An Amazon AI exec just promised commercially useful quantum computers in five to seven years. That's the same timeframe a heroin addict gives you when he says he'll pay back the twenty bucks.
Quantum computing has been five to seven years away since before most retail traders discovered options. Tech giants keep throwing billions at machines that can't do anything a laptop can't do better. Microsoft's in. Google's in. IBM's in. They're all racing to build a computer that exists in multiple states simultaneously, which sounds exactly like every investor who bought tech stocks in early 2022.
The big sell on quantum is that it'll revolutionize cryptography and drug discovery and financial modeling. Right now it revolutionizes the process of keeping a room colder than outer space so a chip can think about being helpful. The error rates are so high these things can't factor the number fifteen without having an existential crisis.
But sure, five to seven years. That's when your quantum portfolio optimizer will tell you which penny stock to buy. It'll process every possible outcome across infinite universes and determine that in every single timeline, you still lose money on SPACs.
Amazon's exec didn't specify what "commercially useful" means. Could mean anything. A quantum computer that runs Doom. A quantum computer that mines Bitcoin slower than your phone. A quantum computer that costs four hundred million dollars and tells you the weather tomorrow with sixty percent accuracy.
Five to seven years is the perfect window. Far enough away that nobody remembers the promise. Close enough that it sounds almost real. It's the timeline equivalent of saying your girlfriend goes to another school.
Tech companies love quantum computing because it lets them burn investor cash on something that sounds smarter than another f*cking chatbot. The math is so complicated that nobody can call bullshit without a PhD. Perfect crime.
In five to seven years we'll get another headline about how quantum computers are five to seven years away, and retail traders will still be googling what superposition means while their portfolios collapse into a single very definite state of broke.
Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash
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