Despite the rapid emergence of mobile devices and cloud computing, it's still intuitive to think of computers as relatively self-contained systems. And, as self-contained systems, they can be relied on to have many if not most of the same capabilities offline as they do online. They work just fine in isolation.

Quantum computing is poised to upend a great many of our assumptions about computers and what it even means to be such a thing. Rather than centralized machines, it may make more sense to imagine the future's powerful quantum computers as distributed networks of very tiny computers operating in a way similar to how parallel computation occurs in classical computing. A problem is broken apart many times and then sent across many different processors at once; at the other end, all of the results are put together into a final solution.

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