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Invited Talk: When the qubits are ready, will the national labs be?
DescriptionAbstractEarly demonstrations of operations relevant to quantum error correction and fault-tolerant quantum computation signal that the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era might be coming to an end. Vendor roadmaps indicate that gigaquop machines with hundreds of logical qubits capable of executing circuits with billions of operations might exist before the end of the decade. But many of the most detailed quantum resource estimates suggest that achieving certain notions of quantum utility might require teraquop computers. I will argue that there is a surprising dearth of prospective applications, even for quantum computers at this scale. Worse yet, I will suggest that there is an application gap and that there appear to be even fewer "useful" things that we can do with mega and gigaquop machines. Nevertheless, there is cause for optimism and I hope to make a compelling case for why the answer to the question in the title is actually a cautious and qualified "yes".