Nah. You don't have to feel excited about every single new bit of tech that comes along.
About 15 years ago I became interested in really advanced cryptography, because it was presented at a Bitcoin conference I went to. If you think AI is hard, that's kindergarten stuff compared to the maths behind zero knowledge proofs. And because nobody cared at that time outside of a handful of academics, there were no tutorials, blog posts or anything else to help. Just a giant mound of academic papers, often undated so it was hard to even figure out if what you were reading had been superseded already. But it seemed important, so I dived in and started reading papers.
At first, maybe only 5% of the words made sense. So I grabbed onto those 5%. I read a paper, put it down for a while, re-read it later and found I understood more. I talked to the researchers, emailed them, asked questions. I read the older papers that initiated the field, and that helped. It was a lot of work.
You know what? In the end, it was a waste of time. The knowledge ended up being useful primarily for explaining why I wasn't using those algorithms in my designs. A lot of the claims sounded useful but ended up not being so for complicated reasons, and anyway, I was mostly interested in what you could do with the tech rather than the tech itself. Turns out there's always a small number of people who are willing to dive in and make the magic happen in a nicely abstracted way for everyone else, for any kind of tech. QC is no different. There's, as far as I can tell, very little reason to learn it. If QC does ever "happen" it'll presumably 95% of the time be in the form of a cloud service where you upload problems that fit a quantum algorithm worked out by someone else, pay, and download the answer. Just like LLMs are - another topic where I was reading papers back in 2017 and that knowledge turned out to not be especially useful in regular life.
Learn the details of stuff if it naturally interests you. Ignore it if it doesn't. Being a specialist in an obscure domain can occasionally be like striking the jackpot, but it's rare and not something to feel bad about if you just don't want to.
About 15 years ago I became interested in really advanced cryptography, because it was presented at a Bitcoin conference I went to. If you think AI is hard, that's kindergarten stuff compared to the maths behind zero knowledge proofs. And because nobody cared at that time outside of a handful of academics, there were no tutorials, blog posts or anything else to help. Just a giant mound of academic papers, often undated so it was hard to even figure out if what you were reading had been superseded already. But it seemed important, so I dived in and started reading papers.
At first, maybe only 5% of the words made sense. So I grabbed onto those 5%. I read a paper, put it down for a while, re-read it later and found I understood more. I talked to the researchers, emailed them, asked questions. I read the older papers that initiated the field, and that helped. It was a lot of work.
You know what? In the end, it was a waste of time. The knowledge ended up being useful primarily for explaining why I wasn't using those algorithms in my designs. A lot of the claims sounded useful but ended up not being so for complicated reasons, and anyway, I was mostly interested in what you could do with the tech rather than the tech itself. Turns out there's always a small number of people who are willing to dive in and make the magic happen in a nicely abstracted way for everyone else, for any kind of tech. QC is no different. There's, as far as I can tell, very little reason to learn it. If QC does ever "happen" it'll presumably 95% of the time be in the form of a cloud service where you upload problems that fit a quantum algorithm worked out by someone else, pay, and download the answer. Just like LLMs are - another topic where I was reading papers back in 2017 and that knowledge turned out to not be especially useful in regular life.
Learn the details of stuff if it naturally interests you. Ignore it if it doesn't. Being a specialist in an obscure domain can occasionally be like striking the jackpot, but it's rare and not something to feel bad about if you just don't want to.