[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.