He makes a fair point. Quantum is just the latest scam to generate hype and raise money from unsophisticated investors or launder money through NGO's, not a real deliverable thing... but...

“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” -Twain

Since there's much for scammers to gain in seeding quantum fud narratives, you're fighting an uphill battle trying to educate everyone and defuse the scam narrative.

Better to acknowledge the fear and redirect it from a place of alignment, like narrative Judo or parenting a small child.

I had an undergrad student for the summer who has doing a 2 month project of his choice. He decided to work on Variational Quantum Eigensolvers. It's not really my field of expertise, so I decided to get up to speed, at least for the sake of this supervision, doing a series of Qiskit and Pennylane tutorials. It was quite interesting to see how mature some of these tools are. But it also showed me I don't know much about this topic.

But this doesn't answer your question yet.

These tools are built by companies who are betting bigly on the success of quantum computers. They are the products of a huge amount of funding trying to find a market fit. A fit which is not truly there yet. I wouldn't go as far as comparing it to web3 companies who are offering solutions to non existent problems, but it's a similar dynamic in terms of funding.

Each time i read from people who truly know about it because they are deeply working on it without vested financial interest, they mostly all say that there is a lot of hype. Too much hype. Reading Tadge echoing that feeling is really not that surprising. And quite comforting knowing he's a smart cookie (LN, uutrexo,...).

If you watch the videos by 3Blue1Brown's channel on quantum computation, it's exactly the same. He starts the videos by trying to reframe the potential usefulness, but also lack thereof for many cases, of quantum computers. And then he dives into the topic from a technical perspective, showing he clearly knows his shit. This makes me trust his initial framing even more.

So, based on this rambling argument of authority, I'd say I'm not too worried about the threat of quantum computation.

here is a video answer from 10 years ago (!!!)