Predicting how home users will benefit from QC is like predicting the iPhone on the day when Edison made an electronic tube. I am a researcher in the field and have no idea how it would be useful in a smartphone.
However, here are the breakthroughs necessary for scalable QC: make the quantum operations about 10 times more precise and the qubits about 10 times more long lived (currently the information stored in the qubits decays a bit too fast). Then make it possible to manufacture not just 50, but a couple of thousand of the qubits. At that point you will be able to simulate important chemistry (for drug discovery and material design) and important field theories (for high energy physics and cosmology).
Breaking RSA will be possible later on when we get to millions of qubits, but it is not that big of a deal as we can switch to other crypto schemes (but recordings of important messages will be decrypted).
To your other question about signal processing: quantum computing is providing technologies that would be very useful in metrology and the creation of crazy sensitive sensors (sensing various fields or displacements or taking pictures at crazy resolutions and signal to noise ratios).
Good points. It’s hard to predict where these QC developments will lead.
One little aside, John Ambrose Fleming[1] is credited for inventing the first electronic tube (a vacuum tube based diode) around 1904 that initiated the development of modern (tube based) electronics.
However, the work at Thomas Edison’s laboratories in previous decades on the electric light bulb were almost certainly important prerequisites to Fleming’s work. He even worked for Edison for a period of time.
However, here are the breakthroughs necessary for scalable QC: make the quantum operations about 10 times more precise and the qubits about 10 times more long lived (currently the information stored in the qubits decays a bit too fast). Then make it possible to manufacture not just 50, but a couple of thousand of the qubits. At that point you will be able to simulate important chemistry (for drug discovery and material design) and important field theories (for high energy physics and cosmology).
Breaking RSA will be possible later on when we get to millions of qubits, but it is not that big of a deal as we can switch to other crypto schemes (but recordings of important messages will be decrypted).
To your other question about signal processing: quantum computing is providing technologies that would be very useful in metrology and the creation of crazy sensitive sensors (sensing various fields or displacements or taking pictures at crazy resolutions and signal to noise ratios).