John Preskill, laziness enabler

The purpose of this post is just to call everyone’s attention to a beautiful and accessible new article by John Preskill: Quantum Computing in the NISQ era and beyond.  The article is based on John’s keynote address at the recent “Q2B” (Quantum Computing for Business) conference, which I was unfortunately unable to attend.  Here’s the abstract:

Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) technology will be available in the near future. Quantum computers with 50-100 qubits may be able to perform tasks which surpass the capabilities of today’s classical digital computers, but noise in quantum gates will limit the size of quantum circuits that can be executed reliably. NISQ devices will be useful tools for exploring many-body quantum physics, and may have other useful applications, but the 100-qubit quantum computer will not change the world right away — we should regard it as a significant step toward the more powerful quantum technologies of the future. Quantum technologists should continue to strive for more accurate quantum gates and, eventually, fully fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Did you ever wish you had something even better than a clone: namely, someone who writes exactly what you would’ve wanted to write, on a topic people keep asking you to write about, but ten times better than you would’ve written it?  To all journalists and others who ask me over the coming year about the application potential for near-term quantum computers, I can now simply respond with a link.