Sci-fi tech coming soon to a workplace near you
information as either a 1 or a 0, quantum computers exploit two phenomena — entanglement and superposition — to process information,” explains MIT Technology Review. The result is computers that may one day “operate 100,000 times faster than they do today,” adds Wired magazine.
Talia Gershon, an IBM researcher, posted a fun video explaining the power of quantum computers to optimize and model problems with an exponential number of variables. She displayed a picture of a table at her wedding set for 10 guests, and posed this question: How many different ways can you seat 10 people? It turns out, she explained, there are “3.6 million ways to arrange 10 people for dinner.”
Classical computers don’t solve “big versions of this problem very well at all,” she said, like trying to crack sophisticated encrypted codes, where you need to try a massive number of variables, or modeling molecules where you need to account for an exponential number of interactions.
Quantum computers, with their exponential processing power, will be able to crack most encryption without breaking a sweat.
It’s just another reason China, the NSA, IBM, Intel and Google are now all racing — full of sweat — to build usable quantum systems.
Look at where we are today thanks to artificial intelligence from digital computers — and the amount of middle-skill and even high-skill work they’re supplanting — and then factor in how all of this could be supercharged in a decade by quantum computing.
As education-to-work expert Heather Mcgowan (www.futureislearning.com) points out: “In October 2016, Budweiser transported a truckload of beer 120 miles with an empty driver’s seat .... In February 2017, Bank of America began testing three ‘employee-less’ branch locations that offer full-service banking automatically, with access to a human, when necessary, via video teleconference.”
It’s why IBM’S CEO, Ginni Rometty, remarked to me in an interview: “Every job will require some technology, and therefore we’ll need to revamp education. The K-12 curriculum is obvious, but it’s the adult retraining — lifelong learning systems — that will be even more important.”
Each time work gets outsourced or tasks get handed off to a machine, “we must reach up and learn a new skill or in some ways expand our capabilities as humans in order to fully realize our collaborative potential,” Mcgowan said.
Anyway, I didn’t mean to distract from the “Trump Reality Show,” but I just thought I’d mention that Star Wars technology is coming not only to a theater near you, but to a job near you. We need to be discussing and adapting to its implications as much as we do Trump’s tweets.
Thomas L. Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times.