Predicting the future is extremely difficult. But we can look for trends that can navigate the choppy waters. One of those trends is computing power. No, I’m not talking about Moore’s law, but the more philosophical fact that the entire universe is a computing device. Therefore it makes sense to bet a future with more computing horsepower and back those technologies which bring us to perform more computations per “unit” of stuff. For those more interested, the work of Seth Lloyd in his book “Computing the Universe”.
Quantum Computing might bring us the leap forward in horsepower we need. After all, mother nature is quantum mechanical. Whilst current computers are only slightly in quantum, they do not readily exploit the power of facets of quantum mechanics such as entanglement and superposition. Algorithms such as Deutsch-Josza have shown the promise of getting “more bang for the buck” and computing specific problems more effectively. However, those problems are not helpful or cannot be easily implemented right now.
So it would seem to look from the outside we are somewhere in the evolution of Quantum Computers akin to the 1950s of conventional computing.