In the decade since governments started taking quantum computing seriously, the question has shifted from “will this work?” to “what happens when it does?” The UK has committed £2.5 billion through its National Quantum Strategy. Globally, public investment has crossed $40 billion. Several leading vendors, including Google, IBM, IonQ, and QuEra, have published roadmaps that target useful, fault-tolerant systems before 2030.
Those timelines have moved from fringe to mainstream, which means it is time to ask a harder question. Will quantum computing be good for the world?
The honest answer is that the outcome will be determined less by the technology itself than by the choices we make around it.
What the world stands to gain
Quantum computers are not faster classical computers. They are different machines that handle a narrow set of problems classical computers struggle with. The most promising of those problems sit in chemistry, materials, and optimization, which happen to underpin some of the largest challenges humanity faces.
Drug discovery is one example. Today’s pharmaceutical pipelines rely on a mix of laboratory experiments and approximate molecular simulations on classical supercomputers. The approximations break down for certain protein-ligand interactions and for catalysts involving heavier elements. A fault-tolerant quantum computer should be able to simulate these systems directly. Companies including Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Roche have already published quantum chemistry pilots, exploring what is possible once the hardware catches up.
Climate science is another area. Better simulation of catalysts could accelerate research into carbon capture, green hydrogen production, and more efficient nitrogen fixation, the last of which is responsible for roughly 1.4 percent of global CO2 emissions through fertiliser production alone. Quantum computers will not solve climate change. But they may shorten the path from idea to validated chemistry by years rather than decades.
Materials science follows a similar logic. Better batteries, better superconductors, better photovoltaics. Each depends on understanding quantum mechanical behaviour in solids. Classical computers approximate. Quantum computers, eventually, will not have to.
The risks we cannot ignore
Optimism without honesty is just marketing. The same technology that helps simulate a catalyst also threatens parts of the digital infrastructure we have built over the past forty years.
The most discussed risk is cryptography. RSA and elliptic-curve encryption, which protect everything from online banking to government communications, can be broken by Shor’s algorithm running on a sufficiently large quantum computer. That machine does not yet exist. But adversaries are already harvesting encrypted data today, planning to decrypt it later. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has set a 2035 deadline for migration to post-quantum cryptography, and most major economies have set similar targets. The transition is real work, and most organisations have barely started.
A second risk is concentration. Building a quantum computer requires deep capital, specialised talent, and infrastructure that few organisations possess. If access is gated to a handful of nations and corporations, the gains in drug discovery, materials, and finance will flow disproportionately to them. Wealth inequality is the default outcome of any expensive, scarce capability unless deliberate steps are taken to prevent it.
A third risk is governance lag. Regulators are still adapting to the previous wave of computing breakthroughs. Quantum brings new questions about export control, dual-use research, secure cloud access, and the verification of quantum-derived results. Most of these questions do not yet have clear answers. Some do not yet have clear questioners.
It is worth being precise here. A 2027 quantum computer will not break the internet. It will not enable mass surveillance overnight. It will not invent a superweapon. The realistic risks are slower, structural, and shaped by policy choices made now.
Why 'good versus bad' is the wrong frame
Every major general-purpose technology in history has been both. Electricity powered hospitals and electric chairs. The internet enabled global education and global misinformation. Machine learning drives medical diagnostics and surveillance states.
Quantum computing will not be the exception.
What matters more is whether the institutions surrounding the technology are good. That includes how governments fund research, how industry shares early benefits, how regulators handle dual-use risks, and how universities train the next generation of quantum-literate workers. Those are all questions about people, not about qubits.
This is where the UK has a genuine opportunity. The country has built a credible reputation in responsible innovation through bodies like the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, and through how it has approached AI safety since 2023. The National Quantum Computing Centre at Harwell has positioned itself as more than a hardware procurement agency. Britain can apply the same playbook to quantum that it has been refining for AI and biotech: invest in capability, anticipate risks, convene early.
What needs to happen next
Three groups have specific work to do.
Industry needs to broaden access. Cloud-based quantum services from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud already offer some democratisation, but most enterprise pilots are still confined to well-funded teams in pharma, finance, and aerospace. Vendors and platforms should make educational access cheap and onboarding pathways short, particularly for academic institutions, public-sector researchers, and SMEs that will otherwise miss the early-learning window.
Policymakers need to act on cryptographic migration now, not in 2034. The UK government’s 2035 target is sensible only if the work starts a decade earlier. That means cryptographic inventories across critical national infrastructure, procurement standards that require post-quantum readiness, and clear guidance for regulated sectors like financial services and the NHS. The National Cyber Security Centre has published useful guidance. Adoption is the gap.
The research community, and the vendors that work alongside it, need to keep being honest about timelines. Quantum has a hype problem, and hype invites both overinvestment and backlash. The healthier discipline is grounding every public claim in peer-reviewed results that other groups can scrutinise and reproduce. At QuEra, the company I help lead, we publish in journals like Nature and Science before we announce in press releases, because the scientific record is where credibility actually lives. Other groups, including academic teams across the UK and Europe, follow similar standards. When that becomes the industry default rather than a competitive differentiator, public trust holds up through the inevitable difficult quarters.
A reasonable conclusion
Quantum computing is a tool, similar in scale and ambiguity to electricity, the internet, and modern AI, rather than a moral object. Its impact over the next twenty years will be shaped less by the physics of qubits and more by the choices made in policy briefings, university curricula, boardrooms, and standards committees over the next five.
The right question is whether we will be good stewards of it.
That is a question Britain, with its quantum strategy, its research ecosystem, and its history of thoughtful technology governance, is unusually well placed to answer.
We are on the runway. The destination is still ours to choose.
Yuval Boger
Yuval Boger is Chief Commercial Officer at QuEra, a leading quantum computing company. He has extensive experience in deep tech, spanning quantum, semiconductors, and enterprise systems, with prior leadership roles at Classiq and Cadence. He focuses on commercialising emerging technologies and bridging the gap between advanced research and real-world business applications.
