Oddly enough, I think this can be answered by headlines alone. Imagine you could do anything remotely interesting with a relative speedup of 47 years to 'instan

Oddly enough, I think this can be answered by headlines alone. Imagine you could do anything remotely interesting with a relative speedup of 47 years to 'instant', where we can say an instant is 1 millisecond. That'd mean in one day of calculation, you could do things that'd take a current era supercomputer more than 4 billion years to achieve. And so on upward from there. Yet we're focusing on this odd and relatively boring metric of 47 years? That suggests that the implications intentionally provoked by the phrasing "Google’s quantum computer instantly makes calculations that take rivals 47 years" are obviously false, even if the statement itself is true in some extremely specific context. So in other words, when genuine quantum progress has been achieved - I don't think we'll need to debate it, as the results would speak for themselves.