The ‘Poetical Science’ of AI: Remembering Ada Lovelace
On the 10th October, we celebrated Ada Lovelace Day, remembering all of her contributions to mathematics, advanced analytics and its relationship to the arts. Ada Lovelace was also one of the first to raise the philosophy of machine learning.
‘Can machines think?’ This is the question that Alan Turing thought to be “too meaningless to deserve discussion.” Instead he believed the focus should be on whether machines could imitate human intelligence to the extent that an impartial human would be fooled.
The world of machine learning and artificial intelligence has quite a Romantic history, weaving mathematics and art and poetry together. Lady Lovelace was a pioneer of this world.
Ada Lovelace was a prominent mathematician in the 1800s, who celebrated the philosophical concepts of machines and their abilities. As the daughter of the famous poet, Lord Byron, she was encouraged by her single mother to pursue mathematics, away from her father’s heritage of “insanity” and poetry. However, Ada described herself as “an analyst and a metaphysician,” and bravely ventured into what she called “poetical science.”
Thus, arguably the world’s first computer programmer, who also happened to be a woman, had a very philosophical take on what constituted a machine’s knowledge, thinking and response.Ada Lovelace rose to prominence through her contribution to Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Her unique perspective allowed her to discover the untapped potential of the Analytical Engine, including applications outside of numbers. Lovelace was one of the first to foster the belief that machines could process music, images and poetry and art. In this way, she was a pioneer in philosophical science.
0 Comments