qc
Explanation
This comic satirizes the hype around quantum computing by contrasting it with traditional engineering.
In the first panel, someone asks who the greatest engineers are, and the answer is "quantum computer architects." When asked what the most important goal of engineering is, one character answers "building things" -- but is told that's wrong. The deep aspiration of a quantum computer engineer is "to take a thing and make it do what it wasn't supposed to."
The comic then contrasts venerated traditional engineers (people who built bridges, figured out how to detect radiation, used logic gates) with quantum computer engineers who "run scripts on a set of particles balanced on the unknowably fundamental nature of the universe to, like, crack an encryption key." The punchline has a character saying "we could run Doom on the universe" to which another responds "Amen."
The humor comes from the absurdity of quantum computing's relationship with practical engineering. Traditional engineering takes well-understood materials and builds useful things. Quantum computing, by contrast, exploits the most bizarre and poorly understood aspects of physics to do computations -- and the results so far are arguably less practically impressive than a Roman aqueduct. The "run Doom on the universe" line is a reference to the engineering community's tradition of porting the game Doom to every conceivable device, taken to its logical extreme.