Science fiction is an extremely poor judge of computers in the future.
We've already exceeded storage space and processing speed described by science fictions little older than 10 years. If you go back to the 80s, computers not yet scheduled for 100 years from now are painfully slow, large and unintuitive and beep for every character printed on the screen (always struck me are an irritating feature I'd turn off right away).
Even produced today, science fictions often use computing delays, transfer rates and lengthy "recalibration"s as plot devices, which if translated literally, would indicate poorly designed, inflexible software running on hardware starved for processing performance and connectivity bandwidth. On the other hand, fictional characters will dictate rather abstract commands and submit ambiguous questions to voice recognition systems that easily interpret and execute them, sometimes demonstrating advanced comprehension and intuition we cannot even begin to imagine possible today.
All quantum computing offers is faster number crunching. It doesn't guarantee more flexible, smarter or productive computers; that's all down to infrastructure and software/firmware.
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Originally Posted by dlf
Who knows what hardware we'll have in 10, 20, 100 years? I think I've also read quantum comps don't use transitors -- or do but very speical kinds that utlize the speed of light (or some part of the computer uses C).
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The very definition of quantum computing, is rather than logic operations being performed by, and stored, in transistor circuits, they are done at a
quantum level by configuring atoms to exist in certain controlled states. It's a loose definition really, but the whole point of quantum computing is to get rid of the reliance on transistors as we know them.