There is an interesting article in Popular Mechanics this month that talks about the relationship between Quantum Mechanics and human logic trees. 

Deep Learning AI models just haven’t been that good at predicting human behavior, let alone emulating it.  Computers, regardless of speed, tend to think linearly, and humans don’t.  It isn’t just the physical differences between processors and human brains; it is the fact that brains process massive amounts of information in parallel, and classical computers can’t handle this massive level of parallelism. 

But Quantum Computers are not only massively parallel in the way they look at information. And, according to scientists at the University of Science and Technology in China in Anhui, that may make Quantum computers the missing link needed to make accurate human emulation and prediction viable.

Now in the US, only IBM has leadership in both AI (with Watson) and Quantum Computing, suggesting that here IBM may get this right first.  IBM believes they will have a functional Quantum Computer in the 2025 timeframe, and this suggests that before 2030 they may also have a system that combines their Watson effort with Quantum computing to create an accurate human-like AI. 

Let’s talk about some of the things that could result from this blend of Quantum Computing and advanced Artificial Intelligence this week.

Digital Immortality

There has been a substantial effort to create a system that would allow an aspect of ourselves to continue indefinitely.  This advancement has both personal and professional potential. 

I think most of us would like to both be able to talk to our children after we are gone to help them through personal problems, and to talk to our ancestors when we have challenges.  Professionally being able to talk to the founders of a company long after they are gone to see if we can stay close to their vision and have those virtual founders talk to customers and employees to help with continuity of vision.

And imagine a customer event where a founder, years after they passed, could still dynamically interact with an audience of investors, employees, or customers becoming a permanent part of the firm’s eternal brand. 

On this last, professionals often don’t do a good job of mentoring their successors, and thus the reasons behind decisions were lost, often resulting in the collapse of otherwise successful unique business models because those operating the companies never understood why they were successful.

Bots and AI

Whether we are talking sales or customer care, our experience with Bots still mostly is not good.  People can listen to the tone of a person’s voice, pick up that they may not be talking to the person connected to the phone number, and can effectively empathize believably with an upset customer or prospect. 

Creating a bot that’s based on the most successful phone sales rep or most liked customer support professional would allow the firm to take their best people and replicate them at scale.  When you called in, the system would pick the personality initially that was generally most successful and then adapt it to the caller’s unique needs. This would improve sales effectiveness and support customer satisfaction over time. 

This capability could be incredibly powerful.  Last year one of the firms presenting at an IBM event shared a customer call where the AI was so good that the caller began flirting with it and seemed to be working toward asking it out.  That’s with current technology, and it is extremely uncommon.  But once these AIs can generically interact as people do, they can provide advice at scale in a way that people might follow it, and whether we are talking about customer satisfaction or closing sales, the results should be impressive.

The AI Decade

We’ve had a lot of discussions about AIs over the last several decades. This decade, if it does bring Quantum computing driven AIs (assuming those Chinese scientists are right), the result should be vastly more realistic human-like AIs. These AIs could make digital immortality real and result in bots that not only are more human-like but may only be distinguishable from humans because of their lack of bad emotions.   

This quantum advancement will be a game-changer and just the tip of the iceberg for how Quantum Computing will not only change the world but our perceptions of it.