Quantum futures – how a patchy skills market threatens the need for urgent progress

While AI dominates the hype cycle – with humanoid robots lumbering up on the outside – quantum technology has been quietly evolving in the background.

As such, it offers a refreshing comparison to the hysterical world of AI: the kind of steady, iterative, grown-up technology development that used to typify the IT sector until the arrival of the bro-ligarchs. Remember those days? Identifying real problems and solving them with skill, innovation and good engineering rather than scraping the world’s art to fill the Web with automated bilge.

There is a serious point to that introduction, though. The absence of AI-style hype about quantum technologies – the dearth of futurist claptrap, messianic seers of the singularity, and insane, economy-threatening stock prices – also poses a challenge, because the world values those things more highly than it should. It means that not enough people are developing skills in the quantum realm.

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