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by vtomole 585 days ago
Yes, QC is far enough that it's "anyone's guess", but the field is actively working on sliding the answer to this problem from "anyone's guess" to "a bit more certain". It will never be 100% certain until the useful QC appears but we can decrease the probability of our predictions being pure guesswork. As an example, DARPA is funding a project to find the first high impact QC applications https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/publications-highlighting... along with finding when the first hardware to run those applications can be built https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/quantum-benchmarking-init....

QC startups should be funded because industry is a crucial component of QC progress and large-scale QC labs (Google, IBM e.t.c) can't work on all the ideas. The ideas that come from startups do accelerate QC development.