I see no reason why anyone would ever need a quantum computer in their home.
Of course, I'm aware that Ken Olson said in the 1970s that there's no reason why anyone would ever need a classical computer in their home, and that gets ridiculed today as one of the wrongest predictions of all time. But if you look at the context, Olson was actually way ahead of his time! He was talking about what today we call the cloud: compute can be centralized, then sold as a commodity for anyone to tap into over the Internet from anywhere in the world.
We're already seeing that model successfully deployed with the small QCs of today, and I expect it to continue to work going forward. Quantum computing mostly helps with a few specific things -- simulating quantum chemistry and materials science, breaking cryptography (!), a few other things, and maybe some other things yet to be discovered. It probably won't help for checking email or playing Candy Crush. So, why not just have it be a resource that people can rent over the cloud in the special cases where it helps?
I see no reason why anyone would ever need a quantum computer in their home.
Of course, I'm aware that Ken Olson said in the 1970s that there's no reason why anyone would ever need a classical computer in their home, and that gets ridiculed today as one of the wrongest predictions of all time. But if you look at the context, Olson was actually way ahead of his time! He was talking about what today we call the cloud: compute can be centralized, then sold as a commodity for anyone to tap into over the Internet from anywhere in the world.
We're already seeing that model successfully deployed with the small QCs of today, and I expect it to continue to work going forward. Quantum computing mostly helps with a few specific things -- simulating quantum chemistry and materials science, breaking cryptography (!), a few other things, and maybe some other things yet to be discovered. It probably won't help for checking email or playing Candy Crush. So, why not just have it be a resource that people can rent over the cloud in the special cases where it helps?