"The reality is that none of these companies — or any other quantum computing firm, for that matter — are actually earning any real money."
I don't see any argument that the technology is fundamentally unsound or doesn't scale, even though that's an argument I'm pretty amenable to.
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Though it is true that we don't know the degree to which we will be successful at developing this technology, and we know there are fundamental properties we will need to contend with (for better and for worst), this is entirely consistent with how "early technology" develops.
AFAIK, even "commercially oriented" quantum computing projects are better understood as being in a research stage at this time. When you do research, in general, it feels daunting and it's not at all obvious that things are going to work. (my field is biochem)
The problem is that none of this scales beyond toy systems with a hand full of qubits. As soon as you try making it bigger, everything starts falling apart. I feel like this is a fundamental difference to digital logic which is extremely easy to scale.
To be clear, there are people making sophisticated arguments for fundamental barriers to quantum computation. For instance, the quantum-skeptical mathematician Gil Kalai writes about his thoughts on recent progress on QC at (https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2022/05/26/waging-war-on-quan...). His view is considerably more nuanced than this FT article, and much more conducive to learning and discussion. I hope you take the time to read it, and I think I'll submit this to HN main as well.
2. It is worth mentioning that by the standards of your comment, the time between conceiving of a classical computer (Babbage) and a scalable electronic computer (ENIAC and family) was about a century.
3. While ultimately there might be a "quantum winter" in the next few years because we (I work in the field) overpromised, this would not be the first time a tech that ultimately works gets disregarded for a decade or two because of mismanaging expectations (e.g. Liquid Crystal displays or neural networks, which were both developed for many decades before being commercially viable).
EDIT: And yes, there are some startups with misleadingly general pitches.
The perceptron was developed in 1940s and only became useful in the 2000-2010 range. So 60-70 years of development time.
If we take 50 years as a baseline (faster than historic examples; but underestimating), we’d expect a quantum computer some time in the 2030s.
Is anyone here hard objecting to QC in the 2030-2040 range?
Liquid crystal displays were commercially viable 10 years before they became commercially available.
Source: my dad worked for a company that made display tubes for CRT manufacturers all over the world. He told me back in the seventies that they knew how to make TVs you could hang on the wall like a picture, but weren't making them because they were camping on a lucrative market.