Instead of labeling people you disagree with "delulus" it would help to examine the serious evidence. Let's note that labeling this as a delusion means one is saying that people like Scott Aaronson, one of the most prolific and major quantum computing experts in the last few decades, who spent years being an active skeptic of a lot of claims about quantum computing, and still spends time explaining to people that the things they think quantum computers can do are often things they won't (like efficiently solve NP hard problems in polynomial time) are delusional https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9718. As a rule of thumb, if you need to call lots of really smart people who are experts in an area "delulus" you may need to rethink your position. You may even be correct about where things are or where they are going, but it you are very likely overconfident. And yes, it is true that serious implementations of Shor's algorithm have not been implemented. But by many other metrics, we're seeing drastic improvement in quantum computing capability, things like number of qubits, coherence times, ability to error correct are all showing growth. How long it takes for qubits to decohere for example has gone up by a factor of 10 roughly every 3 years now. https://physics.aps.org/articles/v4/103. Pointing to a lack of Shor's algorithm improvement is like looking at rockets in 1959 and dismissing how now humans have been successfully sent to space while ignoring the steady improvement of rockets since the 1930s.

From slide 21 he has a quote that "The word “quantum” sucks people's brains out, and otherwise sensible people suffer from impaired reasoning," and there are other similar lines. So I'm not sure why you think I got his claimed causality wrong. That you personally think that only stupid people take quantum computers seriously is a separate issue, which is independent from what Gutnam says. (That you are wrong is incidental.)

Gutnam's link is primarily about using quantum computers to break cryptography. Gutnam is not making any claim about other uses, such as in material science. And even in that context, there's a lot of issues with this, such as using Shor factorization records and extrapolating those out, when we know we're not yet in the domain where that should happen. (He's right that the current Shor factorizations aren't real implementations of Shor's algorithm but that's one slide of many.) Many of the slides in the middle are simply attacks on motivation and claiming that using the word "quantum" makes people stupid. The comparison on slide 31 to historians trying to understand what happened to the Ninth Legion is also just terrible. Historians often cannot figure something out because the information is just gone from the historical record. That's radically different than work in physics or engineering where there's steady improvement. Also the claim in that slide that we've been trying to figure out what happened to the 9th legion for 2000 years is obviously wrong. The Legio IX Hispana disappeared from the records around 120 CE, so much less than that, and it isn't many centuries (over a thousand years later) that anyone was wondering about where it went.

2028 is probably too early, but not by that much. People often overestimate short-term tech improvement and underestimate medium to long-term improvement. In this case, there's a lot of evidence for steady but improving metrics. TFS and TFA mention some of them but it is also worth looking at the general trend lines. In general, coherence times are increasing at a rate of roughly ten times as long every three years. See https://physics.aps.org/articles/v4/103. The rate varies for the specific type of qubit in question (that article is talking about superconducting qubits). But this and the increase in number of physical qubits as well as maximum number of entangled qubits all show progress.

There can be a whole bunch of bad things going on, even as steady improvements elsewhere still has more of an impact. Aside from improvements in medical care, the summary notes explicitly that part of this is due to a reduction in overdose deaths. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean we as a society are handling drug addiction that much better. So many people died that they aren't in the pool. Similarly, some of this is post covid with covid having killed a variety of people, including some very healthy people, but also some more sick people who would have likely died in a few years. And at the same time, note that most of Europe is not right now seeing a bump in life expectancy this large (even as their life expectancy still exceeds that of the US) and they didn't have an opioid epidemic and also did a better job keeping death rates low during the heights of covid.

By the way, a followup note: I agree with you that the current Shor's algorithm records shouldn't really count for much. The primary disagreement here seems to be whether it is more useful to look at component metrics (number of qubits, coherence time, efficiency of error correction schemes), or to look at practical applications. I am favoring the first, and you are favoring the second. Let me suggest that the first is right now more important because that's where we can usefully measure if there's been improvement or not. An analogy here that may be helpful: It wasn't until Yuri Gagarin that any human went into space and only a few years later that humans went to the moon among other things. If you look at the improvement of rockets from the early 1930s until 1961, you'd see massive improvement in rocket capabilities, but your metric for humans in space would keep being zero until 1961 when you get Gagarin, and then Titov, Shepard and Gus Grissom all in one year and a lot happening after that. Using a metric which is at close to zero and where we know why that metric would stay at zero even if we see improvement isn't a great way to understand what is happening.

The summary explicitly mentions "a shortlist of candidates most likely to succeed in experiments"- so they are very aware that these systems may be wrong. If there's a legitimate criticism here, it is that it isn't obvious that these aren't short lists very similar to if not identical to the lists an expert would come up with. But that's a different claim.

I'm not sure what minor mistakes I'm being critical of here. If you mean the 50 year claim, it is just wrong, and in an important way. If an idea has a handful of physicists talking about the idea when it isn''t 50 years old, and there's no major physical work on the idea until some two decades later, then saying it has 50 years of failure is not a minor mistake. Or did you mean something else? As for Paul Benioff, yes, he's one of the other precursors to Feynman. I mentioned Manin, but Benioff is another example who is doing work at about the same time and slightly before then. Again, this is part of the early theoretical work, so making any sort of claim about the field failing at that point when it just in its infancy doesn't follow.

Disagreement with gweirhir is not the same as irrational belief in progress. And I hope that people, whether I disagree with them or not, express their opinions; I might learn something. Unfortunately, when the substantive evidence someone gives for their position is a claim to have talked with an unnamed PhD student 32 years ago, it isn't easy to have a substantial dialogue. I might be wrong on the timeline for when quantum computing will take off; predicting technological development and rate of progress is genuinely difficult. But getting a more accurate understanding requires discussions with evidence, not insults. But since you do want to make this personal, we can go in that direction: do you want to point to any technology that is being developed right now that you expect is going to have a major impact in the next few years? If you cannot name any, then that might suggest that there is in your case an irrational belief in a lack of technological progress.

I don't. The data is noisy, and in the most annoying aspect, different systems have gotten to different numbers of logical qubits. Neutral atom systems have gotten to claims of 96 for example here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09848-5 (but I'm skeptical of the accuracy of that claim) whereas superconducting claims are around 1 or 2. It would be nice for someone to go pull out the data and separate them for individual methods, but I'm not aware of anyone doing it that way. I agree it is a natural question to ask though, and some clearer idea of what the numbers are there would go a fair bit to establishing what the growth rate here is in a way that really matters for when the tech is going to be practical.

So the evidence is essentially "trust me, I had one conversation 30 years ago?" Would you take that sort of level of evidence seriously if someone else made it? They don't even need to be being deliberately dishonest; human memories are just really fallible. I wouldn't trust my own memory from a conversation with a PhD from 30 years ago. But even more to the point, it also isn't terribly relevant to the central question at hand, since the claim isn't there wasn't no one working in these areas, but that there was not a lot. Of course there was some work before that, as I acknowledged in my comment about black box algorithms (the most well known is Deutsch's algorithm but there are a bunch of others from the same time period).

If your argument is just that people were vaguely pointing in a similar direction, then that's radically different than claiming that that translates into decades of failure. That's pretty close to someone in 1937 claiming that very high altitude rockets had decades of failure because Tsiolkovsky was doing calculations in 1900 about multistage rockets. There's a vast gap between people thinking about related ideas and actual engineering work.

You cannot pick a handful of data points and then choose the type of curve to fit them, and that's especially a problem when you have only a few data points. You are using literally three data point. For any tech thing, if you ended up with a curve that shows negative progress, that should be a problem with your model. This is essentially the same thing the Trump people tried to do when they tried to do a cubic fit for covid deaths to argue that deaths would soon drop to zero https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21250641/kevin-hassett-cubic-model-smoothing. But since you don't see where the exponential estimate is coming from, you could take the step of clicking through the link I gave which discussed it. But if you want here are other sources. For example, https://physics.aps.org/articles/v4/103 discusses how decoherence times have gone up at an exponential rate, increasing by roughly a factor of 10 every 3 years. You are correct that successful use of Shor's algorithm has not gone up but that also shouldn't be surprising. Shor's algorithm has a pretty big jump in the number of logical qubits needed when you increase from very small n to medium sized n. Using those two data points to conclude anything about what is going on right now isn't useful. Once it does hit even n around 105 or so, we should expect then quick improvement from there.

I'm not sure why you think this is the case, and would be very interested in evidence or citations for this. It is possible you are confusing quantum computing work with earlier work on Bell tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test which do involve some of the same physical components that would eventually be used for quantum computing. In any event, this still doesn't address the point about exponential improvement: even if you had the same tech being worked on a decade or two decades before it work started, the point about exponential improvement would still apply.

I'm not sure how that could possibly be the case. Feynman suggested the idea of a quantum computer in a 1982 paper. Yuri Manin suggested a similar idea slightly before then which makes the entire idea about 46 years old. There wasn't any substantial work on the idea aside from a few black box algorithms until Shor's algorithm in 1994 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm which is from just 32 years ago. And substantial money going into physical implementations of quantum computing doesn't really start until around the mid 2000s . I'm also not sure why you would think it any of it is a failure given the rapid pace in improvement of the technology. Empirically, quantum computers are improving at an exponential or even faster than exponential rate for coherence times, number of qubits, and other metrics https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-nevens-law-describe-quantum-computings-rise-20190618/. The algorithmic end also continues to improve rapidly, especially with error correction, and we're just moving into the zone where the error correction and the physical systems are both good enough that we can physically implement quantum logical systems with real error correction. See e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10628-y It is easy to forget how exponential growth looks: it looks slow and not impressive until it just takes off. We saw this just recently with the rise of solar power and grid storage which were both struggling and in the last 2 years have now taken off so much that they are rapidly dominating much of the electric grid.

That's part of what is great about this though. This is happening from sheer economics, despite the Trump admin's attempts otherwise.

Unfortunately, the people buying or building the big cars are not the people being hit by them.