Quantum Investment Bros: Have you no shame?

Near the end of my last post, I made a little offhand remark:

[G]iven the current staggering rate of hardware progress, I now think it’s a live possibility that we’ll have a fault-tolerant quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm before the next US presidential election. And I say that not only because of the possibility of the next US presidential election getting cancelled, or preempted by runaway superintelligence!

As I later clarified, I’ll consider this “live possibility” to be fulfilled even if a fault-tolerant Shor’s algorithm is “merely” used to factor 15 into 3×5—a milestone that seems a few steps, but only a few steps, away from what Google, Quantinuum, QuEra, and others have already demonstrated over the past year. After that milestone, I then expect “smooth sailing” to more and more logical qubits and gates and the factorization of larger and larger integers, however fast or slow that ramp-up proceeds (which of course I don’t know).

In any case, the main reason I made my remark was just to tee up the wisecrack about whether I’m not sure if there’ll be a 2028 US presidential election.

My remark, alas, then went viral on Twitter, with people posting countless takes like this:

A quantum expert skeptic who the bears quote all the time – Scott Aaronson – recently got very excited about a number of quantum advances. He now thinks there’s a possibility of running Shor before the next US president election – a timeline that lines up ONLY with $IONQ‘s roadmap, and NOBODY else’s! This represent a MAJOR capitulation of previously predicted timelines by any skeptics.

Shall we enumerate the layers of ugh here?

1. I’ve been saying for several years now that anyone paranoid about cybersecurity should probably already be looking to migrate to quantum-resistant cryptography, because one can’t rule out the possibility that hardware progress will be fast. I didn’t “capitulate”: I mildly updated what I said before, in light of exciting recent advances.
   
2. A “live possibility” is short not only of a “certainty,” but of a “probability.” It’s basically just an “I’m not confident this won’t happen.”
   
3. Worst is the obsessive focus on IonQ, a company that I never mentioned (except in the context of its recently-acquired subsidiary, Oxford Ionics), but which now has a $17 billion valuation. I should explain that, at least since it decided to do an IPO, IonQ has generally been regarded within the research community as … err … a bit like the early D-Wave, intellectual-respectability-wise. They’ll eagerly sell retail investors on the use of quantum computers to recognize handwriting and suchlike, despite (I would say) virtually no basis to believe in a quantum scaling advantage for such tasks. Or they’ll aggressively market current devices to governments who don’t understand what they’re for, but just want to say they have a quantum computer and not get left behind. Or they’ll testify to Congress that quantum, unlike AI, “doesn’t hallucinate” and indeed is “deterministic.” It pains me to write this, as IonQ was founded by (and indeed, still employs) scientists who I deeply admire and respect.
   
4. Perhaps none of this would matter (or would matter only to pointy-headed theorists like me) if IonQ were the world leader in quantum computing hardware, or even trapped-ion hardware. But by all accounts, IonQ’s hardware and demonstrations have lagged well behind those of its direct competitor, Quantinuum. It seems to me that, to whatever extent IonQ gets vastly more attention, it’s mostly just because it chose to IPO early, and also because it’s prioritized marketing to the degree it has.

Over the past few days, I’ve explained the above to various people, only to have them look back at me with glazed, uncomprehending eyes and say, “so then, which quantum stock should I buy? or should I short quantum?”

It would seem rude for me to press quarters into these people’s hands, explaining that they must make gain from whatever they learn. So instead I reply: “You do realize, don’t you, that I’m, like, a professor at a state university, who flies coach and lives in a nice but unremarkable house? If I had any skill at timing the market, picking winners, etc., don’t you think I’d live in a mansion with an infinity pool, and fly my Cessna to whichever conferences I deigned to attend?”

It’s like this: if you think quantum computers able to break 2048-bit cryptography within 3-5 years are a near-certainty, then I’d say your confidence is unwarranted. If you think such quantum computers, once built, will also quickly revolutionize optimization and machine learning and finance and countless other domains beyond quantum simulation and cryptanalysis—then I’d say that more likely than not, an unscrupulous person has lied to you about our current understanding of quantum algorithms.

On the other hand, if you think Bitcoin, and SSL, and all the other protocols based on Shor-breakable cryptography, are almost certainly safe for the next 5 years … then I submit that your confidence is also unwarranted. Your confidence might then be like most physicists’ confidence in 1938 that nuclear weapons were decades away, or like my own confidence in 2015 that an AI able to pass a reasonable Turing Test was decades away. It might merely be the confidence that “this still looks like the work of decades—unless someone were to gather together all the scientific building blocks that have now been demonstrated, and scale them up like a stark raving madman.” The trouble is that sometimes people, y’know, do that.

Beyond that, the question of “how many years?” doesn’t even interest me very much, except insofar as I can mine from it the things I value in life, like scientific understanding, humor, and irony.

There are, famously, many intellectual Communists who are ruthless capitalists in their day-to-day lives. I somehow wound up the opposite. Intellectually, I see capitalism as a golden goose, a miraculous engine that’s lifted the human species out of its disease-ridden hovels and into air-conditioned high-rises, whereas Communism led instead to misery and gulags and piles of skulls every single time it was tried.

And yet, when I actually see the workings of capitalism up close, I often want to retch. In case after case, it seems, our system rewards bold, confident, risk-taking ignoramuses and liars, those who can shamelessly hype a technology (or conversely, declare it flatly impossible)—with such voices drowning out the cautious experts who not only strive to tell the truth, but also made all the actual discoveries that the technology rests on. My ideal economic system is, basically, whichever one can keep the people who can clearly explain the capabilities and limits and risks and benefits of X in charge of X for as long as possible.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2025 at 1:26 am and is filed under Quantum, Rage Against Doofosity, Speaking Truth to Parallelism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.