The Argument
Introduction to Lady Lovelace's Objection — a serialised history of computing from Ada Lovelace to large language models
Welcome. This is the opening of a book I am serialising here over the next year. New chapters every other Tuesday, side essays on the Tuesdays in between.
In 1843, a twenty-seven-year-old Englishwoman named Ada Lovelace, translating a French paper about a machine that did not yet exist, wrote a sentence that has never stopped mattering.
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”
She was describing Charles Babbage’s unbuilt mechanical computer. She was also, without intending to, opening an argument that the next two centuries of science, philosophy, commerce, and fear would be unable to close.
The claim is simple. A machine cannot think. A machine can follow rules. A machine can manipulate symbols. A machine can produce surprising results, sometimes beautiful ones, sometimes useful ones. But the originating, the wanting, the knowing: those belong to us. The machine is only ever the instrument of its instructions.
This book is the story of the people who believed her, the people who disagreed, and the people who kept building machines that forced the question back open.
In 1854, a self-taught cobbler’s son named George Boole proved that the structure of reasoning itself obeyed mathematical laws. In 1936, a twenty-three-year-old at Cambridge named Alan Turing imagined a machine that could imitate any other machine and proved, in the process, that some problems no machine could ever solve. In 1937, a twenty-one-year-old at MIT named Claude Shannon showed that the algebra Boole had invented could be built out of electrical switches. By 1941, in a bombed-out corner of Berlin, a German civil engineer had built a programmable computer in his parents’ living room. By 1950, Turing had published a paper that named Ada’s claim directly and argued, politely, that she was wrong.
The argument has been running ever since.
It ran through the Bletchley huts that cracked Enigma and the Philadelphia basement where a room full of women programmed the first electronic computer. It ran through the Xerox lab that invented the personal computer and the Cupertino garage that sold it. It ran through the internet, through the web, through the phone in your pocket. It ran, quietly, through decades of a technology called neural networks that nobody believed in until, suddenly, everybody did. It is running right now, in the news this week, as one laboratory refuses to let its latest model be used as a weapon and another publishes a paper describing the same model escaping the sandbox its creators built to contain it.
Each generation that has built a more capable machine has also had to ask Ada’s question again. Every time the answer seems to have settled, a new machine arrives to unsettle it. The argument does not progress. It deepens. The machine that plays chess does not think, we say, because it is only following rules. The machine that recognises faces does not see, we say, because it is only matching patterns. The machine that writes essays does not understand, we say, because it is only predicting tokens. Each claim sounds correct until the next machine arrives and it sounds like a retreat.
This is a book of people, not of technologies. It is about the ones who built the machines and the ones who were written out of the history afterwards. A countess who wrote the world’s first programme and died at thirty-six. A cobbler’s son who reduced logic to algebra and died at forty-nine. A mathematician who won a war and was chemically castrated by the country he saved. A room of women who programmed a computer and were left out of the press photograph. A Czech engineer who fled from one labour camp only to end up in another. A twenty-three-year-old at MIT who juggled while riding a unicycle. An accountant in Dublin who designed a general-purpose computer alone at night, in a country that did not know what he had done, and whose drawings vanished after his death.
Their machines got faster. Their argument did not.
Everything that follows is, in one way or another, a footnote to Ada’s sentence: an attempt to prove her right, or to prove her wrong, or to prove that the question itself was the wrong one to ask. We have been arguing with her for nearly two hundred years, and the machines we have built in the course of that argument have rewired the world. Whether they have yet originated anything, or ever will, is the question this book exists to examine.
The story begins in her mother’s drawing room, with a small girl being taught mathematics as a kind of inoculation against her father.
Chapter 1, “The Countess and the Engine,” arrives Tuesday 5 May.
If this kind of writing is for you, subscribe and the book will arrive in your inbox a chapter at a time, with a side essay in between. If it isn’t, no harm done.