Every generation inherits problems it didn’t create, alongside tools it didn’t build. Ours are significant: diseases like cancer that we still can’t reliably cure, managing financial portfolios with countless variables in today’s financial markets, or trusting communications about our most sensitive information without having to worry whether security safeguards will hold.  

For most of my career, I’ve watched brilliant people attack these complex problems with computers that were never built for them. Classical computers are remarkable machines. They’re also a ceiling because, in spite of continued improvements, some problems still can’t be addressed as chips get faster. No amount of “faster” will ever help them catch up with the processing burdens we increasingly place on them.

That’s the real promise of quantum computing. It’s not a faster version of the computer already on your desk or in your hand, but a different way of computing altogether. It can be used to model a cancer drug’s interaction with 10,000 biological variables instead of scientists guessing at those interactions. Financial systems holding people’s savings and pensions can finally be built for the complexity of the markets they run on. And we can have confidence in the safety and security of our communications.

None of that is guaranteed by quantum computing. But all of it becomes possible because of it.

That distinction matters because it’s honest. Quantum gives the people working on cancer, in financial markets, within telecommunications networks, and on other complex issues a set of tools equal to the size of the problem.

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