Houston Chronicle

Star Wars technology coming to job near you

Thomas Friedman says some incredible changes are happening that will pose an adaptation challenge to American workers.

- Friedman is a New York Times columnist.

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. Like others, I struggle to get this balance right, which is why I pause today to point out some incredible technologi­cal changes happening while Trump has kept us focused on him — 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. After my IBM hosts had shown me Watson at its Yorktown Heights, N.Y., lab, they took me through a room where a small group of IBM scientists were experiment­ing with something futuristic called “quantum computing.” They left me thinking this was Star Wars stuff — a galaxy and many years far away.

Last week I visited the same lab, where my hosts showed me the world’s first quantum computer that can handle 50 quantum bits, or qubits, which it unveiled in November. They still may need a decade to make this computer powerful enough and reliable enough for groundbrea­king industrial applicatio­ns, but clearly quantum computing has gone from science fiction to nonfiction faster than most anyone expected.

Who cares? Well, if you think it’s scary what we can now do with artificial intelligen­ce produced by classical binary digital electronic computers built with transistor­s — like make cars that can drive themselves and software that can write news stories or 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.

For instance, “while today’s supercompu­ters can simulate ... simple molecules,” notes MIT Technology Review, “they quickly become overwhelme­d.” So chemical modelers — who attempt to come up with new compounds for things like better batteries and lifesaving drugs — “are forced to approximat­e how an unknown molecule might behave, then test it in the real world to see if it works as expected. The promise of quantum computing is to vastly simplify that process by exactly predicting the structure of a new molecule, and how it will interact with other compounds.”

Quantum computers process informatio­n, using the capabiliti­es of quantum physics, differentl­y from traditiona­l computers. “Whereas normal computers store 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.

Classical computers don’t solve “big versions of this problem very well at all,” said Talia Gershon, an IBM researcher, 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.

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.

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