Quantum Computing: What It Is and What It’s Not

A recent Linkedin post argued, in essence, that quantum computers are likely hopeless as a practical technology. By the time I wrote my answer ready to post, that post vanished, and I could not find it on my homepage. So I decided to write a post here in my blog and share it on LinkedIn. I hope whoever wrote it read my reply and sees my views.

The core claims were:

A qubit does not “store” information like a classical bit, and measurement collapses the state and yields only one classical outcome; there is no hidden parallel data inside a qubit, and Useful quantum computation requires long coherence, precise control, and error correction at a scale never demonstrated and yes, after 40+ years, there is still no empirical proof that scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computing is physically achievable

That critique is largely correct, but only within a very specific framing: universal, gate-model, fault-tolerant quantum computation. Hear me out: that framing is not the whole story.

My work does not treat quantum systems as long-lived computational registers. Measurement is not a failure mode; in my work, measurement is the signal. let me explain.

Quantum systems can already be used today as:

• physical entropy sources

• biased samplers

• collapse-path probes

• stochastic explorers of complex spaces, like in chemical space for molecular docking, material science, and many other uses.

In these cases:

Coherence does not need to last indefinitely; error correction is not required, and results are harvested once and consumed classically. This is not speculative — QRNGs such as cryptalabs QRNG products, Quantum annealers, and noisy QPUs are already doing this. I am harvesting entropy from these systems and using them successfully in my Hybrid-classic applications and already seeing great results.

So yes, scalable universal quantum computation remains unproven. It may happen in 2026 or 2030 or sooner or later.

But note that useful quantum systems do not require universal quantum computation.

Dismissing all quantum utility because one idealized model may or may not soon scale is like dismissing medicine in 1900 because antibiotics hadn’t been discovered yet.

History is full of technologies that were useful long before they were fully understood, and sometimes centuries before their breakthrough moment.

I believe that Quantum systems don’t need belief. They just need to be used for what they already do well.