Technological advances will pose challenges to workforce

Donald Trump poses a huge dilemma for commentators: to ignore his daily outrages is to normalize his behavior, but to constantly write about them is to stop learning. I struggle to get this balance right, which is why I pause to point out some incredible technological changes that will pose as big an adaptation challenge to American workers as transitioning from farms to factories once did.

Two and half years ago, I was researching a book that included a section on IBM’s cognitive computer, “Watson,” which had perfected the use of artificial intelligence enough to defeat the two all-time “Jeopardy!” champions. My hosts took me through a room where a small group of scientists was experimenting with something called “quantum computing.” They left me thinking this was Star Wars stuff — a galaxy and many years far away.

Last week I visited that same lab in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where my hosts showed me the world’s first quantum computer that can handle 50 quantum bits, or qubits, which it unveiled in November. Clearly quantum computing has gone from science fiction to nonfiction faster than most expected.

Who cares? Well, if you think it’s scary what we can now do with classical binary digital electronic computers built with transistors — like make cars that can drive themselves and software that can produce humanlike speech — remember this: These “old” computers still don’t have enough memory or processing power to solve what IBM calls “historically intractable problems.” Quantum computers, paired with classical computers via the cloud, have the potential to do that in minutes or seconds.

Talia Gershon, an IBM researcher, posted a 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 there are “3.6 million ways to arrange 10 people for dinner.”

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 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.