{"id":6670,"date":"2022-08-29T10:03:49","date_gmt":"2022-08-29T15:03:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=6670"},"modified":"2022-08-29T15:18:20","modified_gmt":"2022-08-29T20:18:20","slug":"that-financial-times-qc-skepticism-piece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=6670","title":{"rendered":"That Financial Times QC skepticism piece"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Several people have asked me to comment about a Financial Times<\/em> opinion piece entitled The Quantum Computing Bubble<\/a> (subtitle: “The industry has yet to demonstrate any real utility, despite the fanfare, billions of VC dollars and three Spacs”) (archive link<\/a>). The piece is purely deflationary—not a positive word in it—though it never goes so far as to suggest that QC is blocked by any Gil-Kalai-like fundamental principle, nor does it even evince curiosity about that question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As it happens, the author, physicist Nikita Gourianov, had emailed me a few days ago with some nice words about my own skeptical efforts on Shtetl-Optimized<\/em>, and a request for comment on his article. So, as a way to get back into blogging after a 2-week hiatus, I figured I’d share my respoinse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Hi Nikita,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks for the kind words about my blog, and for your piece, which I just read.\u00a0 There\u2019s a great deal of truth in what you write, but I also take issue with a few points.\u00a0 You say:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A convincing strategy for overcoming these errors has not yet been demonstrated, making it unclear as to when \u2014 if ever \u2014 it will become possible to build a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In one sense this is tautologically true \u2014 the only fully convincing and clear demonstration that something is possible is to do it, as with the Wright brothers or the Trinity nuclear test.  In other sense, though, we\u2019ve known the \u201cstrategy\u201d since the 1990s.  It\u2019s just that the fault-tolerance theorem called for gate fidelities 5-6 orders of magnitude better than anything achievable at the time.  In the 25 years since, about 3 of those orders of magnitude have been achieved, so it doesn\u2019t take any great imagination to foresee that the remainder could be as well.  A layperson reading your piece might not understand this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for applications, my position has always been that if there were zero<\/em> applications, it would still be at least as scientifically important to try to build QCs as it was to build the LHC, LIGO, or the James Webb telescope.\u00a0 If there are<\/em> real applications, such as simulating chemical dynamics, or certifiable randomness \u2014 and there very well might be \u2014 then those are icing on the cake.\u00a0 This, of course, radically differs from the vision that now gets presented to investors and the press (hence all the railing on my blog!), but it also differs from what a reader of your piece would take away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, thanks again for sharing!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Best,
Scott<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several people have asked me to comment about a Financial Times opinion piece entitled The Quantum Computing Bubble (subtitle: “The industry has yet to demonstrate any real utility, despite the fanfare, billions of VC dollars and three Spacs”) (archive link). The piece is purely deflationary—not a positive word in it—though it never goes so far […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[4,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quantum","category-speaking-truth-to-parallelism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6670"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6672,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6670\/revisions\/6672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}