Charles Babbage

How does our brain give rise to the rich world of our conscious experience?  Each lecture in this course approaches this fundamental philosophical question by focusing on a specific issue regarding thinking, minds, and brains.  Topics include little-known facts about consciousness, what it is like to be a bat, the 'inner theater' view of consciousness, Charles Babbage's steam-driven computing engines, and how optical illusions work.  Philosophical theories of mind are at the core of the course, from Plato and Aristotle through Descartes and Locke to contemporary work by Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, and Paul and Patricia Smith Churchland.  In addition, the course draws from psychology, neurophysiology, linguistics, and the amazing history of attempts at building thinking machines.

Artykuł otwiera długą serię felietonów, które wszystkie mają główny tytuł "Jak nauczyliśmy maszyny liczyć i myśleć za nas?", ale potem są rozwinięcia sygnalizujące kolejne istotne etapy historii rozwoju informatyki. Pierwszy artykuł prezentowany tu nie miał jeszcze w tytule tego rozszerzenia, a dotyczył pierwszych urządzeń - jeszcze mechanicznych - które wykonywały za ludzi potrzebne obliczenia, włącznie z koncepcją (nie zrealizowaną) maszyny programowalnej Charlesa Babbage'a.

Coba fikirkan hal apa yang tidak dapat diretas hari ini ? Apakah demikian juga halnya dahulu ? apakah esok dan masa depan kita masih akan terus mengalami semua kekacauan ini ? Coba jawab dalam diri anda berapa banyak informasi yang anda ijinkan untuk diketahui dan tidak oleh oranglain, ada beberapa cara agar tetap bisa menjaga rahasia yang kita miliki dalam era teknologi serba canggih ini. Tidak ada yang benar-benar aman di dunia maya, sudah marak terjadi aksi pembobolan bank melalui saluran internet, peretasan akun internet juga hal-hal yang bersifat pribadi dengan mudah dicuri dan disebarkan oleh pihak-pihak yang tidak bertanggung jawab secara sengaja dan tidak. Lalu apakah kita akan membiarkan hal ini terus terjadi ? Tetaplah berhati-hati, pada buku ini akan dibahas hal mengenai sandi namun penuh dengan kata-kata/kalimat yang mudah dimengerti, bagaimana anda dapat membuat sandi anda sendiri, merusak dan bahkan meretasnya. Dan untuk yang lebih menarik akan dibahas mengenai apa dan bagaimana sandi RSA melakukan enkripsinya.

The general intellect of the whole community, male and female, is stunted or perverted in infancy, or more commonly both, by keeping from women the knowledge possessed by men. … The only and the simple remedy for the evils arising from these almost universal institutions of the domestic slavery of one half the human race, is utterly to eradicate them. Give men and women equal civil and political rights.

What is business getting itself into in its embrace of so-called artificial intelligence? What is it getting the world into?

In approaching these questions, it may be useful to set aside the term "artificial intelligence" in favour of "interpretation machines."

To do so is to point to ecological and political continuities between 19th-century and 21st-century automation -- continuities that may help clarify strategies for popular struggle.

Die Geschichte der Künstlichen Intelligenz beginnt vor 300 Jahren mit der Arbeitsteilung der Kopfarbeit. Sie ist vor allem eine Frage der Organisation von Rechenprozessen. Vorbild ist immer der rechnende Mensch, dessen Fähigkeiten Stufe für Stufe mechanisiert werden. Bevor es geeignete Maschinen gab, hat Gaspard De Prony im Frankreich der Revolution Menschen organisiert. Charles Babbage plante dampfkraftbetriebene und lochkartengesteuerte Zahnradmaschinen. Und Alan Turing programmierte strombetriebene digitale Röhrenrechner. Karl Steinbuch baute eine Lernmatrix. Was die Zukunft bringt, die grade beginnt, wird sich in Abhängigkeit von Energiequellen, Speichermedien und Kommunikationskanälen zeigen.
Gedreht wurde im Rahmen des Wissenschaftsjahrs 2019 "Künstliche Intelligenz" im Technoseum in Mannheim sowie dem Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM) in Karlsruhe.

Resumen — Charles Babbage planteó el diseño [1] de sus máquinas diferencial [2] y analítica [3], las que no pudo llevar a cabo completamente por diversas razones. La arquitectura de esta última máquina, analizada a la luz del desarrollo de las computadoras modernas del siglo XX, es similar a los modelos de Von Neumann.
Entre las ventajas de las máquinas mecánicas de cálculo,
podemos contar: inmunidad al pulso electromagnético, consumo de energía nulo durante el reposo, tolerancia al aumento de temperatura, entre otras; características que siguen siendo deseables para todo tipo de técnica física de solución de problemas.
Mediante las técnicas de construcción de MEMS, MOEMS y NEMS, es posible plantear el desarrollo de máquinas análogas al diseño de Babbage. A las ventajas dichas, podemos sumar las propias de la miniaturización mediante MEMS, MOEMS o NEMS.
Sin limitarnos a tan solo las máquinas de cálculo, pueden
construirse en esa misma tecnología, máquinas análogas a las soluciones mecánicas de muchos otros procesos, en los cuales tanto por tradición, como por costo o simplicidad se construyeron mediante técnicas mecánicas.
Sin embargo, también el uso de estas tecnologías viene
acompañado de una serie de restricciones relacionadas con problemas de escala y geometría, que deben ser contemplados a priori. Por otro lado, es poco probable que la velocidad de trabajo o ejecución de tareas, esté por encima o a la altura de los modernos sistemas electrónicos de procesamiento de datos.
Las aplicaciones posibles serían muy diversas, aprovechando sus ventajas, allí donde no sean necesarias las correspondientes de las versiones electrónicas: sistemas de control de vuelo y navegación inmunes al ruido eléctrico, al pulso electromagnético, de bajo consumo energético o autopropulsados; plantas de procesamiento químico en miniatura para la fabricación bajo demanda de
drogas farmacéuticas; control y procesamiento numérico en
instalaciones industriales.
Por esto, un cuidadoso estudio de sus posibilidades constructivas
y de aplicación, sería la clave para disponer de esta tecnología y
sus ventajas.

This essay investigates the ways in which changing communication networks in the middle of the nineteenth century forced people to entrust their most closely guarded secrets to unknown intermediaries as a matter of course. This shift introduces a number of pressing concerns that stay with us today, particularly a growing sense of the need for encryption. Looking at Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit, this essay also argues that this changing understanding of how people are connected requires a different way of visualizing character networks in novels. Instead of focusing only on named characters in private spaces, in Little Dorrit Dickens consistently imagines characters connected through an unknown, and unknowable, public.

Funded by the British government, Babbage’s Difference Engine was supposed to be the world’s most powerful mechanical calculator, able quickly to produce tables of numerical solutions for relatively high-order polynomial equations. But it was never built (at least not in his lifetime). In contemporary accounts, the device emerges as an object of wonderment and excitement, but also anxiety: the machine seemed to be capable of substituting for human labor and even human thought. Commentators understood its mysterious powers in sonic terms: the click of a hand crank, the whir of silver rings displaying numbers, the ring of a bell at the end of the calculation—noises were read as signs of intelligent activity, but, disturbingly, in the absence of a human agent. I argue that these unsettling sounds, emerging from the internal mechanism, distill the Marxian problematic of replacing human labor with machines. The Difference Engine’s internal sound world can thus be put into dialog with the noisy cityscape of early-nineteenth-century London—a volubly disruptive environment of “street nuisances” (to wit: itinerant musicians) that Babbage himself deplored and actively campaigned against. Indeed, the noises of the urban environment and those of the Difference Engine provide an illuminating contrast, presenting diverse aspects on noise and the human-machine interface within what was at the time the world’s most industrialized city.

Sydney Padua’s 'The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage' as a research sample between Literary Criticism and Digital Humanities

As Schmitz-Emans pointed out, comics «represent an art of storytelling that is rooted in a basic and transcultural human inclination to give a narrative form to experiences and imaginations» (Schmitz-Emans 2013: 385). Indeed, Comics Studies call for interdisciplinarity between World Literature, Cultural Studies and  Visual Studies can lead scholars to open up new research fields. Accordingly, in my proposal, Sydney Padua’s The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage will be analysed as an example of the meeting between academic audiences and popular audiences in the context of graphic narratives. Padua’s work crosses the boundaries of comics as an entertainment medium, of storytelling as a textual tool, and of historical research as a simple framework for a Victorian setting. Behind the entertaining tale of crime fighting in a steampunk universe, The Thrilling Adventures presents an articulate work of philological and scientific research. The role of Ada Lovelace – Lord Byron's daughter – in programming Charles Babbage’s calculating machine, within Padua’s research, opens the encounter between graphic narratives and cognitive development of the Digital Humanities even to Gender Studies. Comic works, then, elude definitions but can be useful for a detached analysis of how Comic Studies are relevant as an intersection between various disciplines. As Charles Hatfield pointed out, comics’ «ambiguous status as visual narrative and popular culture might continue to place them beyond the purview of the literary» (Hatfield 2010:11) and it is precisely this ambiguity that can illuminate Comics peculiar role as a medium between literary criticism and pop culture. Thus, The Thrilling Adventures can symbolise a multifarious sample in our cultural learning through comics.

Between Art and Truth with MachineLearning: A brief history of ArtificialIntelligence from the code of Ur-Nammu to the Generative NeuralNetworks. From autofiction to the open collective author. English translation of the French original “Entre l’art et la vérité“, in La Cinquième Saison: Revue littéraire romande, volume 6, ‘Portrait des robots’. 2019.

The paper looks at the relationship between machines and pre-modern enclaves of skills, exploring the manner in which technological networks deploy various forms of cultural difference in order to augment efficacy. Includes research on the textiles and silk industry of Europe and India.

Pragmatism, according to Peirce, “is a sort of instinctive attraction for living facts.” Living facts, like living organisms, are cellular. Interaction in cellular ontologies is not causal, in which objects touch, attract or repel each other, but semiotic, in which subjects communicate with each other across borders defined by coded interfaces or protocols. Peirce-inspired research by Fernando Zalamea suggests that a new pragmatist logic is emerging with the addition of “horosis,” coined from the Greek word for “border,” to the Kantian dualism of analysis and synthesis.

Babbage’s designs could be the base for making Mechanical Computers with MEMS Technology. Basic arithmetic operations could be extended with lograrithmic calculus as in Slide Rules. Mechanical parts in MEMS provide shrinking and robustness against Electrical Interference and Radioactive Environments.

Tra la fine del Settecento e i primi decenni dell'Ottocento, il Vesuvio e tutta l'area vulcanica del napoletano diventano la meta obbligata delle osservazioni di studiosi locali e stranieri, in un periodo in cui si gettano le basi della moderna geologia. Tra i tanti viaggi di scienziati a Napoli, in questo libro si seguono le tracce di due studiosi molto diversi tra loro, con in comune la fascinazione per il Vesuvio. Entrambi percorreranno gli stessi itinerari, rischiando di bruciarsi nel cratere, ma le loro strade non si incroceranno mai. Quella di Carlos de Gimbernat (1768-1834) è una originale e affascinante figura di studioso ben noto e inserito nella comunità scientifica del primo Ottocento. La sua vita è quasi la trama di un romanzo d'avventura, che lo vede in giro per un'Europa tormentata da guerre e rivoluzioni. Scienziato cosmopolita dai molteplici interessi, il suo arrivo a Napoli nel 1818 coincise con una spettacolare e lunga eruzione del Vesuvio: un evento dalla forte valenza che condizionerà il suo futuro. Il suo soggiorno sarà dedicato a escursioni e osservazioni geologiche e vulcanologiche, che unirà a ideali libertari in una commistione fortemente simbolica di nuove idee scientifiche e politiche. Matematico, fisico, riformatore scientifico dalla mente lungimirante, Charles Babbage (1791-1871) fu anche un viaggiatore instancabile. Nel 1828 arrivò a Napoli e fu ammaliato dal Vesuvio e dalle ricchezze geologiche dei Campi Flegrei. Visitando il Serapeo si soffermò sui singolari segni circolari e i misteriosi buchi lasciati dai molluschi sul marmo della "più notevole costruzione sulla faccia della terra": erano una prova evidente che il Tempio non si era trovato sempre allo stesso livello rispetto al mare. Con l'ausilio della sua macchina calcolatrice, proporrà un'interpretazione dei fenomeni osservati che sarà accettata dai più valenti geologi del tempo. Rossella De Ceglie insegna Storia della scienza presso l'Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro. Studiosa di storia delle scienze della vita e delle teorie evoluzionistiche, ha indirizzato in particolare la sua attività di ricerca sugli sviluppi delle ricerche naturalistiche nel XIX secolo in Italia, con riferimento agli scienziati del Regno di Napoli. Carla Petrocelli insegna Storia della rivoluzione digitale presso l'Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro. Studiosa del pensiero scientifico moderno, si è specializzata nell'evoluzione del calcolo automatico focalizzando l'attenzione sul rapporto tra uomo e tecnologia e sulle sue ripercussioni antropologiche. È autrice di numerosi contributi scientifici dedicati alla storia dei linguaggi di programmazione e ai protagonisti dell'informatica.

Resumen: El estudio de las máquinas es un campo que puede rastrearse hasta el Renacimiento. Sin embargo, en la Modernidad adquiere cierto perfil teórico. Se produce una transformación desde los tratados sobre la instalación y uso que conciben a las máquinas como una síntesis entre las estructuras materiales y el trabajo humano, hacia estudios analíticos que las consideran como entidades modulares, como ensamblaje de piezas y mecanismos susceptibles de ser analizados matemáticamente. A su vez, los primeros se caracterizan por un enfoque antropométrico que no ven mayores inconvenientes en usar el lenguaje coloquial e ilustraciones para transmitir el conocimiento acerca de las máquinas; los segundos, en cambio, plantean problemas cognitivos y proponen lenguajes simbólicos específicos para representar el diseño y funcionamiento de las máquinas. Comenzaremos por el siglo XVIII, al ilustrar algunos conceptos provenientes de L’Encyclopédie y de Adam Smith. Posteriormente, nos enfocaremos en los matemáticos del siglo XIX que promovieron las transformaciones mencionadas. En primer lugar, Charles Babbage y su notación mecánica; luego Robert Willis y Franz Reuleaux y sus “mecanismos puros”; y de nuevo Babbage para analizar la complementariedad de la economía política a sus estudios matemáticos sobre las máquinas. Finalmente, mostraremos algunos debates actuales sobre el vínculo entre máquinas, realidad, matemática y lenguaje que, explícita o implícitamente, retoman aquellos problemas y pueden encontrar en el pensamiento de los matemáticos del siglo XIX un antecedente.

Abstract: The study of machines is a field whose origin can be traced back to the Renaissance. However, it is in Modernity when it attains a certain theoretical outline. There was a transformation from the treatises on installation and use - which conceive of machines as a synthesis between material structures and human work - towards analytical studies that consider them as modular entities, as the assembly of parts and mechanisms that can be analyzed mathematically. In turn, the former are characterized by an anthropometric approach that sees no major inconvenience in using colloquial language and illustrations to transmit knowledge about machines; the latter, on the other hand, pose cognitive problems and propose specific symbolic languages for representing the design and operation of machines. We will start in the 18th century, illustrating some concepts from L’Encyclopédie and Adam Smith. Later, we will focus on the 19th century mathematicians who promoted the aforementioned transformations. First, Charles Babbage and his mechanical notation. Later Robert Willis and Franz Reuleaux and their “pure mechanisms”; We will then return to Babbage to discuss the complementarity of political economy to his mathematical studies of machines. Finally, we will show some current debates on the link between machines, reality, mathematics and language that, explicitly or implicitly, take up those problems and can find an antecedent in the thought of 19th century mathematicians.

Babbage's Dream examines what it means to be human in an age of technological transformation when the boundaries between the human and the machine, biology and technology, and science and religion have become  increasingly blurred. The manuscript takes its title from Charles Babbage, the nineteenth-century mathematician, who designed but did not complete what would have been the first mechanical programmable computer. Babbage's plight, to dream of something too large to complete in one lifetime, strikes me as very much the quandary of many writers and artists. He becomes something of an everyman in these poems which weave together not only Victorian and contemporary anxieties about the spectacle and threat of new technology, but also work in lyric redefinitions of computer programming terms and first-person perspectives from literary and historical artificially intelligent others. In many respects, the goal of these poems is to challenge and blur the lines between history and legend, science and art, machine and man, code and poetry.

Resumen-Charles Babbage planteó el diseño [1] de sus máquinas diferencial [2] y analítica [3], las que no pudo llevar a cabo completamente por diversas razones. La arquitectura de esta última máquina, analizada a la luz del desarrollo de las computadoras modernas del siglo XX, es similar a los modelos de Von Neumann. Entre las ventajas de las máquinas mecánicas de cálculo, podemos contar: inmunidad al pulso electromagnético, consumo de energía nulo durante el reposo, tolerancia al aumento de temperatura, entre otras; características que siguen siendo deseables para todo tipo de técnica física de solución de problemas. Mediante las técnicas de construcción de MEMS, MOEMS y NEMS, es posible plantear el desarrollo de máquinas análogas al diseño de Babbage. A las ventajas dichas, podemos sumar las propias de la miniaturización mediante MEMS, MOEMS o NEMS.

We learn from Michel Foucault's analysis of spaces of knowledge, in his The Order of Things, that an episteme can be reduced to one or two signs (a table, a network). These signs in turn may reductively frame everything about the knowledge space, but in fact they non-reductively operate, in practice. This reduction by an analyst overloads the symbol that he or she has constructed, thereby expanding the field of the signifier-signified relation. The sign becomes machinic in the Deleuzian sense of an agent who can respond in diverse ways--not as a mechanism, but as a black box, inputting and outputting information. In this sense, the signifier acting like a machine entails a network of relations that all point to another locus of knowledge.

This chapter explores the cultural lineage that from the cams, cogs, wheels and delicate clockwork mechanisms of 18th century automata, arrives to the algorithm and code-based design of contemporary Android systems (via the punch-cards of Jacquard’s loom). Taking these two types of androids as peculiar objects of design, eliciting culturally specific affects and meanings, the chapter focuses on how their materiality – whether mechanical or digital, and invisible to different degrees - is intimately connected to, and the vehicle for, the enchanting power of technology to create awe, curiosity, delight, while provoking questions about the relationship between human and machines. By locating smartphones within the history of the “instruments of the imagination”, a novel context for our fascination with digital devices is put forward, one that calls attention to the continuity of the magical apprehension embedded in every technological metamorphosis.

Between Art and Truth with MachineLearning: A brief history of ArtificialIntelligence from the code of Ur-Nammu to the Generative NeuralNetworks. From autofiction to the open collective author.

English translation of the French original “Entre l’art et la vérité“, in La Cinquième Saison: Revue littéraire romande, volume 6, ‘Portrait des robots’. 2019.

Repetidamente citado por Marx, Charles Babbage (1792-1871) es uno de esos fascinantes “filósofos” de las manufacturas, las máquinas, o el sistema capitalista en general, como Andrew Ure en el pasado, Taylor y Ford más recientemente o Ray Kroc y Ohno en la actualidad. Maestros en el arte de la explotación del trabajo, que en la sociedad capitalista corre pareja, necesariamente, con una obsesión ilimitada por el tiempo y la velocidad, han llevado a cimas inigualadas la reflexión sobre las formas más eficientes de producir con menor gasto de energía humana. En su actividad cotidiana, cada capitalista individual debe emular a estos “héroes” de la productividad: cuanto más eficiente sea su consumo de la fuerza de trabajo, más bajos serán sus precios y, por ende, mayor la posibilidad de destruir a sus competidores. Como todos los capitalistas hacen lo mismo, la competencia resulta ser el motor general del sistema, que asume la forma de una guerra sangrienta a través de la cual la capacidad productiva del trabajo se eleva permanentemente. Estos cambios en la productividad resultan en desplazamientos de trabajadores por nuevos métodos o por tecnologías de diferente tipo, provocando la desaparición de oficios enteros junto con todos los conocimientos que los sustentaban y con las formas de vida que hacían posible. Dichos desplazamientos implican, por lo tanto, cambios profundos en el conjunto de la sociedad. Vastos movimientos de población, destrucción completa de campos productivos enteros, creación ex novo de otros tantos, cambios abruptos en la fisonomía del paisaje mismo, son los resultados emergentes de esa revolución permanente de la ciencia y la técnica.

Babbage wrote two relatively detailed, yet significantly incongruous, autobiographical accounts of his pre-Cambridge and Cambridge days. He published one in 1864 and in it advertised the existence of the other, which he carefully retained in manuscript form. The aim of this paper is to chart in some detail for the first time the discrepancies between the two accounts, to compare and assess their relative credibility, and to explain their Author’s possible reasons for knowingly fabricating the less credible of the two.

14th ESSE conference : S68 Sounds Victorian seminar (Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, 29 August – 2 September 2018)

Dickens’s novels are usually characterised by orality, by the way the author transcribes English dialects and idiolects in order to confer a theatrical quality to his works. However, oral speech in Dickens’s novels is often modelled on written documents, on testimonies, letters and contracts that the characters (and most notably Micawber in David Copperfield) trace or print using their voices as writing instruments. Dickensian orality is here pre-structured by writing, evoking the derridean concept of archi-writing.
This talk draws its inspiration from the acoustic theories of British mathematician Charles Babbage, a key influence for Charles Dickens and his reflection on media since the beginning of his career. As exposed in Babbage’s 1837 publication The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment, sound is perceived as a form of writing as it prints itself permanently on the air. We will see how Dickens draws away from paper and explores new media for writing, finding an answer in the acoustic research that marked the Victorian era.

It is difficult to imagine what Wordsworth would have done with an Asus Eee pc or how Keats would have felt after his first look at Chapman's Homer by clicking a hyperlink on a website designed in Flash. However, farfetched though it might seem, the computer and its versatile capabilities were not too distant from the Romantics. At a time when it was fashionable to philosophise about the clockwork mechanism of the universe and to conceive of engines that could reason, the basic principles of information technology were already current in Romantic philosophy and science.

Looking back, it seems that things could indeed have turned out very differently for the Romantics, if we are to go by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's alternative history novel, The Difference Engine, where a computerised Victorian England is governed by Byron and where a certain Mr Keats's reputation lies in his expertise in creating multimedia presentations. Though Gibson and Sterling's 'steampunk' world is a fantasy, the machine after which they named their novel was already partly built during the lifetime of some of the Romantics. The Difference Engine, built by Charles Babbage, and the Analytical Engine, which he later outlined, have been universally acknowledged the predecessors of the modern computer and Babbage himself has been called the 'Father of Modern Computing'. The story of computing, however, remains incomplete without mention of another important Romantic connection: Lady Ada Lovelace, the mathematically gifted daughter of Lord Byron, also called the ‘Enchantress of Numbers’.

Even as one listens to an MP3 on the latest i-phone today, the possibilities that Lovelace saw for programming Babbage's engines two centuries ago are now coming to fruition. The technology for the media may have moved far beyond the gears and levers of Babbage's engines; the concept of multimedia is, however, not as 'new' as is sometimes thought to be.

This essay will explore how the 'poetic programming' of Lady Lovelace compares with modern conceptions of multimedia. Taking this as the point of departure, it will go on to explore other similar comparisons between modern-day computing concepts and their roots in early nineteenth-century ideas.