Does it, though? If I understand correctly the exponential distribution means we will have an expected waiting time of X years between two occurences but does it also hold when there is just a single event?
I mean to say that the introduction of a quantum computer is just a single, once occurring event.
I don't think I really understand what you mean. What he said was that it stays at 10 years indefinitely. Either way, x+10 and e^x both go to infinity, so I guess the conclusion is the same, right?
I think the joke was to say that 'quantum computing being discovered' follows a Poisson distribution which models occurrences of events that arrive in a manner so that each one is independent of the previous one. Such as letters arriving in the mail or winning at roulette. Regardless of how long it's been since your last letter, you still guess that the next one will come on average, say, 5 days from now. Regardless of how long its been since you won at roulette, you should still expect your number to come up on average 38 tries from now.
The exponential part is more like e^(-x) and refers to the exponential distribution [1] that gives the distribution of intervals in between Poisson events. So if its 'distributed exponentially' (whatever that means for a one-off event), the joke is that this would then give rise to the situation where researchers are always correct guessing 10 years off, even if they've been saying that for decades.
> So if its 'distributed exponentially' (whatever that means for a one-off event)
One-off event is not a problem. You can clone the world many times at the moment when scientists made their prediction and find the distribution over ensemble instead of over time.
No, it just means that time until quantum computers are available is distributed exponentially.