Scott Aaronson is a brilliant computer scientist, but I honestly don’t see it. There are a lot of these bizarre “applications” coming from quantum computing the

Scott Aaronson is a brilliant computer scientist, but I honestly don’t see it. There are a lot of these bizarre “applications” coming from quantum computing theorists or physicists. Generally speaking they read as a little out of touch with whatever field they’re proposing the new thing too. For example, generating random numbers with quantum computers is an interesting theoretical exercise. But it’s completely asinine in practice. The world moved on from information theoretic randomness decades ago because complexity theoretic randomness is basically fine for just about any purpose. It comes across as grasping at straws when you’re proposing using a quantum computer to generate true randomness. Sure, you could, but what a ridiculously overengineered way of getting random bits... For similar reasons, I’m incredibly skeptical of quantum cryptography. Go find someone who publishes at an IACR conference and ask them for their take on quantum key agreement protocols.