Before we start on quantum
Imagine that every week for twenty years, people message you asking you to comment on the latest wolf sighting, and every week you have to tell them: I haven’t seen a wolf, I haven’t heard a wolf, I believe wolves exist but I don’t yet see evidence of them anywhere near our town.
Then one evening, you hear a howl in the distance, and sure enough, on a hill overlooking the town is the clear silhouette of a large wolf. So you point to it — and all the same people laugh and accuse you of “crying wolf.”
Now you know how it’s been for me with cryptographically relevant quantum computing.
I’ve been writing about QC on this blog for a while, and have done hundreds of public lectures and interviews and podcasts on the subject. By now, I can almost always predict where a non-expert’s QC question is going from its first few words, and have a well-rehearsed answer ready to go the moment they stop talking. Yet sometimes I feel like it’s all for naught.
Only today did it occur to me that I should write about something more basic. Not quantum computing itself, but the habits of mind that seem to prevent some listeners from hearing whatever I or other researchers have to tell them about QC. The stuff that we’re wasting our breath if we don’t get past.
Which habits of mind am I talking about?
- The Tyranny of Black and White. Hundreds of times, I’ve answered someone’s request to explain QC, only to have them nod impatiently, then interrupt as soon as they can with: “So basically, the take-home message is that quantum is coming, and it’ll change everything?” Someone else might respond to exactly the same words from me with: “So basically, you’re saying it’s all hype and I shouldn’t take any of it seriously?” As in my wolf allegory, the same person might even jump from one reaction to the other. Seeing this, I’ve become a fervent believer in horseshoe theory, in QC no less than in politics. Which sort of makes sense: if you think QCs are “the magic machines of the future that will revolutionize everything,” and then you learn that they’re not, why wouldn’t you jump to the opposite extreme and conclude you’ve been lied to and it’s all a scam?
- The Unidimensional Hype-Meter. “So … [long, thoughtful pause] … you’re actually telling me that some of what I hear about QC is real … but some of it is hype? Or—yuk yuk, I bet no one ever told you this one before—it’s a superposition of real and hype?” OK, that’s better. But it’s still trying to project everything down onto a 1-dimensional subspace that loses almost all the information!
- Words As Seasoning. I often get the sense that a listener is treating all the words of explanation—about amplitudes and interference, Shor versus Grover, physical versus logical qubits, etc.—as seasoning, filler, an annoying tic, a stalling tactic to put off answering the only questions that matter: “is Quantum real or not real? If it’s real, when is it coming? Which companies will own the Quantum space?” In reality, explanations are the entire substance of what I can offer. For my experience has consistently been that, if someone has no interest in learning what QC is, which classes of problems it helps for, etc., then even if I answer their simplistic questions like “which QC companies are good or bad?,” they won’t believe my answers anyway. Or they’ll believe my answers only until the next person comes along and tells them the opposite.
- Black-Boxing. Sometimes these days, I’ll survey the spectacular recent progress in fault-tolerance, 2-qubit gate fidelities, programmable hundred-qubit systems, etc., only to be answered with a sneer: “What’s the biggest number that Shor’s algorithm has factored? Still 15 after all these years? Haha, apparently the emperor has no clothes!” I’ve commented that this is sort of like dismissing the Manhattan Project as hopelessly stalled in 1944, on the ground that so far it hasn’t produced even a tiny nuclear explosion. Or the Apollo program in 1967, on the ground that so far it hasn’t gotten any humans even 10% of the way to the moon. Or GPT in 2020, on the ground that so far it can’t even do elementary-school math. Yes, sometimes emperors are naked—but you can’t tell until you actually look at the emperor! Engage with the specifics of quantum error correction. If there’s a reason why you think it can’t work beyond a certain scale, say so. But don’t fixate on one external benchmark and ignore everything happening under the hood, if the experts are telling you that under the hood is where all the action now is, and your preferred benchmark is only relevant later.
- Questions with Confused Premises. “When is Q-Day?” I confess that this question threw me for a loop the first few times I heard it, because I had no idea what “Q-Day” was. Apparently, it’s the single day when quantum computing becomes powerful enough to break all of cryptography? Or: “What differentiates quantum from binary?” “How will daily life be different once we all have quantum computers in our homes?” Try to minimize the number of presuppositions.
- Anchoring on Specific Marketing Claims. “What do you make of D-Wave’s latest quantum annealing announcement?” “What about IonQ’s claim to recognize handwriting with a QC?” “What about Microsoft’s claim to have built a topological qubit?” These questions can be fine as part of a larger conversation. Again and again, though, someone who doesn’t know the basics will lead with them—with whichever specific, contentious thing they most recently read. Then the entire conversation gets stuck at a deep node within the concept tree, and it can’t progress until we backtrack about five levels.
Anyway—sorry for yet another post of venting and ranting. Maybe this will help:
The wise child asks, “what are the main classes of problems that are currently known to admit superpolynomial quantum speedups?” To this child, you can talk about quantum simulation and finding hidden structures in abelian and occasionally nonabelian groups, as well as Forrelation, glued trees, HHL, and DQI—explaining how the central challenge has been to find end-to-end speedups for non-oracular tasks.
The wicked child asks, “so can I buy a quantum computer right now to help me pick stocks and search for oil and turbocharge LLMs, or is this entire thing basically a fraud?” To this child you answer: “the quantum computing people who seek you as their audience are frauds.”
The simple child asks, “what is quantum computing?” You answer: “it’s a strange new way of harnessing nature to do computation, one that dramatically speeds up certain tasks, but doesn’t really help with others.”
And to the child who doesn’t know how to ask—well, to that child you don’t need to bring up quantum computing at all. That child is probably already fascinated to learn classical stuff.
Follow
Comment #1 April 7th, 2026 at 7:21 am
Thanks for this post. Sadly, this superficiality applies to every kind of discourse, these days, including ones that are highly consequential such as politics, international relationships, war, and other life-or-death situations. Very depressing, but you are a bulwark which gives a glimmer of hope to humankind.
Thanks!
Comment #2 April 7th, 2026 at 7:45 am
So what you’re saying is that it’s all hype, right?
I Kidd, I Kidd 😉
Comment #3 April 7th, 2026 at 8:30 am
Very insightful yet humorous post, I snorted and nearly choked on my drink on the Q-day question. : )
On points 1 and 2, I wonder could this be an ensemble effect similar to the [Center squeeze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_squeeze)? Perhaps, individually most people are moderate, but taken as a whole appears to be unidimensionally bicolored.
I resonate a lot with 3 and 6, having been bombarded with equally silly AI questions from friends around me for almost a decade. It appears that when a field is in the vogue, people tend to feel an irresistible urge to know more about it, yet are unwilling to put in the necessary effort to understand the core details (such as take a few minutes to read Figure 7 of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05229). Interestingly/unfortunately, this negative trait is shared even by scientists (working in a different field such as high energy physics) who ought to behave better.
Comment #4 April 7th, 2026 at 8:34 am
The frustration could be because stabilizability is not discussed enough. Space flight requires a variety of things to be stabilizable (combustion for starters) before anything can lift beyond 100 m. Atom bombs have analogous requirements (shaping the initial shock wave, else even critical mass will not suffice). A discussion of the threshold theorem may help for QC before reviewing new developments. You probably already have reviewed it in your blog but there may be churn in your readership and the new guys will find it hard to see how to go from “nothing” to “something” in QC.
Comment #5 April 7th, 2026 at 9:58 am
It’s been my experience that a well-described elevator pitch for “what’s the bottom line then if I don’t understand any of this” is a part of effectively communicating research, whether we like it or not. The number of people interested in “so when does the internet break” simply far exceeds that interested in Shor versus Grover.
It’s best if you stick to true things that are still legible and get the point across. The Manhattan Project comparison for why it’s premature to be asking a lot of these questions. The fact that you’re a scientist, not a hedge fund manager or a prophet, and you’re the wrong person to ask about investment tips of the exact date of the next breakthrough. The admission that yeah, right now to tell any of it apart from snake oil, one needs to either understand or trust the science. “I understand it, so I hope you trust me when I say the science is real, even if there’s no ETA on everyone’s cryptography being broken.”
Comment #6 April 7th, 2026 at 10:36 am
Ben #5: I agree, and I’m totally willing to give people elevator-pitch bottom lines! “Yes, this would eventually break the Internet if left unfixed.” “Yes, fixes are available.” “No, this won’t happen tomorrow, but by 2030? I don’t know and neither does anyone else.” “What else is it good for? Well, quantum simulation, and hopefully some more, but finding big, clear advantages over classical for AI and optimization has been a struggle” Etc.
The trouble is, often the people will then disagree! Or I’ll see on their faces that they’re giving my bottom lines no more weight than Michio Kaku’s or whoever else is the last person they heard spout off about QC. So then it’s like, why don’t I explain this, so that you can rely not on my authority or anyone else’s but on actual object-level understanding? But maybe I should just give up at that point?
Comment #7 April 7th, 2026 at 11:58 am
I see you’re following in the footsteps of Eliezer Yudkowsky, getting so frustrated at people not understanding what you’re saying that you resort to explaining the basic principles of rationality in hope that this will help.
Comment #8 April 7th, 2026 at 12:04 pm
Scott, re your sobering #6: alas as you said none of us has access to the elusive proof-of-expertise beam, which forcefully flips the “person I am talking to actually does know what they are talking about” bit in the other person’s brain. Indeed many people sadly do not properly care about that bit and whether it has been properly set or not. I don’t pretend I have a solution for this. The two leads I can _maybe_ think of are:
1. The approach one might colloquially refer to as ‘More Dakka’. Dropping some other big names at the forefront of science and industry and saying “ask them, they’ll tell you the same thing.” Brute forcing the skepticism into submission with zero ground-level facts, in the venerable style of Twitter. I understand why you do not find this so appealing, though maybe this kind of thing is regrettably the price of admission to the battleground of ideas in this day and age.
2. Pulling off an actual “explain the object level stuff like I’m 5” as you alluded to. This is deceivingly difficult. I’ve written a few explainers regarding cryptographic attacks for moderately non-technical audiences, much simpler stuff than what you’re dealing with here, and the pressures and constraints regarding what to simplify, what to cut, how to communicate the essence of it were still close to unbearable. I’m convinced it’s possible for QC and would make a positive difference, but I’m not so sure even that would go all the way to solving the problem! The world is full of controversies where the object level has been very clearly explained, and yet somehow experts still have to deal with the exact reaction you described.
Comment #9 April 7th, 2026 at 2:20 pm
Itai Bar-Natan #7:
I see you’re following in the footsteps of Eliezer Yudkowsky, getting so frustrated at people not understanding what you’re saying that you resort to explaining the basic principles of rationality in hope that this will help.
LOL, I had exactly that thought while writing the post!
This wouldn’t even be the first instance where I reached similar conclusions as Eliezer did, but took 20 years longer to do so. 😀
Comment #10 April 7th, 2026 at 10:07 pm
“Just cherry pick specific subclasses of specific problems and lo and behold! INSTANT speedups”
Yeah I don’t have to get all quantumy to do THAT. I can do integer factorization in LOGARITHMIC TIME!!! WOOOO!!! Look at MEEE!!! As long as that integer is a power of 2 (or n or whatever). YAHOOOO
Basically the same thing
Comment #11 April 8th, 2026 at 12:00 am
Your ‘wise child’ is really just a vehicle for indirect self-promotion.
Comment #12 April 8th, 2026 at 6:39 am
beeefer #10: Your comment confuses speedups of instance-tailored classical algorithms over generic classical algorithms, with speedups of quantum algorithms over all possible classical algorithms for the same instances. The latter are inherently more interesting, although yes, obviously more so the more the speedup is for something someone cares about. That’s why Shor’s algorithm was such a big deal for the wider world, because it breaks much of the encryption that the world actually uses (not just that it hypothetically could use).
Comment #13 April 8th, 2026 at 6:42 am
Rainer #11: You could argue that the wise child of the original Passover Haggadah is “just a vehicle for promoting the Haggadah’s messages.” In general, it’s really hard to say what you think is true without someone accusing you of “self-promotion.”
Comment #14 April 8th, 2026 at 8:10 am
Scott,
The 4 major fields that have seen lots of interest have similar traits
1. AGI
2. Fusion power
3. QC
4. Curing cancer.
All have been victims of high expectations and misses, decades long ups and downs. And today’s state of the art is nowhere near achieving the goal, until an unknown breakthrough is achieved. There has been quite a bit of incremental progress for sure, which also has given the impression of a breakthrough and the subsequent hype. Compare this to the LHC development, the Higgs boson was pretty much a sure shot, one of the reason such a high investment was taken up by state funding(and fission power in the first nuclear era). Until the threshold is crossed ( i.e. the breakthrough needed is known and feasible ) to achieve the goal, the opinions will oscillate in the entire spectrum of scepticism to utopia, and should be expected.
Comment #15 April 8th, 2026 at 9:37 am
Ben #8: Regarding 2, lets not forget Scott’s guest contribution on https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3 🙂
Comment #16 April 8th, 2026 at 12:13 pm
Hello Professor Aaronson,
I could really feel the mixture of long-built frustration and dark humor in your post — especially the “wolf” analogy. The image of finally seeing the clear silhouette of the wolf on the hill after years of warnings immediately reminded me of Ennio Morricone’s iconic soundtrack for Sergio Leone’s *The Good, the Bad and the Ugly*. The lonely howl in the distance, the vast empty landscape, the slow-building tension, and the sudden dramatic reveal — it all felt surprisingly fitting for the story of cryptographically relevant quantum computing. One almost expects Clint Eastwood to appear next to the wolf, squinting into the sunset.
As someone who has been learning quantum computing on my own for the past five years while working in software development for 35 years, your post hit close to home.
I still remember trying to explain what I had learned to a colleague. I told him something like: “It’s not classical programming — it’s more like designing custom circuits with gates, and if the underlying math is correct, it can solve certain problems much faster than today’s computers…” Before I could finish, he enthusiastically completed the sentence for me: “…by running all possibilities in parallel!”
At the time I didn’t feel confident enough to push back strongly. I only replied that the “parallelism” idea wasn’t quite that simple. Even though I had to dust off quite a bit of linear algebra to understand the actual math, that magical parallelism narrative is still very much alive in many conversations I hear.
What struck me most in your post is the importance of focusing on improving the algorithm – that is, designing better circuits – rather than simply adding more qubits. In my software engineering experience, throwing more hardware at a problem rarely solves the real challenge, you always need solid theory behind it. I suspect the same principle applies strongly in quantum computing.
By the way, I strongly laughed at your line about the “superposition of real and hype” — it was both funny and painfully accurate. How easy is falling into that trapdoor.
Your post made me realize how common (and how sticky) these oversimplified mental models are — even among technically educated people. It encouraged me to be more careful with my own explanations going forward and to strive to become the “wise child” rather than falling into black-and-white thinking.
Thank you again for continuing to push back against the hype cycles and for writing with such clarity and honesty. It really helps people like me who are trying to learn properly.
Comment #17 April 8th, 2026 at 3:25 pm
Scott, you are an incredible resource and educator on top of your long list of accolades. I understand that your accomplishments mean that your time is now very limited as we all ask more and more of you to help solve problems.
You should have a special way to suggest people ask for the unscripted answer because what if their question really is about information theory rather than clout. What happens when a curious person who is on their journey has a subtle question, but the dot product of that vector is suspiciously close to a question that has a canned answer?
I can also imagine the scripted repository has been deployed because you’re working on a paper, or five, and the calories are going there! Looking forward to the next ones
Comment #18 April 9th, 2026 at 12:04 am
Gemini says 4 to 48 logical qubit FTQCs are available based on 100’s of physical qubits and is the SOTA. Neven’s law says 2^(2^n) scaling for QC logical qubit density. So we see ECC gone in 3\\pm0.3 years by https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2%5E%282%5En%29%3E100?
Comment #19 April 9th, 2026 at 12:49 am
But there is a Q day…
Q day for Nuclear tech was not the Manhattan test, it was Hiroshima…
When will someone die because a technology allowed a bad actor (including nation states) to cause them harm?
When do we see low grade cryptography used in some non critical tech, but critical to a persons livelihood be broken by someone using a device available to all (for example Claude Opus 4.6 finding critical vulnerabilities)
Hiroshima was 75 years ago – but we dont have more nuclear reactors than nuclear ICBMs.
Whats the chances that QC or so called AGI wont just become another item to use in an arsenal in endless oneupmanship and conflict.