I think humans are weak and prone to leaping on gimmicks and extrapolating with limited information to wherever their imagination takes them.
If shown a dazzling, mysterious, $10m glass cube draped with all that hyperbolic "quantum future wow!!" marketing, ordinarily smart people will leap to anything. In reality, QC doesn't seem to have a ton of applications yet.
A lot, if not all, of those references were in jest. Nobody was expecting the machine to be an actual deity.
The post you're replying to doesn't suggest anyone expected deification.
The post suggests sparkly marketing hooplah wrapping up meager actuality.
> The post suggests sparkly marketing hooplah wrapping up meager actuality.
I don't think any of those who quoted from this story fell into the marketing hyperbole. We all know these machines are interesting engineering marvels, but far from actually useful at the moment, with the exception of a very narrow set of problems that fall within the narrow capabilities. The people who fell for it probably never heard of this story.
I saw many people come up independently with a direct quote from this story when they saw the IBM promotional image of a man standing in front of an IBM Quantum System One machine.
The image: https://www.techmonitor.ai/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2023/...