Science perpetuating unequal social orders

A reader sends this 2017 paper on The careless use of language in quantum information:

An imperative aspect of modern science is that scientific institutions act for the benefit of a common scientific enterprise, rather than for the personal gain of individuals within them. This implies that science should not perpetuate existing or historical unequal social orders. Some scientific terminology, though, gives a very different impression. I will give two examples of terminology invented recently for the field of quantum information which use language associated with subordination, slavery, and racial segregation: 'ancilla qubit' and 'quantum supremacy'.

I first heard of this sort of objection in connection with Master/slave (technology)

Master/slave is a model of communication where one device or process has unidirectional control over one or more other devices. In some systems a master is selected from a group of eligible devices, with the other devices acting in the role of slaves.[1][2][3] ...

Appropriateness of terminology

In 2003, the County of Los Angeles in California asked that manufacturers, suppliers and contractors stop using "master" and "slave" terminology on products; the county made this request "based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County".[5][6] Following outcries about the request, the County of Los Angeles issued a statement saying that the decision was "nothing more than a request".[5] Due to the controversy,[citation needed] Global Language Monitor selected the term "master/slave" as the most politically incorrect word of 2004.[7]

In September 2016, MediaWiki deprecated instances of the term "slave" in favor of "replica".[8][9]

In December 2017, the Internet Systems Consortium, maintainers of BIND, decided to allow the words primary and secondary as a substitute for the well-known master/slave terminology. [10]

I am not even sure that people associate "white supremacy" with South Africa anymore. It appears to be becoming one of those meaningless name-calling epithets, like "nazi". Eg, if you oppose illegal immigration, you might be called a white supremacist.

Until everyone settled on "quantum supremacy", I used other terms on this blog, such as super-Turing. That is, the big goal is to make a computer that can do computations with a complexity that exceeds the capability of a Turing machine.

Meanwhile, the inventor of the quantum supremacy term has cooked a new term for the coming Google-IBM overhyped results:

Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) technology will be available in the near future. Quantum computers with 50-100 qubits may be able to perform tasks which surpass the capabilities of today's classical digital computers, but noise in quantum gates will limit the size of quantum circuits that can be executed reliably. NISQ devices will be useful tools for exploring many-body quantum physics, and may have other useful applications, but the 100-qubit quantum computer will not change the world right away --- we should regard it as a significant step toward the more powerful quantum technologies of the future. Quantum technologists should continue to strive for more accurate quantum gates and, eventually, fully fault-tolerant quantum computing. ...

We shouldn’t expect NISQ is to change the world by itself; instead it should be regarded as a step toward more powerful quantum technologies we’ll develop in the future. I do think that quantum computers will have transformative effects on society eventually, but these may still be decades away. We’re just not sure how long it’s going to take.

Will Google and IBM be happy claiming NISQ and admitting that quantum supremacy and transformative effects are decades away? I doubt it, but if they cannot achieve quantum supremacy, they will surely want to claim something.

A few years ago I spoke enthusiastically about quantum supremacy as an impending milestone for human civilization [20]. I suggested this term as a way to characterize computational tasks performable by quantum devices, where one could argue persuasively that no existing (or easily foreseeable) classical device could perform the same task, disregarding whether the task is useful in any other respect. I was trying to emphasize that now is a very privileged time in the coarse-grained history of technology on our planet, and I don’t regret doing so. ...

I’ve already emphasized repeatedly that it will probably be a long time before we have fault-tolerant quantum computers solving hard problems.

He sounds like Carl Sagan telling us about communication with intelligent life on other planets.