Emerging Technology Separating genuine breakthrough from billion-dollar hype in the race to compute the impossible Every few years, technology produces a concept so powerful and so poorly understood that it becomes a Rorschach test for ambition. In the 1990s, it was the internet. In the 2010s, it was blockchain. Today, it’s quantum computing — a field that promises to revolutionize everything from drug discovery to cryptography while remaining almost completely opaque to anyone without a physics PhD. My British lilac cat, Mochi, exists in a superposition of states every time I open a can: simultaneously interested (could be tuna) and indifferent (could be vegetables). She collapses into one state or the other only upon observation. This, I’m told, is roughly how quantum mechanics works, though Mochi’s version involves more fur and fewer Nobel Prizes. The quantum computing industry has received over $35 billion in investment since 2020.…