The Things You Learn Standing In Line

I was standing in line at the local Social Security Office last week hoping to register for Medicare.?You never know who you will meet in line, but I was so fortunate to meet a younger man who was there taking care of some paperwork for his elderly mother.?We talked for awhile and it turned it out that he worked for a Houston computer company that was producing “commercial” quantum computers.?I spent 40 minutes listening to his journey as the company moved from concept to functional model to commercial application.?When I say commercial, I am really talking about a very specialized market.?These are not cheap to build and maintain.?They operate at near 0 degrees Kelvin.

This field has all sorts of promise and also the potential to be a challenge to national/industrial security. ?The sheer processing power that is tied to quantum mechanics is beyond imagination when it comes to certain types of problems like large scale, multi-variate optimization and probabilistic forecasting.?Turns out that an enterprising young person can gain access to free use for learning purposes through Microsoft, Google, Amazon and others.?But having access and making use of it are two different animals.

Yesterday, I went on LinkedIn Learning and took “Cloud Quantum Computing Essentials” by Lynn Langit.?(https://www.dhirubhai.net/learning/cloud-quantum-computing-essentials/creating-solutions-with-cloud-quantum-computing?autoplay=true) ?This is a phenomenal class with plenty of additional resources provided into addition to the direct instruction.?I quickly realized how far out of my league I was.?To really program well in a quantum environment requires a mastery of some pretty complex math (linear algebra, advanced probability and statistics), physics, and some background in electrical circuits.?It also requires imagination.?The concepts of entanglement, superposition, and other basics concepts relevant at the atomic and sub atomic level are not easy to grasp.?

A simple, random conversation opened my eyes to tremendous possibilities.?I brought up the idea that we are rapidly approaching a tipping point where we need to adopt world model that was suggested in Star Trek where the preservation, survival, and growth of humanity as a species must over take tribalism and nationalism.?That computational tools such as the quantum computers coupled with imagination and challenges would be essential to dealing with the certain crisis that will face our children and their children as global climate change makes water and food no longer a certainty.?But, my partner in the discussion was much more fatalistic, believing that all top species eventually extinct themselves and man is no different.

We did touch on a final subject. We discussed the fact that the leading thinkers in his space were not native-born Americans.?They were students and other immigrants who came to the US to study or to escape oppression and settled here and were now leading the research in quantum computing.?They came form Iran, Russia, China, and India.?As an immigrant himself, my partner suggested that the US is far ahead of the rest of the world on so many fronts.?That from his vantage point, this was due to the youth of the country, the heavy investment by the US government in cutting edge technologies, and by the freedoms accorded individuals to pursue their own interests.?

I left the social security office more convinced more than ever that the greatest threat to the US is ourselves.?The recent conversative trends to limit immigration, to limit student visas, to make it hard to work here and to place restrictions on free thought are just counter to American values, but more significantly counter to American interests.?Further, we need government investment through DARPA, NIH, and other Agencies to foster research whether the commercial business case does not yet exist.?Finally, we need desperately to invest in our schools and our children at all levels and across all socio-economic divisions.

The last irony of my trip to the social security office:?it was a logistic problem needing a solution.?I arrived early – 7:30, was let into the building at 9:00, spent another 15 minutes in lines and a total of 10 minutes working directly with a Medicare Specialist.?