[dcposch]

> Once you invest decades of your life into a research subject, if it turns out the entire thing is never going to work, there are major social and financial pressures to deceive the public about the true nature of the subject.

You're implying that Scott Aaronson is being deceptive.

I think that needs better evidence. The story you linked to is two years old and it's about QC skeptic Gil Kalai.

Scott addresses him directly in his post:

> If quantum supremacy was achieved, what would it mean for the QC skeptics?

> I wouldn’t want to be them right now! They could of course retreat to the position that of course quantum supremacy is possible (who ever claimed that it wasn’t??), that the real issue has always been quantum error-correction. And indeed, some of them have consistently maintained that position all along. But others, including my good friend Gil Kalai, are on record, right here on this blog predicting that even quantum supremacy can never be achieved for fundamental reasons. I won’t let them wiggle out of it now.

[calhoun137]

I am not very familiar with Scott Aaronson and am just making a general observation about the subject of QC, I have no idea what his motivations or intentions are. If Scott believes QC will day be practical and I don't, only time can tell who is right and who is wrong. I have seen this kind of goal post moving in string theory, and its been going on for 20 years with QC in a strikingly similar way imo.

There is no way to argue against this kind of goal post moving style of debate because even if another 20 years go by and QC still don't exist on a practical level, the goal posts will just keep getting moved.

I am extremely confident that this will continue until the public gets bored of hearing about it.

[sanxiyn]

I think Scott is agnostic about whether QC will be practical or not. To quote the original article, "we have no idea how long it will take".

[DebtDeflation]

>"we have no idea how long it will take"

IMO, this is a reasonable position to take. However, we have to accept that even if a universal QC is possible, "how long" could conceivably be centuries.

Our perspective with regard to technology has been significantly biased by our experience with Moore's Law/Dennard Scaling. The speed of progress in ICs from 1960 to 2010 (and especially 1980-2000) is an outlier in the history of science and technology, yet we base expectations in everything from AI to QC on it.