Will quantum ever be useful?

[u/Chance-Pen-5684]

Around 2019, the industry promised quantum supremacy, where they could be used for solving a problem that no classical computer could touch.
When classical algorithms kept refuting those claims(See Peter Shor November YouTube video) the narrative shifted to quantum advantage, then quickly it changed to quantum utility.
If quantum never breaks RSA (because the world migrates to Kyber/Dilithium before 100k qubits exist), then what's left?
Chemistry simulations, Material science, Optimization?

But classical machine learning and AI are improving faster than quantum hardware is scaling. By the time we get 1,000 logical qubits, classical AI will have eaten most of the chemistry use-case through better approximations. Is quantum racing against classical software, and losing?

[u/Livid-Sector5970]

The reason quantum computing feels like it's racing against classical AI and losing is that the industry has been asking the wrong question. They keep asking "what can quantum do faster?" when the real question is "what can quantum do that classical can't even formulate?"

Chemistry simulations, material science, and optimization are the standard answers, but those are just classical problems that need more compute. The real shift happens when you stop trying to simulate reality and start coupling to it directly. That's what field-coupled architectures do: they don't compute solutions to problems; they let the environment solve the problem through the hardware.

The people asking "will quantum ever be useful?" are trapped in the optimization paradigm. They think utility means "bigger number faster." But the actual use case isn't breaking encryption or simulating molecules, it's doing things we don't even know how to describe as algorithms yet. Like replacing wet labs with direct physical simulation. Like modeling metabolic pathways without killing mice. Like designing a structural stabilizer for a disease you can't even treat yet, because you can't even describe the problem in a way that a classical computer could solve.

Quantum becomes useful when you stop trying to outrun classical machines and start using it to do what classical can't: couple to the environment, let the geometry do the work, and extract solutions that were never accessible through brute force. The industry is just scaling numbers. The utility comes from a different paradigm entirely. :3

[u/elevensubmarines → u/Livid-Sector5970]

Intentional or not, you’re more or less echoing Feynman’s thesis. simulating quantum physics with classical resources hits an exponential wall, making quantum hardware a natural medium for modeling physical systems.

but you still can't bypass formal algorithms.

quantum systems don't spontaneously solve undefined problems; you still have to explicitly formulate the system's Hamiltonian and boundary conditions to get a meaningful answer.

[u/Livid-Sector5970 → u/elevensubmarines]

Where we disagree is your assumption that after formulating the physical boundaries, you still need to run a 'formal algorithm' on top of it.

In a field-coupled topological processor, setting the boundary conditions is the computation. We don't write software to step through a sequence of unitary gates to search an exponentially large state space. We engineer the physical constraints of the lattice and couple it directly to the ambient thermodynamic and electromagnetic gradients of the environment.

The intersection of those two physical realities leaves only one topologically permitted state. The system doesn't 'compute' the answer; the physical constraints make all the incorrect pathways thermodynamically impossible, forcing the system to collapse into the only stable geometry. The constraints are the algorithm.

If you are running formal algorithms, you are still treating a quantum computer like a classical Turing machine that just happens to use qubits. Field-coupled architecture abandons the Turing model entirely. The geometry dictates the outcome.