Comment by bawolff
2 days ago
You should stop viewing it as a tech start up and view it more as a physics experiment.
In some ways it is similar to fusion. People have been working on it for a long time. The benefits are potentially significant (shor is cute and all but really the big deal would be a cheap way to simulate other quantum systems) but the challenges are also significant. Real progress is being. Things that were super challanging 10 years ago are solved now. The field is advancing. But we still have a long way to go.
It is not a scam itself, but a lot of scammers use the language of quantum to sell their scams. You should treat anyone convincing you that they will have a useful quantum computer in the next 5 years the same way as someone offering you a fusion reactor (i.e. full of shit).
Its still a worthwhile pursuit, even just as a physics experiment. It pushes the "weirdness" of quantum physics to the limit - by literally disproving the extended church turing thesis. If we make a real quantum computer - that is proof that quantum physics is really how are world works. Its not just something else that is being misinterpreted.
This is exactly it. QC right now is a series of very cool science experiments that are being marketed to [Government Officials, CEOs, Investors, the General Public] as product development, which it is not. We're at the stage of scientists in the 1910s creating the first vacuum tubes and noting the ability to amplify and control small currents with larger ones but these companies are pretending it's instead the early 1980s with the PC and 8088 and Moore's Law getting ready to take off like a rocket.