Comment by YouWhy
7 hours ago
Re the "Manhattan project in 1944" argument - I am very cautious about the "modulo engineering scaling" carve-out -- unlike the uranium manufacturing pipeline of World War 2, that involved massively scaling up a known process, on the face of it there's no uncontroversial process/architecture to scale up in this case.
On the face of it, even relatively "point-target" goals of this kind could take many decades if at all; GaN for blue diodes come in mind as an example of a field that was stuck for a generation -- until it wasn't.
> I am very cautious about the "modulo engineering scaling" carve-out
As OP said elsewhere[0, 1]:
> Once you understand quantum fault-tolerance, asking “so when are you going to factor 35 with Shor’s algorithm?” becomes sort of like asking the Manhattan Project physicists in 1943, “so when are you going to produce at least a small nuclear explosion?”
In other words (IIUC): Some problems (here: scaling fault tolerance) seem to be easier than others.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47959531 for a very similar quote.