The video mostly seems reasonable, but the economic arguments toward the end seem off base to me.
Hossenfelder describes a situation in which universities rent equipment from large companies, but fits this into a worldview in which quantum computing as an industry will not be commercially viable.
But isn't this exactly what happened with the internet and other new forms of large scale computation? Initially demand came largely from academia (or government via defense), companies competed on cost and usability. After a few years or decades of competition and scaling, the technology became so commercially useful that it's now ubiquitous. Why won't that happen with quantum computers, why would that be a bad thing, and why shouldn't academics want to be working on that?
Hossenfelder describes a situation in which universities rent equipment from large companies, but fits this into a worldview in which quantum computing as an industry will not be commercially viable.
But isn't this exactly what happened with the internet and other new forms of large scale computation? Initially demand came largely from academia (or government via defense), companies competed on cost and usability. After a few years or decades of competition and scaling, the technology became so commercially useful that it's now ubiquitous. Why won't that happen with quantum computers, why would that be a bad thing, and why shouldn't academics want to be working on that?