSA encryption depends on the difficulty of factoring the product of two large primes. The security of ECDSA signatures and Diffie-Hellman key exchange depends on the difficulty of the discrete logarithm problem. Shor's algorithm breaks all three.

The algorithm works by reducing factoring to a period-finding problem, then using the quantum Fourier transform to find the period exponentially faster than any known classical method. The quantum Fourier transform exploits superposition and interference to evaluate many frequencies simultaneously and concentrate amplitude on the correct one. This is the real power of quantum computing: not seeing all futures, but solving specific algebraic problems that underpin public-key cryptography.

A fault-tolerant quantum computer with enough logical qubits could break RSA-2048 in hours. Current estimates, based on research from NIST's Post-Quantum Cryptography project, put the requirement at roughly 20 million physical qubits with current error correction overhead. IBM's largest publicly known processor in 2026 has on the order of 1,000 qubits. The gap between current hardware and a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is large but narrowing. NIST published its first post-quantum cryptography standards in August 2024 (FIPS 203, 204, and 205), formalizing lattice-based algorithms that resist Shor's algorithm. The show never mentions any of this. The real quantum threat to encryption is not a philosophical thought experiment about determinism. It is a specific algorithm with a specific mathematical structure, and the cryptography community has been responding to it for over a decade.

Devs is effective television. Garland uses quantum physics to explore free will, grief, and determinism, and the show works as drama. The problem is that viewers may come away thinking quantum computers are prediction engines. They are not. They are specialized processors that outperform classical computers on a narrow set of problems, most of which involve algebraic structure.

The show also never addresses the cryptographic implications of quantum computing, which is the area where quantum computers actually intersect with real-world security. If Amaya had built a machine capable of running Shor's algorithm at scale, the consequence would not be seeing the future. It would be the collapse of RSA, ECDSA, and Diffie-Hellman, which together secure most internet traffic, banking systems, and digital signatures. That is a more concrete and more alarming scenario than anything the show depicts, and it is already driving a multi-billion-dollar migration to post-quantum cryptography.

For anyone interested in the real science, the NIST PQC competition page documents the standardization process. IBM's Quantum Learning resources cover the actual algorithms. Neither of them will help you predict the future, but both will explain why every major government and tech company is racing to replace RSA before a sufficiently large quantum computer arrives. If you want to see the encryption that is at stake, the RSA Encrypt/Decrypt tool demonstrates key generation and encryption using the Web Crypto API, and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange tool shows the protocol that protects most of your web traffic today. Read the post-quantum cryptography overview for the full picture of how the migration is unfolding.