  Historically, noise in superconducting circuits has been considered an
obstacle to be removed. A large fraction of the research effort in designing
superconducting circuits has focused on noise reduction, with great success, as
coherence times have increased by four orders of magnitude in the past two
decades. However, noise and dissipation can never be fully eliminated, and
further, a rapidly growing body of theoretical and experimental work has shown
that carefully tuned noise, in the form of engineered dissipation, can be a
profoundly useful tool in designing and operating quantum circuits. In this
article, I review important applications of engineered dissipation, including
state generation, state stabilization, and autonomous quantum error correction,
where engineered dissipation can mitigate the effect of intrinsic noise,
reducing logical error rates in quantum information processing. Further, I
provide a pedagogical review of the basic noise processes in superconducting
qubits (photon loss and phase noise), and argue that any dissipative mechanism
which can correct photon loss errors is very likely to automatically suppress
dephasing. I also discuss applications for quantum simulation, and possible
future research directions.
