Article Preview: This morning a humanities teacher named Richard Horan, having read my NYT op-ed on quantum supremacy, emailed me the following question about

Article Preview: This morning a humanities teacher named Richard Horan, having read my NYT op-ed on quantum supremacy, emailed me the following question about it: ``` Is this pursuit [of scalable quantum computation] just an arms race? A race to see who can achieve it first? To what end? Will this achievement yield advances in medical science and human quality of life, or will it threaten us even more than we are threatened presently by our technologies? You seem rather sanguine about its possible development and uses. But how close does the hand on that doomsday clock move to midnight once we “can harness an exponential number of amplitudes for computation”? ``` I thought this question might possibly be of some broader interest, so here’s my response (with some light edits). Dear Richard, A radio interviewer asked me a similar question a couple weeks ago—whether there’s an ethical dimension to quantum computing research. I replied that there’s an ethical dimension to everything that humans do.