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I work in the field and I will have to disagree - 20 years ago nobody serious would have claimed we can build a quantum computer in 10 years. There are very cle

I work in the field and I will have to disagree - 20 years ago nobody serious would have claimed we can build a quantum computer in 10 years. There are very clear levels we need to reach to have something useful (in terms of lifetime of the qubits and number of connected qubits) and there has been extremely clear upward slope on both of those measures over the last 15 years. Extrapolating optimistically from them in 5 years we will have quantum chemistry simulators. Extrapolating pessimistically, it will take 20 or so years.

michael_nielsen 9y ago
Not quite true. I can think of two well funded people in 1995-2000 who either believed (or implied to funders) that scalable quantum computing was plausible within 10 years. But those people were outliers. You're correct that it was an uncommon view, and mainstream consensus in the field was that it was many decades away. The situation today is certainly very different, and people seem much more optimistic.