While You Were Sleeping<br />The promise of quantum computing is to vastly simplify<br />that process by exactly predicting the structure of a new molecule, and how it will interact with other compounds.”<br />Quantum computers process information, using the capabilities of quantum physics, differently from traditional computers.<br />It turns out, she explained, there are “3.6 million ways to arrange 10 people for dinner.”<br />Classical computers don’t solve “big versions of this problem very well at all,” she said, like trying to crack sophisticated encrypted codes, where<br />you need to try a massive number of variables, or modeling molecules where you need to account for an exponential number of interactions.<br />“Whereas normal computers store information as either a 1 or a 0, quantum computers exploit two phenomena — entanglement<br />and superposition — to process information,” explains MIT Technology Review.<br />Technology companies “are inventing these technologies, so we have the responsibility to help people adapt to it —<br />and I don’t mean just giving them tablets or P. C.s, but lifelong learning systems.”<br />To back that up, said Rometty, IBM designed Pathways in Technology (P-Tech) schools, partnering with close to 100 public high schools<br />and community colleges to create a six-year program that serves large numbers of low-income students.<br />But, again, look at where we are today thanks to artificial intelligence from digital computers —<br />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.
