Scott Aaronson is not a quantum-computing skeptic, quite the opposite, he has always seemed optimistic about its prospects and his work has been fundamental to progress in the field. He just does not like hyped-up work that has little substance. If anything, Bruce Schneier should have been a bit more skeptical - this type hyped-up unreviewed preprint papers appear very frequently these days.
I think he was fairly skeptical but said the proof would come when someone tries to implement it; he now links to Aaronson's take in his original blog post.
Just wanted to point out that Scott Aaronson is not one of those anti quantum curmudgeons. Besides bashing on companies with questionable claims, I think he's been pretty open minded about looking for problems and algorithms with actual quantum advantages.
As someone who lived though one AI winter and seriously fears another, I view fighting hype is important to allowing useful research to happen.
'Super position' and 'entanglement' have been overly mystified in QM in general and the implications of probabilistic Turing machines vs the typical non-deterministic Turning machine examples is important.
While probabilistic Turing machines are non-deterministic, they don't work the way that most examples offer.
Same problem with elementary descriptions of entropy so it isn't just the quantum fields problem.
We are perhaps in something of a "quantum winter" at the moment, given the activity on the financial side of the QC industry as far as reverse listings, SPACs, and mergers have gone.
I work in this field as I find it compelling and the challenges of finding a worthy business case that applies beyond the fantastical potentials is one I feel worth my efforts/years. But equally open to failure where such yields an advance in our learning.
Aaronson is always an entertaining voice in the industry, although his focus on AI means less than I would hope to nudge us along at times. But he was in fine form at Q2B conference in Santa Clara recently, and I'm not anywhere near close to my contributions to the industry to ignore his thoughts as valuable to the discourse. Especially when pushing back on the emotional velocity we might have at times.
Scott Aaronson is more than willing to praise research whenever there has been actual progress made. There is just a lot of bullshit in his field (or maybe there is a normal amount of bullshit but it is amplified more by the media).
The bullshit ratio in quantum computing is the highest I've seen in any field, followed only by ML (the difference being that there is ML non-bullshit, while quantum computing hasn't been shown to be useful for any real problem, but there have been huge advances in the underlying technologies).
To my knowledge the only "practical" application of quantum sensing so far has been the use of squeezed light in some gravitational wave detectors. However, this has absolutely nothing to do with quantum information science. Getting an actual advantage out of quantum effects has so far been remarkably difficult.
Answering here, but this really covers the sibling comment from dekhn.
To me it seem quite wild to have quantum sensing separated from the rest of quantum information science. It would be like saying that classical SNR considerations are unrelated to Shannon's introduction of error correcting codes (the birth of information science). But if that is your preference, it does not make much sense to argue. Either way, most scientist who work on quantum information science also see their work apply specifically to sensing.
Similarly, it seems strange to me to insist on specifically focusing on quantum computing, when the majority of technology developments in quantum information science apply both to sensing and to computing (one of which is simply easier thanks to its analog nature).
I think it's a stretch to relate that to quantum computing, which normally describes making systems that can... well, compute! Quantum sensing is more an application of quantum theory and exploitation of quantum effects to improve photonics applications.
