QUANTUM SKILLS
Perhaps one of the greatest hurdles to quantum computing is simply helping people to understand how it works. Quantum will likely follow a typical technology adoption path, said Kim. “If you think about it, we’ve been discussing concepts around artificial intelligence and machine learning for over 10 years and those are just getting at the cusp of mainstream,” he pointed out. “For the majority of people in technology, there’s still little understanding of how quantum physics—through its mechanics like superpositions and entanglement; and experiments like Schrödinger’s Cat and Quantum Double Slit—can be used to dramatically increase computational capabilities.”
When the move to quantum computing does accelerate, there will be demand for new types of skills as well to take advantage of this new form of computing power. For starters, “quantum computers require a new way of programming,” said Stoica. “They require developers not just learning new languages but mastering radically new concepts. Training quantum computing programmers will take time—and training enough of them will take even more time.” Think about the time it is taking to create new university curricula and move data scientists through the pipeline, he noted.
How is quantum-oriented programming different from programming as we know it today? “The challenge for developers will be understanding that the physics of quantum computing are different than for classical computing,” said Petrocelli. “Leveraging superposition, quantum entanglement, and the more probabilistic model of quantum computing is a change in thinking of computing. Wrapping one’s head around this model so that it can be used appropriately is going to require rethinking what developers have known their whole lives about software.”
According to Harrison, "The biggest challenge is to rewrite all the secure internet layers to become quantum resistant. Inside the quantum computing industry, the challenge is to achieve higher qubit counts, since until we get at least 256 qubits we probably won’t see quantum computers capable of cracking existing encryption regimes. Programming quantum algorithms is a totally new skill and there’ll be a shortage of quantum programmers for some time."
Developers and data managers “will have to learn new ways of writing and running quantum computers which are in sync with the hardware,” Kothari predicted. “They will need proficiency in quantum algorithms for clustering, quantum classification algorithms, and adiabatic quantum computing. I expect that the key players such as Google, AWS, IBM, and Azure will integrate these algorithms in cloud offerings in a much easier way for data scientists and data managers to consume without getting into the details of quantum entanglement.”
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay