Ada Lovelace’s Mistake

Today (ie. 24th March) is Ada Lovelace day. This annual blogospheric event was created to commemorate and publicise achievements of women within science and technology as something that’s greatly overlooked.

I thought it best to commemorate Ada Lovelace herself, or rather a particular thing she worked on. Daughter of Lord Byron, she became interested in mathematics and collaborated with Charles Babbage on work around his Analytical Engine. This was the first conception of a computer. The Engine was designed by Babbage a century before transistors and was therefore meant to operate purely mechanically. As such, it was never built but remained a beautiful paper idea. As an aside, nowadays people build mechanical computers for fun, such as this Turing Machine (the most formalised and fundamental computer on which all actual computers are based) made of lego.

Ada Lovelace is considered the world’s first computer programmer, writing code that was to be executed on Babbage’s Engine to calculate some Bernoulli numbers. Although it is apparently the world’s first computer program, some scholars contend that it was Babbage himself who wrote the actual code.

The area I want to focus on however is something that relates more to what I’m doing at uni: cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Alan Turing’s most famous paper is Computing Machinery and Intelligence in which he takes his rigorous mathematical concept of a Turing Machine developed previously and applies it to the notion of implementing an intelligence. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say the paper single-handedly launched the field of AI. In the paper, Turing anticipates some objections to AI and lists them. It’s telling that about 60 years later the objections haven’t evolved much. Anyway, here’s one he calls Lady Lovelace’s objection:

(6) Lady Lovelace’s Objection Our most detailed information of Babbage’s Analytical Engine comes from a memoir by Lady Lovelace. In it she states, “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform” (her italics). This statement is quoted by Hartree (p.70) who adds: “This does not imply that it may not be possible to construct electronic equipment which will ‘think for itself’, or in which, in biological terms, one could set up a conditioned reflex, which would serve as a basis for ‘learning’. Whether this is possible in principle or not is a stimulating and exciting question, suggested by some of these recent developments. But it did not seem that the machines constructed or projected at the time had this property.”

I am in thorough agreement with Hartree over this. It will be noticed that he does not assert that the machines in question had not got the property, but rather that the evidence available to Lady Lovelace did not encourage her to believe that they had it. It is quite possible that the machines in question had in a sense got this property. For suppose that some discrete-state machine has the property. The Analytical Engine was a universal digital computer, so that, if its storage capacity and speed were adequate, it could by suitable programming be made to mimic the machine in question. Probably this argument did not occur to the Countess or to Babbage. In any case there was no obligation on them to claim all that could be claimed.

So there it is. Lovelace understood the formal nature of the Analytical Engine enough to derive the programming principles of Garbage In – Garbage Out and that the computer does exactly what we program it to do (often to our detriment when this diverges with what we thought we told it to do). However she was not in a place within intellectual history where she had the tools to consider learning algorithms. Furthermore, had she been born just over a century later she’d know that in fact we are exactly such machines. We can only do what our DNA have programmed us to do. (I know this is a very crude way of putting it so maybe to rephrase, we also have no pretensions to originate anything outside our biological “vocabulary” in our cells, whether this comes from genes, epigenetics, culture and whatnot.)

It is almost a cliche that something is “just” a machine — but most of these assertions essentially boil down to a version of the Lady Lovelace objection. Except she was operating in a time where I think it really was the reasonable conclusion. We are not. So it’s actually her mistake that puts us to shame. It wasn’t fair that she was born in a time where she had little opportunity in the field she was interested in — but progress is unfair which is kinda the whole point. She made the best of her epistemic situation.

We can learn more from our mistakes than our successes. This is especially true for revealing mistakes that were made for good reasons. But out of respect of Ada’s intellect and her Important Mistake, out of a desire not to shame her and make her turn in her grave, the least we could do is not make this mistake today, when it’s a million times more inexcusable.