Not quite sure why all the responses here are so cynical. I mean, it's a genuinely difficult set of problems, so of course the first steps will be small. Today's computers are the result of 80 astonishing years of sustained innovation by millions of brilliant people.

Even as a Googler I can find plenty of reasons to be cynical about Google (many involving AI), but the quantum computing research lab is not one of them. It's actual scientific research, funded (I assume) mostly out of advertising dollars, and it's not building something socially problematic. So why all the grief?