Perhaps more difficult, though, is that it was clear once or twice that for some guests, it may be their first venture into speaking publicly about their field, and so they may not know how to breach communicating on it. As someone who’s thought quite a bit about communicating about quantum computing, I found that episode quite difficult to listen to.

I kept wanting to help the guest avoid saying things in ways that mislead or confuse people, as most general-audience articles about quantum computing tend to, but the conversation kept digging farther. It pretty much went through leading listeners to most of the common misconceptions about quantum computing. Some of the things stated were things that have just been passed through a broken telephone between different types of computing researchers until they’re no longer true. For example, RSA, the encryption algorithm susceptible to quantum computers factoring integers is no longer commonly used, and AES, among others, is not susceptible to quantum computer attacks unless quantum computers can solve NP-hard problems efficiently, which is widely believed to not be the case. Even if one could break modern encryption with future quantum computers, it’s not like that would be an application that’s very beneficial to society as a whole. Sorry, I’ll stop myself before this becomes a play-by-play of that episode.