It's more akin to "we only need to make reliable transistors to make classical computers." With the invention of the planar transistor, going from 1 transistor to 100 or 100k was not that big of a step, comparatively.
It's really really easy to eliminate noise in a digital system of transistors. For analog systems with subtle values, I would say we still can't arbitrarily scale that up with transistors. And quantum is like analog but far worse.
Transistors connect to other transistors, directly or in switched arrangements. Qubits can be connected to other qubits likewise. E.g. a single photon emitter next to a nuclear spin qubit that can send an entangled photon through a beam splitter in a photonic switch, routing that entangled pair through fiber optic cables to other qubits where a combination of electric fields, filters, and occupied energy levels cause gate operations to be applied during absorption & re-emission. Except for the long-lived, error-corrected qubit, everything I described there is off-the-shelf commercial technology.
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It's more akin to "we only need to make reliable transistors to make classical computers." With the invention of the planar transistor, going from 1 transistor to 100 or 100k was not that big of a step, comparatively.
It's really really easy to eliminate noise in a digital system of transistors. For analog systems with subtle values, I would say we still can't arbitrarily scale that up with transistors. And quantum is like analog but far worse.
transistors are local unit, qubits are not
Transistors connect to other transistors, directly or in switched arrangements. Qubits can be connected to other qubits likewise. E.g. a single photon emitter next to a nuclear spin qubit that can send an entangled photon through a beam splitter in a photonic switch, routing that entangled pair through fiber optic cables to other qubits where a combination of electric fields, filters, and occupied energy levels cause gate operations to be applied during absorption & re-emission. Except for the long-lived, error-corrected qubit, everything I described there is off-the-shelf commercial technology.
Photonic quantum interfaces typically operate at glacial speeds and with terrible fidelities. There is a lot more missing than good qubits.