Bob Sutor: Building the decade’s quantum workforce

Many years ago, in a different (albeit similar) life, a dictaphone packed up on me and boiled a 30-minute interview into something acrid, dripping and metaphorical. The 30 minutes were non-negotiable: I had used my slot. And as is the way of the dictaphone when they so calamitously drop the ball, jump up and down on it in crampons and then whump it into space, it was only on plugging my premium-branded paperweight into a laptop that I received the then-cutting-edge Windows ‘probably-Google-it’ shrug. I think technically it’s still called the ‘Troubleshooter’ - but let’s be honest: I don’t know for certain, and neither do you.

Rationally, I know now that everyone gets that feeling at some point. Like someone has fired something from way down the periodic table into space, missed, and had that cold, hard slug perform a faultless 180-degree turn-and-thud somewhere into the pit of their stomach. It isn’t fair. Dogs don’t really eat people’s homework. And yet here one was, innocently wagging its tail, with chunks of metaphor all over its adorable slobbering face. I called some people. More were surely roused. Across the world, people were dragged from their marital beds, like in the films.

A day later I had exactly the same conversation - verbatim - all over again for the second time by telephone. It was a terrible interview. The same questions, the same answers, the same surreally frantic feeling of negotiating Christmas seats with the cinema switchbot after being cut off in a tunnel when you were already only twenty minutes away. Of being part of some mad Turing Test designed, built and tested by mynah birds.

Imagine - and I appreciate, that’s now ‘an ask’ - the opposite of that experience. That is Bob Sutor, IBM’s ‘Chief Quantum Exponent’.

For non-mathematicians, that is a 50-calibre nerd joke. “It's a little bit of a play on words,” he says with the air of an amiable dad who’s named a bowling team. “One of the things about quantum computing is that there are many mathematical ‘exponents’ involved… For example: if you have ten qubits, the number of pieces of information you have is two-to-the-ten… But ‘exponent’ also has another meaning, and that is somebody who goes around and loudly proclaims the value of some particular topic. I'm a mathematician by training, but I spend a lot of my career speaking publicly about technical topics and trying to make them understandable so people have a sense of why they're important and what they're going to be used for.”

This is Sutor’s niche. Going back pre-pandemic, there are YouTube videos, audio streams and text interviews where he hits the same beats without ever losing momentum. Answers aren’t repeated or regurgitated: even when you have an idea of the answer that’s coming, the delivery is like an enthused university professor retreading old ground for a new year of undergrads. Some six or seven minutes of our interview (which, mercifully, is permitted to stretch from our assigned 30 minutes to 55) are spent on a question about the seemingly arbitrary number of qubits that make up IBM’s 20-plus cloud-based QCs (IBM’s largest by qubits, codenamed ‘Eagle’, runs 127; next year’s ‘Osprey’: 433). I ask why not 126 or 434 and spend the better part of ten minutes being educated. There are three separate analogies involving cars. I come out feeling 20% smarter. I can’t even drive.

But this is why Sutor is IBM’s Chief Quantum Exponent. He dislikes the term ‘evangelist’ as applied to tech, but whatever his platform, there is the flickering zeal of the techno-shepherd: steering audiences away from quantum crags with his crook (never trust anyone who says, ‘Quantum computing will,’ he tells an audience of fintech experts), cracking modern encryption standards (not for decades, says Sutor - usually followed by imploring people to sleep soundly that weekend) and most importantly: steering the audience toward education. IBM, Sutor explains, has had publicly accessible cloud QCs online since mid-2016 and has consistently met its roadmap targets. On that strength, he’s confident (without using the ‘W’ word) that IBM’s QCs might-probably-based-on-past-work-almost-but-not-quite-definitely break 1000 qubits by 2023 - the point at which quantum advantage (Sutor avoids the buzzword ‘supremacy’ in our talk) will start to make a difference to the lives of people outside the sphere of quantum research.

What the world needs - and what IBM is nurturing through its Qiskit Summer Camps (up from 200 to 6000 attendees since Covid forced it online - is a quantum-literate workforce who will be ready by the mid-to-late 2020s to use its cloud QCs in industries from materials research (like electric car batteries) to financial services. IBM Quantum is already working with Samsung, Honda and JPMorgan Chase and when I ask him to connect the dots between those and other organisations - some of them household brands, some of them world-renowned academic research centres - I am Socratic Method-ed into considering future applications for AI and medicine. The man is “a theoretical mathematician by training,” not a quantum physicist or computer scientist. But the reason IBM puts him on stage as their representative is that he is - possibly foremostly - an educator.