welcome back to our course on the digital revolution from ada to zuckerberg and as the name implies we're going to start with ada ada byron later to become the countess of lovelace and known to history as ada lovelace she was the only little legitimate child of the great romantic poet lord byron she was born in 1815 and she developed some of the poetic sensibilities of her father but her mother was not particularly fond of lord byron when ada was growing up if you know anything about lord byron you could probably understand why lady byron was fed up with him and so she lady byron had ada tutored mainly in mathematics as if that would be a way to knock out of her any poetic sensibilities she had but instead she developed what she called a feel for the poetical science in other words she loved standing at that intersection we talked about that intersection between the humanities and the sciences and she realized that mathematics which she loved was just the good lord's brush stroke for painting things in nature it was like a wonderful line like a line from her father's poetry one of those lines is she walks in beauty like the night well some people say math you know those uh math equations are hard to understand yes but you can visualize them if you're really somebody like ada lovelace just like she was able to visualize a line from her father's poetry that's pretty complicated you know she walks in beauty like the night ada was born right at the beginning of the industrial revolution in which the steam engine and the railway and mechanical looms we're changing the way we do business his um lord byron her father was a luddite and by that i mean it literally his only speech in the house of lords was defending the followers of ned ludd who went around smashing those looms on the theory that automation like automated looms would put people out of work that's why they were called the luddites i think they were wrong back then indeed by the end of the century there were more people working in the fabric industry in england by far than there were before the looms came in and i think luddites are wrong now in thinking that technology puts people out of work but what it does do is it disrupts jobs and that was something that was key to the industrial revolution just as it's key today is that it was a very disruptive period entire industries were being disrupted just like they are today well uh ada was not like her father she actually thought that the mechanisms of the looms and the inventions of the industrial revolution were totally fascinating she went on tours of industrial midlands and north in england looking at the looms including what was called the jacquard loom pictured here which used punch cards in order to help the loom figure out how to weave patterns of different fabrics it made ada think of something that her close friend charles babbage was doing charles babbage was building a numerical calculator just like before him people like pascal and others had tried to invent machines that would do addition subtraction and even multiplication and division and what babbage created was something called the difference engine and then a more complicated machine called the analytical engine that would be able to do all sorts of numerical calculations and he figured out with aydah's help that if you use the punch cards from the jacquard loom you can actually program the calculator to do all sorts of calculations to sort of know how to figure out what numbers have been figured out what sums have been totaled up and then to use those sums to decide what programs you're going to do next all as punched in on the instructions from the punch card well ada did something that was somewhat unusual for a woman uh in the mid 1800s she wrote a piece for a scientific journal explaining the analytical engine reporting on a speech of somebody explaining it but then she wrote notes and her notes are actually longer than the speech and they explain exactly how babbage's engine could work she even creates an algorithm which you can see on this page but the most important thing she does is she figures out something that is really the birth of the first personal computer which is that the as soon as you applied the idea of punch cards the bounds of just being a math machine uh get expanded and she wrote in her notes and i'm sorry this is a texty page but her notes are so important the analytical engine does not occupy common ground with mere calculating machines it holds a position wholly on its own in an enabling a mechanism to combine together general symbols in succession of unlimited variety and extent you create a link she said between the operations of things in the real world and mental processes in other words you can mimic our mental processes through a machine that uses punch cards to program in what should it should do and the main thing she figured out was that once you do that it doesn't just apply to doing numbers it can act on anything she said that can be notated in symbols it might act upon other things besides numbers she wrote if these objects were whose mutual relationship could be expressed by those of the science of operations in other words if you could create a program to show how these relationships work suppose for example that the fundamental relations of pitch sounds in other words musical sounds were susceptible to being notated the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music you can actually kind of imagine her father lord byron turning over in the grave at this which is that a machine could compose music but that was her great insight and she finally said at the end of her piece there was one thing that a machine couldn't do she said that the analytical engine has no pretension whatsoever to originate anything in other words it can't originate an idea it can do whatever we know how to order it to perform it can follow analysis but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relationship or truth what she's saying here is the machine can't think on its own it can only do what we program it to do about a century later alan turing we'll hear about him later he breaks the german enigma code during world war ii he is really the father of the modern computer and he talks about ken machines think and he calls this lady lovelace's objections was that machines could process all sorts of things we program it to do but it will never think on its own now i told you at the beginning of this course that there were really two types of schools of thought that come in the digital revolution one is artificial intelligence that machines at some point we'll be able to think just like humans as we'll see that's what alan turing believed but the other school of thought i call it the ada lovelace school of thought that no machines will only be able to do what we can instruct them to do but we will become closer and closer to our machines we will be tied together and interface with them and they will augment human intelligence and that idea of human computer interaction augmented intelligence is the way that the computer revolution and the digital revolution in my opinion ended up proceeding but that's getting a bit of ahead of our game first we have to invent the computer and then we'll get to alan turing's question of can machines think thanks see you next time