Meeting of the Parliament 13 November 2019
When I graduated from computer science—some time ago, it has to be said—computers of any significance were the size of a big room, and programmes were keyed in on punched cards while the user waited for the printed output in another room. Those were the glory days, indeed—but oh, how things have changed. They are changing so fast that we will need to be pretty astute just to be able to keep up.
Our smartphones are millions of times more powerful than the computers that took us to the moon and back. Al and data-driven technology are transforming the way we live, shaping business growth, transforming the skills base of our workforce and determining our place in an increasingly digitally advanced and data-driven global economy. Our economic and social future is largely dependent on our ability to innovate and to harness the advances in digital technologies. That is particularly the case with regard to the data revolution that we are in right now, which many members have referred to as the fourth industrial revolution.
What is going on, and what do we need to do to keep pace and stay in the game? There is nothing new about data—it has been around for millennia. However, what is different is the computing power to do something meaningful and helpful with it. Previously, we could only dream about being able to analyse complex data and do something with it, but we can do that now, and the computers are getting faster and faster.
Members might be aware of recent developments involving quantum computing, where experiments by Google and NASA appear to show that we are on the cusp once again of an incredible and astonishing jump in computing power. So, watch out for more on quantum supremacy, as it is called.