Hilarious. Even the connection between AI and Quantum computing is deeply opaque.
When computers first began development during WW2, they were a response to immediate demands for particular functionality from many technical areas. Quantum computing seems to go the exact opposite route, first of building up an (admittedly very interesting) technology and then later figuring out if there actually is anything useful to do with it. The connection to AI is particularly interesting, because it seems to be built entirely out of a combination of two buzzwords.
idk enough physics to say quantum computing is it or not intuitively it seems like understanding matter at a sub atomic level and having a machine that can interact with it seems like a super powerful thing to have. but I think quantum computing is in the same place ML was in the 80s; influential people (mainly Marvin Minsky) said the perceptron and neural nets were a dead end same thing could be happening to quantum computing because of the high expectations
Sure on some level it is extremely interesting and I don't think there is anything wrong with doing research on it. The real issue is pretending that it is something that in the near future will change the world, while having yet to figure what you actually could do with it.
IBM and Google have invested massively because someone there thought that it actually would be useful. But that hasn't happened yet and to be honest it doesn't look like that will change any time soon.
Inregards to Neural Networks, they were pretty much a complete dead end until computing power increased enough to make them viable. In that case an external technology had to come along to make it work.
When computers first began development during WW2, they were a response to immediate demands for particular functionality from many technical areas. Quantum computing seems to go the exact opposite route, first of building up an (admittedly very interesting) technology and then later figuring out if there actually is anything useful to do with it. The connection to AI is particularly interesting, because it seems to be built entirely out of a combination of two buzzwords.