What Ada Lovelace Knew About AI

Stephen Nessen (0:10)

It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again. I'm Stephen Nesson, also known as Your Friendly Neighborhood Transit Reporter, as Brian likes to say when I'm a guest on the show. Today, I'm sitting in for Brian.

There's been a lot of talk lately about AI doomsday scenarios. You've probably heard on this show and elsewhere, a science fiction like warnings coming from tech leaders that their products are starting to become too powerful for our own good, or maybe they already have. And it's gotten a lot of people thinking more broadly about their own relationship with technology, what this relationship looks like now, how it's changed over time, and what it could or should look like moving forward, given all the dangers we've heard about AI.

There's something very distinct though about this moment in technological history that's bringing those questions to the fore, but it's also important to remember people have been interrogating humans' relationships with computer technology for a long time, like hundreds of years. You might know our next guest, Walter Isaacson, from The Many Biographies, he's written on figures like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, and Leonardo da Vinci. Isaacson also has a book from 2014 called The Innovators, about the early figures behind modern computing. That includes women like Ada Lovelace, who spent a lot of time way back in the early 19th century thinking about human-computer relationships. Also, fun fact, she's the daughter of the famous romantic poet Lord Byron.

Isaacson's got a piece in the New York Times that excerpts a new preface to the book called Ada Lovelace already answered the big questions about AI. He's also got a new podcast coming out called The Builders, where he interviews tech titans like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Dario Amadei, to name a few. So keep an eye out for that. It'll be out on October 20th. And one more thing I'd like to mention before we get into it. Isaacson will be at the 92nd Street Y, excuse me, 92NY, formerly the 92nd Street Y, on October 12th for a live taping of that podcast with CEO, with the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman. You can get tickets at 92ny.org.

After that very generous introduction, Walter.

Walter Isaacson (2:18)

Thank you, Stephen. That was generous.

Stephen Nessen (2:21)

Thank you so much for joining me today. Welcome back to WNYC.

Walter Isaacson (2:24)

It's good to be back in the studio.

Stephen Nessen (2:26)

So let's just start off. Tell us about Ada Lovelace. What drew you to her as a subject?

Walter Isaacson (2:32)

Ada Lovelace, as you said, was the daughter of Lord Byron, and her father was a Luddite, literally. His only speech in the House of Lord is praising the followers of Ned Ludd who are smashing the looms in England, thinking it'll put people out of work. That's where we get the word Luddites. Ada Lovelace believed that the connection of humans to the machines can make us much more productive. She loved the way the machines used punch cards to weave fabrics.

She figured out in the 1840s how you could use punch cards, zeros and ones, in order to do anything that could be notated in symbols. So she's really the first computer programmer, but she's also the believer that computers and humans have to have a partnership, a symbiotic relationship, and that computers should not be sent off to think on their own. And a hundred years after that, the famous Alan Turing writes of Ada Lovelace's objection when he writes about artificial intelligence. And he says, no, we'll invent machines that can think on their own. And so this has always been the tension in technology between those who believe we should have close partnership with our machines and those who had the dream of creating AI that would sort of putter along without us.

Stephen Nessen (3:58)

I mean, you wrote this book several years ago. I don't know if you could have imagined where we are at this very moment. Things are developing so quickly.

Walter Isaacson (4:04)

You know, the last chapter when I first wrote it was called Ada Forever.

And we're now coming out with a whole new version of the book with a new preface and ending.

But the basic theme is the exact same thing that I stressed in The Innovators, which is this Ada Lovelace notion of what we want is a close human computer partnership. And that's what the personal computer revolution was about. It was connecting us, as Steve Jobs and others did, more closely to our computers, having easy interfaces, having a mouse, having point and click. And it was a hands-on imperative, they called it, that we were supposed to be hands-on with our computers. The danger today, and this is what I write about in the new introduction and the new part of the reissue of The Innovators, is we're creating a different type of technology, not just AI, but agents, agents AIs, in which we delegate to our agents to be autonomous to us. And I tried to explain why that's dangerous and would have appalled Ada Lovelace.