I Called AGI Early. Now I'm Calling Quantum.
Four Predictions About Quantum That Will Sound Boring by 2030.
Back in 2018, when I wrote about AI and AGI, people called it radical and futuristic. My timeline was 2020–2030. Turns out I was too conservative.
The same will happen with quantum.
I’ve updated my thinking after recent developments, a better grasp of the physics, and dozens of conversations with some of the brightest minds in the field. Here are my new claims, bold today, boring by 2030.
Bookmark this. Check back by 2030 (maybe sooner).
Quantum chips will ship at scale. They may stay special-purpose, but we’ll eventually see (hundreds of) millions of units deployed, not a handful in research labs.
No truly autonomous humanoid robot will exist without on-device compute, and that compute will be quantum. The degrees of freedom a humanoid must reason over in real time, every joint, every sensor input, every possible next action, explode combinatorially. Classical chips can’t search that space fast enough. Quantum can. And even where classical hardware could brute-force a narrow slice of the problem, it can’t do so without burning through batteries, generating heat the body can’t dissipate, or introducing latency that breaks the illusion of autonomy.
Drones will carry quantum chips for real computation, not just sensing.
Every device will have a quantum option. The iPhone 22 will run on a quantum processor.
Yes, I know the objection: cryogenics, isolation, decoherence. The room-temperature breakthrough is the load-bearing assumption here, it needs to land by ~2027 for the rest to be in your hands by 2030. That's my bet. Everything else is engineering. Happy to argue it in the comments.
P.S. If you want to join our sci-phi journey, we're hiring at tomorrowmensch. Write me.
See you in 2030.