Ada Lovelace's life and impact on scientific computing
Walter Isaacson discussing the life and impact of Ada Lovelace.
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Transcript
JOHN HOCKENBERRY: What did it take to be someone like Ada Lovelace, who discovered that calculating was not simply equations, but was algorithms, a set of instructions?
WALTER ISSACSON: I think that the main thing she had, in a larger sense, was the ability to connect the arts to the sciences, the humanities to engineering. As you know, her father, Lord Byron the poet, was a Luddite. And I mean that literally because the only speech he gives in the House of Lords is offending the followers of Ned Ludd who are smashing the mechanical looms in England thinking it's going to put weavers out of work. But Ada went on a trip to the Midlands, saw the mechanical looms, saw the way punch cards were instructing the looms to do beautiful patterns. And she was friends with Babbage, as you said. And he was making his calculating machine doing numbers. And she realized that the punch cards can make it so as she put it-- because she publishes, which is unusual for a woman in the 1830s to publish, a scientific paper on Babbage's machine. Saying that because of the punch cards and other things it can do anything that can be notated in symbols. Not just numbers. But it can do words. It can weave tapestries as beautiful as a jacquard loom, she writes. And it can even make music, something that would have caused Lord Byron to flinch--
HOCKENBERRY: What she's seeing there is exactly what John von Neumann sees.
ISSACSON: Bingo. The general purpose computer. And Alan Turing sees it.
HOCKENBERRY: That symbols are agnostic. They don't depend on violins. They don't depend on typewriters. They don't depend on the machines that make them. Symbols have a life of their own.
ISSACSON: One of the things that Ada says at the end of her notes on the analytical engine, machines will do everything-- they'll do music, they'll do this that and the other. And then she says, but they will never think. They will never originate thought. They will never be imaginative. It will take the human partnership with the machine to originate thought. And that's what Alan Turing, 100 years later, calls Lady Lovelace's objection. And says, how would we know that? How would we know a machine can't think? What if we can't tell a machine apart from a human in its answers? Then there's no reason to say the machine is not thinking.
WALTER ISSACSON: I think that the main thing she had, in a larger sense, was the ability to connect the arts to the sciences, the humanities to engineering. As you know, her father, Lord Byron the poet, was a Luddite. And I mean that literally because the only speech he gives in the House of Lords is offending the followers of Ned Ludd who are smashing the mechanical looms in England thinking it's going to put weavers out of work. But Ada went on a trip to the Midlands, saw the mechanical looms, saw the way punch cards were instructing the looms to do beautiful patterns. And she was friends with Babbage, as you said. And he was making his calculating machine doing numbers. And she realized that the punch cards can make it so as she put it-- because she publishes, which is unusual for a woman in the 1830s to publish, a scientific paper on Babbage's machine. Saying that because of the punch cards and other things it can do anything that can be notated in symbols. Not just numbers. But it can do words. It can weave tapestries as beautiful as a jacquard loom, she writes. And it can even make music, something that would have caused Lord Byron to flinch--
HOCKENBERRY: What she's seeing there is exactly what John von Neumann sees.
ISSACSON: Bingo. The general purpose computer. And Alan Turing sees it.
HOCKENBERRY: That symbols are agnostic. They don't depend on violins. They don't depend on typewriters. They don't depend on the machines that make them. Symbols have a life of their own.
ISSACSON: One of the things that Ada says at the end of her notes on the analytical engine, machines will do everything-- they'll do music, they'll do this that and the other. And then she says, but they will never think. They will never originate thought. They will never be imaginative. It will take the human partnership with the machine to originate thought. And that's what Alan Turing, 100 years later, calls Lady Lovelace's objection. And says, how would we know that? How would we know a machine can't think? What if we can't tell a machine apart from a human in its answers? Then there's no reason to say the machine is not thinking.