October 12, 2021 • 34 mins
Today Ada Lovelace is hailed as one of the most important figures in the early history of computing -- but, during her childhood, her mother was worried she might take after her father, the famous poet (and infamous philanderer) Lord Byron. Learn more about Ada's childhood in part one of this two-part series.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in, UH, and a very very
special thanks to not just our usual super producer Max Williams,
but to our guest super producer, the one and only
give it up for in folks, loll Brilliante. Also along
(00:49):
with you, Noel, I'm I'm appointing the dream team of
Noel and Lowell as officially the most patient people I've
hung out with today. My name is Ben. I hey
try trapic and I need to learn how to not
need a phone. Well you know, I think that uh,
that ship has sailed, my friend, thanks to the subject
of today's episode. Well in some part of the subject
(01:12):
of today's episode, Ada Lovelace. No, that's not a porn
star from from the nineteen seventies. It is, in fact
one of the most important forces in mathematics and science
and modern computing UH to this day. Um who also
happened to be the daughter of a very body poet
and lothario note known as Lord Byron Um. I I
(01:36):
did not know that at all. I knew about Ada Lovelace.
I did not know she was related to this notorious Letch.
So yes, yes, just an interesting story and just because
I'm coming in hot Uh no, well, I want to
explain to everybody what what's going on here. So we
(01:56):
were supposed to record earlier today, but one genius who
I will name because it was me, left their phone
in a rideshare service half of this, and I drove
all the way out to a distant place to go
pick up this phone and couldn't find it because I
printed out a map and I was driving back and
(02:18):
I was thinking, oh, no, I'm making the gang late
for recording. How did we become so reliant on these things?
And the whole time this story was kicking in my head,
as you know, stopping and going. And we do owe
a lot, not just to Lord Byron his love life aside,
but to Augusta Aida King, the Countess of Lovelace, or
(02:39):
Augusta Ada Byron December ten, eighteen fifteen. We know her today,
as you said, as simply Ada Lovelace. She is widely
regarded as the world's first computer programmer, which means she's
the first person to take the ideas or the the
abilities the potential of computational machines and combined them with
(03:04):
the potential of symbolic logic. And you can find so
much great writing from her. We were inspired by a
wonderful article from Wired. We pulled some stuff from the
New Yorker, the Smithsonian, all the hits, all the hits.
But no, I love that we're starting by talking a
little bit about her old her old man, because this
(03:28):
guy turns out had somewhat reluctantly married aid as mom.
Isn't that correct? Yeah, that's right. Um, I don't know,
he didn't really have a whole on common with his bride,
Annabella Millbank. Um. She was kind of a little more
of a bookish type. And you know, Byron he was
(03:48):
a poet, but that didn't make him like a bookworm exactly.
I mean, he was out carousing. I think he had
like a pet bear. He was described as being a
dangerous fellow to know, uh, just in general, like kind
of had a reputation, even though his poetry was uh
and it is quite quite beautiful, and his daughter would
ultimately become fascinated by it. Despite her father's reputation. But
(04:11):
her mother, um was really really into mathematics, and she
came from the upper crust as well and had an
upper class education, which is, you know, one of the
benefits to yet when you come from a super super
wealthy family. Uh. Byron was hesitant to marry her, not
only because maybe they didn't quite see eyed in terms
of their lifestyle, but he just wasn't really romantically attracted
(04:34):
to her. Um. He kind of looked at her as
almost like a bullwark, like you know, like a barrier
kind of against his own. That was described as dangerous
passion um and that's very true. He was known to
be dangerously passionate um. And he apparently was known to
(04:57):
carry on um romantic quite willy nilly with both men
and women. Round drown round, round, I get around. Yeah. Yeah,
he's an original beach boy there. Uh. He also he
had many many mistresses. He had been called mad, bad
and dangerous to know, and he wasn't initially cool at
(05:23):
all with his daughter from the jump. Uh. He He
had refused, by the way, to acknowledge one child that
he had already had and had the kid instead sent
away to a convent in Italy, where the poor type
died at five years old. But when Adah was born
reportedly the first words that Lord Byron said to her were, oh,
(05:48):
what an implement of torture. I have a quiet in
you which is not quite I love you. And her
first words that turned out was maths Um, that's not
necessarily true. But she was his only legitimate child. And that,
by the way, fun a little little sub fact. Uh.
Claire Claremont, which is a great name, by the way,
(06:08):
who was the daughter he had from an illegitimate affair,
was also the sub sister of Mary Shelley, so very
interesting literary connections all around. Definitely fared better than her sister, um,
who you know was kind of shuttled off to that
convent like you mentioned. Um. He was not stoked about it,
Lord Byron, Um. But he deferred largely to her mother
(06:32):
in the kind of education she would receive. Uh. He
told his wife that it was his intention to keep
having affairs um with mistresses uh and do his thing.
And three days later he wrote his wife a letter
telling her to find a good time that would be
convenient for she and his daughter to leave. Yeah, he says,
(06:57):
the child will of course accompany you, as certainly proper.
That child must be the care of the woman whilst
I carouse and drink my fine wines. Um. Yeah, he
was kind of a jerk. Uh, definitely remembered for this
beautiful poetry, but was clearly kind of a garbage person. Um. Yeah,
(07:19):
So Annabella took this, you know, with this in the
spirit that it was intended. She definitely read the room
and decided to seeking annulment or separation rather, and uh
employed attorneys, which she could afford, thankfully, because she was
independently wealthy, had nothing to do with her marriage to him,
which is a good thing. Um. And his attorney sent
(07:40):
notice to Lord Byron saying that Lady Byron positively, oh
this is actually the quote from the letter. Lady b
positively affirmed that she has not at any time spread
reports injurious to Lord Byron's character. Uh. He was doing
that plenty well himself, it would seem yeah yeah, and
(08:05):
yeah yeah, And we know that there was this implication
that unless Lord Byron complied with her whiskers, she might
actually start talking. So now you've got to comply if
you are Lord Byron. So he started thinking of her,
and this is something that sadly people can relate to
(08:25):
in the modern day. You ever meet those folks who
are like, oh my ex wife for my ex husband
or Max, remember how I hate them. This is kind
of where Lord Byron ended up. He started calling her
a mathematical media, and then he later made fun of
her in his poetry, specifically his epic poem don One,
(08:48):
where he says her favorite science was the mathematical She
was a walking calculation. It sounds like he might be
talking about Ada, but she never really like met her
father when she was old enough to talk to him,
and he died so young, dude. He passed away when
he was thirty six in Greece. Ata was eight, and
on his deathbed he um In his deathbed, he seemed
(09:11):
to have a change of heart and he was saying,
you know, I wish I could have seen her give
her my blessing. Although you know he also had eight
years to figure that out. Yeah, it's not that it
didn't really add that. It doesn't really ring true. When
he's you know, and his with his dying, dying breath,
he's like, you know what, I made some mistakes, mistakes, mistakes. Yeah.
(09:36):
So Lady Byron is rightly just traumatized by this, and
she makes a vow to herself, and she says, I
Am not going to let my daughter become like her father.
So I've got to figure out a way to make
her not this just philandering poet poetests and get it. Yeah,
(09:58):
the apple doesn't fall too far from the treat. Maybe
it depends nature or nurture. Uh. They weren't really sure
yet in those days, so she wasn't gonna take any chances.
You know. Well, they definitely lived a privileged life in
a country estate where she was you know, tended to
by governesses and had tutors and all that. She also
(10:19):
had a pet cat named Mrs puff Um. It does
say in the Wired article in the research that we
found that it was a rented house, uh, which makes
me think that maybe they were like on more like
in the upper crust world, maybe more in the middle crust,
you know, of the upper crust. Um. But it did
lead to an excellent education for Ada, and she took
to it beautifully. Um. She you know, her mom really
(10:43):
was genuinely concerned. And it actually is I believe, uh
conjectured by historians that Lord Byron was in fact quite mad.
He was, uh, he was not well, um in terms
of you know, some form of sexual addiction or you know,
bipolar person. I mean, I don't know. I'm not gonna
like try to I'm not armchair psychiatrist here, but it
(11:05):
does seem like the guy that had a few screws loose.
And she was aware of this and did not want
that to be inherited by or was worried that maybe
it had been inherited. So she was gonna fight tooth
and nail to keep her from becoming her father, like
you said, um, And in her mind, the education was
the path toward that life for her. So she was enrolled,
um in this really really intense homeschooling program. She covered
(11:29):
most of the basics of you know, any education that
with children with that kind of access would get, like
language and science and all that. But her mom was
a big fan of math, and so she really pushed
her daughter into mathematics, which would have been, while not
unheard of, a little more rare for a young woman
(11:49):
to to focus on, you know, the study of of
of logic and reason in mathematics, especially in the eighteen
hundreds in England. And she was in this game from
the age of four. She's very very quick study, a
smart student, when she was only twelve years old, she
(12:10):
decided that she wanted to try to fly. Unlike that
alchemist John Damian that we mentioned earlier, she didn't yeah,
she had immediately strapped chicken feathers to herself and jump
off a building. She said, okay, well, let me let
me learn from the pros who were the flying pros
I'm aware of, And she started looking at birds. She
(12:31):
became a birdwatcher, and she was thinking, okay, how do
birds fly? Could I build something that could help me fly?
Could I build wings? So she worked with feathers, paper,
and silk, and according to her biographer Betty Alexandre Toole,
this is her research began in eight is and she
(12:54):
went on to write an illustrated guide about her research
called fly Ology, which is just like the sweetest, most
impressive thing. It's durable, uh, and then it's just to
be clear too. She wrote and illustrated that book herself.
Definitely had some pretty broad talents. Sure. Her mom a
let her about this, saying, I've got a scheme to
(13:15):
make a thing in the form of a horse with
a steam engine on the inside, so contrived as to
move an immense pair of wings fixed on the outside
of the horse in such a manner as to carry
it up into the air while a person sits on
his back. Okay, first of all, this is basically like
a super nerdy, high functioning version of a unicorn or
a pegasus. So she's like a little girl, and she's
(13:37):
combining like the kind of dreams and daydreams that little
girls have, you know, um stereotypically with a massive intellect
and creating like a steam powered kind of steampunk unicorn
pegasus situation. I think that's pretty awesome. Yeah, And her
mother is if if we can get a beep there,
(13:59):
little Her mother is terrified because this is too fanciful,
and she's like, I'm throwing all this money out the
window to make sure that you have a mindset based
in logic and you are a rational thinker. I don't
want to be at all crazy like your dad. Uh.
And Aida doesn't quite agree, because she feels that this
(14:23):
poetic stuff that her imagination is a big part of
who she is. She's also a teenager at this point
and fast forwarded and she says in a letter to
her mother, you will not concede me philosophical poetry invert
the order, will you give me poetical philosophy poetical science?
(14:43):
And uh, this is is strange because this new iteration
of that same tension between her parents originally is a
big part of what led Aida Lovelace to become a
pioneer of what you could call poetical science. And and
(15:03):
people have written about this and imagine these moments of
her early life in depth, and there are there are
a lot of good things to check out in that regard. Uh,
we would like to recommend a work, a nonfiction work
called The Innovators How a group of hackers, geniuses and
geeks created the Digital Revolution. In this book which talks
(15:24):
about a lost a lot of things and a lot
of players Walter Isaacs, and the author profiles Ada Lovelace
at the opening chapter, which should let you know how
important she is to you today. Totally. There's also a
really good um uh talk that I watched on YouTube
on the Computer History Museum YouTube channel by co authors
(15:45):
of Ada Lovelace, The Making of a Computer Scientists. The
names are Ursula Martin and Adrian Rice and believe they
both had are associated with Oxford. But I'm really really
interesting deep dive. They have the Ada Lovelace Archives at
housed at Oxford, So I had like incredible access to
all these letters and things that we're talking about. Um
but yeah, but poetical science, that's not really a thing.
(16:07):
It's more of a concept that she more or less invented. Uh.
And it makes sense because she is you can tell
from the start even with that, I'm making a joke
about the whole Pegasus thing about how it's like the
kind of whimsical thinking of like a child combined with
this like huge massive intellect. But it's ultimately super forward
(16:28):
thinking and like everything that she conceives of so ahead
of its time, like she is incredibly pressing it. So
all of this continues exponentially, much like a computer technology.
And in that book you mentioned, Been the Innovators, um
Isaacson writes this wonderful kind of crystallization of like her
(16:49):
whole vibe. Um Ada had inherited her father's romantic spirit,
a trait that her mother tried to temper by having
her tortured tortured by having her tutored in mathematics. The
combination produced in Ada a love for what she took
to calling poetical science, which linked her rebellious imagination to
her enchantment with numbers. For many, including her father, the
(17:10):
rarefied sensibilities of the Romantic era clashed with the techno
excitement of the Industrial Revolution, but Ada was comfortable at
the intersection of both eras, I think that's the key.
I love that sentence. Um. So she finds her niche.
And it's not really even a niche that exists yet,
because the Industrial Revolution is still a relatively new thing
(17:34):
in terms of, like, you know, overall history. But on
January one, she proposed this question about the nature of imagination. Um.
And she decides that it's two things. One the combining
faculty that seizes points in common between subjects having no
apparent connection, and imagination is the discovering faculty. Pre eminently,
(17:59):
it is that which of traits into the unseen worlds
around us, the worlds of science. UM. Yeah, beautiful, I'd
like to talk about that. Yeah, it's a step back here.
So this is something what I find so inspiring about
this is the this is the kind of thinking that
a lot of people have practiced, or a lot of
(18:20):
people have It's a route to people have gone down
cognitively in the past. But haven't always written about, and
they've just sort of restricted it at times to their
their musings, or, if you want to be a little
more lord Byron about it, their flights of fancy. I
would argue, this is one guy talking on the internet.
But I would argue that this represents a new form
(18:44):
of a very ancient thing, because the early days of
science were uh inextricably rooted in spirituality, right, the early
centers of learning were also themselves spiritual centers. And so
now what she's doing is um maybe a little more
secular version, and she's saying, Hey, these two things which
(19:06):
we might today call qualitative and quantitative forms of knowledge,
they're not so different, and together perhaps they can vultron
up into more than the some of their parts. And this,
as you said, is a pretty freaky, unfamiliar idea for
a lot of people that she's interacting with at the time,
(19:27):
except for one person she meets who changes her life
and therefore ridiculous historians, changes the lives of everyone who
is listening to the show today. His name Charles Babbage,
his gig, his bag. He is renowned mathematician. He meets
(19:48):
aid Up on June five three. She's at this wild party.
It's chock full of London's socialites, the move ers and
the shakers. And she's about seventeen years old making her debut,
and Babbage is much older. He's in his forties. He
(20:10):
is a widower, and he is telling everybody he can
buttonhole like anyone will listen to him. He's saying, let
me tell you about this idea I have. It's called
the Difference Machine, which is also a side note. Babbage
didn't know this. It's the name of an underground hip
hop group in Atlanta. That's quite good. So if you're
like in the ground hip hop, check out Difference Machine. Yeah,
(20:31):
they're cool, dudes, they are. I don't know. One of
the guys that makes the beats for him, gauge what
his difference machine is is essentially, it's a tower of wheels,
numbered wheels, and you can turn a handle and it'll
do math for you. It'll do calculations. Yeah, I mean,
(20:54):
it's it's it's essentially a super bespoke, glorified adding machine.
That's what it's called the difference machine, right, the difference
It literally is a mechanical calculator. It does more elaborate
math than just adding and subtracting and doing differences. I
think it you know, maybe I don't know if it
(21:14):
would do calculus, but it definitely not existed. And that
was the idea was that it could do. It was
more like a graphic calculator maybe, but probably you couldn't
play snake on it. Uh. It never actually got built,
and he was obviously pitching this idea amongst these movers
and shakers to try to get funding to build the thing,
but he ultimately never quite went on to build the
full uh difference machine. I think he did like a
(21:36):
test version of it that was much smaller, Um. But
she was super into it. She loved the poetical sensibilities
of it all. Um. She it could be argued, kind
of got it even more than the inventor himself. One
of her friends said of this miss Byron Young as
she was understood it's working and saw the great beauty
of the invention. And Isaacson in that book talks about
(21:59):
how important that moment was when she met Babbage um
in her life. And also he said, Ben, the trajectory
of computers and these little things we carry around in
our pockets that we were allowed on so much to
get us from point A to point B and to
you know, play snake on and like google things. Um.
But her love of poetry and math, according to isaacson
(22:21):
Um primed her to see beauty in a computing machine. Um,
which is crazy. It's like no one else. Apparently it
was regarded as a bit of a gimmick by people
that he was pitching it too at the party, like
they weren't into it. They because they couldn't see it.
They could they only saw it for what it was,
which was something that already existed in the form of
like an abacus or like pen and paper, right, like
(22:42):
why why I need this machine? Would have been huge,
like what forty ft wide and fifteen feet tall something
along those lines. Yeah, it would be a different innovation
on the way, but that's what they what he was envisioning,
and those were the materials of the I'm and obviously
a tow sees something more here. She is thinking big,
(23:07):
you know what I mean, kind of like a Hollywood
producer people brainstorming in a writer's room. And she thinks,
this is the first step, one of the biggest steps
I can make in this poetical science. I've been dreaming
about for so long. I need to get this Babbage
guy to work with me. I need to get him
(23:29):
to teach me. And so she tries to convince him
by writing him a letter. And here's just a piece
of what she says. You can read it at brain
pickings dot org. She says, I have a peculiar way
of learning, and I think it must be a peculiar
man to teach me successfully. You know, I reckon me conceded,
but I believe I have the power of going just
(23:50):
as far as I like in such pursuits. And where
there is so decided a taste I should almost say
a passion as I have for them, I question if
there is not always some poor shouldn't have natural genius.
Even what that means in the parlance of these our
times is look, I'm special. I think you got something too.
(24:13):
I'm not trying to be a jerk about it, but
I'm a pretty smart cookie. I think you're a smart cookie.
Let's be a smart set of cookies. This Babbage is sold,
and they write correspondencies to each other for years and
years after this, and he talks about her plan. He
talks about his plans that the stuff he wants to
(24:35):
innovate the stuff he wants to build, and she talks
to him about her ambition. Uh, and Babbage agrees with her.
It turns into like this, you ever have those times, Noel, Well,
we're hanging out with your buds and sometimes you might
have a couple of beers and they just are big
up in each other and it's like, no, dude, you're
the man. No, you're the you know you're awesome. You're awesome.
(24:59):
They kind to start doing this, and at one eight
thirty nine that big even says, despite the rampant massogyny
of the age, I think you are so so good
at math that no one should get in your way.
That's that we're translating. He really said, I think you'll tasteful.
Mathematics is so decided that it ought ought to be checked.
But that's basically the same don't check herself lest she
(25:22):
wrecked herself, um or yourself, because she was a force
to be reckoned with my friend. Um. She did get
married and started a family. Uh and you know, lived
the domestic life for a little bit, but ultimately the
siren call of mathematics was just too loud. Uh and
uh and seductive for her to to stay away for
(25:44):
too long. Um. She was, you know, kind of told
by her mother to follow that kind of more conventional
child rearing. Upper middle class UM model. Lady Byron at
this point is one of the wealthiest women in all
of Britain um and had a lot of influence and
could ensure that Adah was able to do what she wanted. Um. So,
(26:08):
in a thirty five, with her mom's approval, she married
a not particularly intelligent, but but friendly enough young aristocrat
by the name of Lord William King, who eventually became
the Earl of Lovelace. I don't know love Lovelace what
I'm gonna call it? Um and uh he really loved
(26:31):
Ada a lot. He also admired her smarts uh and
remarked that she would would make a great general. He
felt that she would was a good tactician. A lot
of that is required to to be good at mathematics.
You have to have some strategy solving puzzles in the like. Uh.
So for the next several years, Um, she's mainly rearing kids,
(26:56):
popping out babies. She's got three of them. Uh. And
she's you know, she's managing a household you know the lady,
the lady of the house. Literally it's center title. Um.
She did a little bit of horseback riding. She she
learned how to play the harp, uh, and continued um
doing math. She really was getting into something called spherical trigonometry.
I I, for one, was always quite bad at math
(27:17):
and struggled just to even like get through college algebra,
so never never took trigg. I don't think I did
any calculus, but um, yeah, she was into all that stuff. Uh.
And within a few months of the birth of her
third kid in eighteen thirty nine, she decided it was
time to get back on the horse, the math horse,
and she had some support, I think from Lord William King.
(27:41):
They had what I like to call the best relationship,
not as in the best for them, but when I
say a best relationship, I mean one person in the relationship,
William King, was like, oh, Aida, you're the best. And
the other person in the relationship, Ada Lovelace, was like, ah, Willie,
trying your best. Yeah, you're you're you're What was it?
(28:05):
One time a German speaker I was in a conversation
with them and they called something I did severely adequate,
which was like the most biggest burn. Yeah, you guys
get it. I can tell by your faces. But well, no,
I mean it's like, no matter what he did, how
is he going to hold a candle to the Lord
(28:26):
of Math? Right? You know what I mean? That she
was clearly in love with Math. No, ma'am was going
to satisfy that particular you know pursuit. All they could
do was hope to uh ally and support this journey,
right and to work together with this brilliant mind. We
(28:46):
have decided before we recorded today that we were going
to make this a two parter because you need to
know the setup for AIDA's life to know uh to
fully understand the gravity of what she's doing, in many ways,
working against tremendous odds, given how people the way that
(29:07):
academia thought of women at the time. So I think, no,
what do you say we we give it a pause
here and come back Thursday with where things get even crazier. Well, hey,
this is a great place to pause, because you're right,
things do start to heat up in a really interesting
way with a new version of Babbage's machine that we
(29:28):
talked about, and one that would ultimately really truly change
the course of technology. And and and human history. UM.
But we also wanted to take a minute to talk
to our guest superproducer, Lowell Berlante, who is the producer, creator,
and host of a podcast that very much deals with
this exact kind of stuff. Uh, it's called Prodigy, Um, loll,
(29:52):
can you tell us a little bit about Prodigy and
some of the topics that you're stoked about? Yeah, thanks
for having me. So in two thousands and there was
this big behaviorist movement with books like Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Um.
The idea behind it was that genetics or nature basically
just don't matter. But if genetics don't matter, does that
(30:13):
mean that prodigies can be created? So the first three
episodes of Prodigy covered are most up today understanding of
where talent comes from. After that, it kind of just
evolved into like any psychological topic I found interesting, UM,
like lucid dreaming or narcissism or social engineering. UM. I
have an episode coming out soon about ketamine therapy for PTSD.
(30:36):
Totally fascinating stuff. What's your take on on this kind
of nature versus nurture? This idea that Lovelace's mom was
so worried that she was going to become like a
spitting image of her father and so like, Yeah, obviously
they were separated and so there was no nurture there
from the father. But like in your studies and in
some of the episodes you've done, have you found one
(30:57):
or the other to be strong or stronger force and
and how kids end up? Yeah, well, it really depends
on who you ask. Obviously, trauma is incredibly powerful, but
if you take that out of the equation, we do
have some ways to measure the influence of nature versus
nurture um. In fact, we've been doing it for decades UM,
way before the DNA revolution, and we do it with
(31:20):
twin studies. So identical twins have identical DNA. So cases
where identical twins were separated at birth, we could measure
their similarity to each other, their birth parents, and their
adoptive parents, and they found that identical twins were at apart,
shared more similarities with their birth parents. If you want
(31:41):
to hear more about those studies, you can listen to
my third episode the Source Code. Also, there's a documentary
called Three Identical Strangers that's really good. Yeah, and I
can't recommend Prodigy enough this is not me blow and
smoke a little. I've I've told people about this stuff.
You you and I have talked before, particularly about your
episode on the UNI bomber Ted Kaczenski, which which I
(32:04):
think I think would be fantastic. Not if it's a
fantastic listen, um, especially if you're a fan of our
other shows. Stuff they don't want you to know. Also,
I didn't want to interrupt you guys, but I do
have to step in. I don't think this show devolved
into that. I think it evolved really really special. So
(32:26):
so what we're gonna do is we're gonna come back
with one and only guest super producer, Little Brilliante in
part two of our episode on Ada Lovelace. In the meantime,
thank you, thank you, thank you so much to all
the hits, all all our friends and fan are felt
(32:47):
ridiculous historians, Casey Pegram, thanks to Max Williams, Noel of course,
thank you to you. Thanks to both of you guys
for having my back. I totally forgot traffic was a thing. Yeah, well,
I mean it's like you said, uh, we can thank
slash curse people like Babbage and Aida Lovelace for you know,
(33:08):
literally kind of depriving us of parts of our brains
that used to do things like remember directions or like
memorized maps or even just read maps. There's I mean,
it's it's great. It's a double edged sword. Obviously, we
work for the Internet and we love a lot about it,
but technology really does when you start to lean on
it a little too hard, it can kind of become
(33:30):
a crutch, a weird crutch, or something that you know,
makes you dumber while also giving you incredible access to
information or it could make you, you know, weird. Increasingly
into the age of cybernetics, what makes you a cyborg?
Is it an implant in your brain or is it,
you know, being attached to your phone? How much what's
the line of relied on technology? A million percent? We're
(33:52):
gonna definitely talk about that. In the episode two, Lovelace
actually has a pretty awesome hot take about AI before
it was even something everybody can see like she was,
like I said, very very imprescient. Um. So yeah, thank
you too, Ben. Looking forward to getting back um and
tackling part two of Ada Lovelace. We'll see you next time, folks.
(34:19):
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in, UH, and a very very
special thanks to not just our usual super producer Max Williams,
but to our guest super producer, the one and only
give it up for in folks, loll Brilliante. Also along
(00:49):
with you, Noel, I'm I'm appointing the dream team of
Noel and Lowell as officially the most patient people I've
hung out with today. My name is Ben. I hey
try trapic and I need to learn how to not
need a phone. Well you know, I think that uh,
that ship has sailed, my friend, thanks to the subject
of today's episode. Well in some part of the subject
(01:12):
of today's episode, Ada Lovelace. No, that's not a porn
star from from the nineteen seventies. It is, in fact
one of the most important forces in mathematics and science
and modern computing UH to this day. Um who also
happened to be the daughter of a very body poet
and lothario note known as Lord Byron Um. I I
(01:36):
did not know that at all. I knew about Ada Lovelace.
I did not know she was related to this notorious Letch.
So yes, yes, just an interesting story and just because
I'm coming in hot Uh no, well, I want to
explain to everybody what what's going on here. So we
(01:56):
were supposed to record earlier today, but one genius who
I will name because it was me, left their phone
in a rideshare service half of this, and I drove
all the way out to a distant place to go
pick up this phone and couldn't find it because I
printed out a map and I was driving back and
(02:18):
I was thinking, oh, no, I'm making the gang late
for recording. How did we become so reliant on these things?
And the whole time this story was kicking in my head,
as you know, stopping and going. And we do owe
a lot, not just to Lord Byron his love life aside,
but to Augusta Aida King, the Countess of Lovelace, or
(02:39):
Augusta Ada Byron December ten, eighteen fifteen. We know her today,
as you said, as simply Ada Lovelace. She is widely
regarded as the world's first computer programmer, which means she's
the first person to take the ideas or the the
abilities the potential of computational machines and combined them with
(03:04):
the potential of symbolic logic. And you can find so
much great writing from her. We were inspired by a
wonderful article from Wired. We pulled some stuff from the
New Yorker, the Smithsonian, all the hits, all the hits.
But no, I love that we're starting by talking a
little bit about her old her old man, because this
(03:28):
guy turns out had somewhat reluctantly married aid as mom.
Isn't that correct? Yeah, that's right. Um, I don't know,
he didn't really have a whole on common with his bride,
Annabella Millbank. Um. She was kind of a little more
of a bookish type. And you know, Byron he was
(03:48):
a poet, but that didn't make him like a bookworm exactly.
I mean, he was out carousing. I think he had
like a pet bear. He was described as being a
dangerous fellow to know, uh, just in general, like kind
of had a reputation, even though his poetry was uh
and it is quite quite beautiful, and his daughter would
ultimately become fascinated by it. Despite her father's reputation. But
(04:11):
her mother, um was really really into mathematics, and she
came from the upper crust as well and had an
upper class education, which is, you know, one of the
benefits to yet when you come from a super super
wealthy family. Uh. Byron was hesitant to marry her, not
only because maybe they didn't quite see eyed in terms
of their lifestyle, but he just wasn't really romantically attracted
(04:34):
to her. Um. He kind of looked at her as
almost like a bullwark, like you know, like a barrier
kind of against his own. That was described as dangerous
passion um and that's very true. He was known to
be dangerously passionate um. And he apparently was known to
(04:57):
carry on um romantic quite willy nilly with both men
and women. Round drown round, round, I get around. Yeah. Yeah,
he's an original beach boy there. Uh. He also he
had many many mistresses. He had been called mad, bad
and dangerous to know, and he wasn't initially cool at
(05:23):
all with his daughter from the jump. Uh. He He
had refused, by the way, to acknowledge one child that
he had already had and had the kid instead sent
away to a convent in Italy, where the poor type
died at five years old. But when Adah was born
reportedly the first words that Lord Byron said to her were, oh,
(05:48):
what an implement of torture. I have a quiet in
you which is not quite I love you. And her
first words that turned out was maths Um, that's not
necessarily true. But she was his only legitimate child. And that,
by the way, fun a little little sub fact. Uh.
Claire Claremont, which is a great name, by the way,
(06:08):
who was the daughter he had from an illegitimate affair,
was also the sub sister of Mary Shelley, so very
interesting literary connections all around. Definitely fared better than her sister, um,
who you know was kind of shuttled off to that
convent like you mentioned. Um. He was not stoked about it,
Lord Byron, Um. But he deferred largely to her mother
(06:32):
in the kind of education she would receive. Uh. He
told his wife that it was his intention to keep
having affairs um with mistresses uh and do his thing.
And three days later he wrote his wife a letter
telling her to find a good time that would be
convenient for she and his daughter to leave. Yeah, he says,
(06:57):
the child will of course accompany you, as certainly proper.
That child must be the care of the woman whilst
I carouse and drink my fine wines. Um. Yeah, he
was kind of a jerk. Uh, definitely remembered for this
beautiful poetry, but was clearly kind of a garbage person. Um. Yeah,
(07:19):
So Annabella took this, you know, with this in the
spirit that it was intended. She definitely read the room
and decided to seeking annulment or separation rather, and uh
employed attorneys, which she could afford, thankfully, because she was
independently wealthy, had nothing to do with her marriage to him,
which is a good thing. Um. And his attorney sent
(07:40):
notice to Lord Byron saying that Lady Byron positively, oh
this is actually the quote from the letter. Lady b
positively affirmed that she has not at any time spread
reports injurious to Lord Byron's character. Uh. He was doing
that plenty well himself, it would seem yeah yeah, and
(08:05):
yeah yeah, And we know that there was this implication
that unless Lord Byron complied with her whiskers, she might
actually start talking. So now you've got to comply if
you are Lord Byron. So he started thinking of her,
and this is something that sadly people can relate to
(08:25):
in the modern day. You ever meet those folks who
are like, oh my ex wife for my ex husband
or Max, remember how I hate them. This is kind
of where Lord Byron ended up. He started calling her
a mathematical media, and then he later made fun of
her in his poetry, specifically his epic poem don One,
(08:48):
where he says her favorite science was the mathematical She
was a walking calculation. It sounds like he might be
talking about Ada, but she never really like met her
father when she was old enough to talk to him,
and he died so young, dude. He passed away when
he was thirty six in Greece. Ata was eight, and
on his deathbed he um In his deathbed, he seemed
(09:11):
to have a change of heart and he was saying,
you know, I wish I could have seen her give
her my blessing. Although you know he also had eight
years to figure that out. Yeah, it's not that it
didn't really add that. It doesn't really ring true. When
he's you know, and his with his dying, dying breath,
he's like, you know what, I made some mistakes, mistakes, mistakes. Yeah.
(09:36):
So Lady Byron is rightly just traumatized by this, and
she makes a vow to herself, and she says, I
Am not going to let my daughter become like her father.
So I've got to figure out a way to make
her not this just philandering poet poetests and get it. Yeah,
(09:58):
the apple doesn't fall too far from the treat. Maybe
it depends nature or nurture. Uh. They weren't really sure
yet in those days, so she wasn't gonna take any chances.
You know. Well, they definitely lived a privileged life in
a country estate where she was you know, tended to
by governesses and had tutors and all that. She also
(10:19):
had a pet cat named Mrs puff Um. It does
say in the Wired article in the research that we
found that it was a rented house, uh, which makes
me think that maybe they were like on more like
in the upper crust world, maybe more in the middle crust,
you know, of the upper crust. Um. But it did
lead to an excellent education for Ada, and she took
to it beautifully. Um. She you know, her mom really
(10:43):
was genuinely concerned. And it actually is I believe, uh
conjectured by historians that Lord Byron was in fact quite mad.
He was, uh, he was not well, um in terms
of you know, some form of sexual addiction or you know,
bipolar person. I mean, I don't know. I'm not gonna
like try to I'm not armchair psychiatrist here, but it
(11:05):
does seem like the guy that had a few screws loose.
And she was aware of this and did not want
that to be inherited by or was worried that maybe
it had been inherited. So she was gonna fight tooth
and nail to keep her from becoming her father, like
you said, um, And in her mind, the education was
the path toward that life for her. So she was enrolled,
um in this really really intense homeschooling program. She covered
(11:29):
most of the basics of you know, any education that
with children with that kind of access would get, like
language and science and all that. But her mom was
a big fan of math, and so she really pushed
her daughter into mathematics, which would have been, while not
unheard of, a little more rare for a young woman
(11:49):
to to focus on, you know, the study of of
of logic and reason in mathematics, especially in the eighteen
hundreds in England. And she was in this game from
the age of four. She's very very quick study, a
smart student, when she was only twelve years old, she
(12:10):
decided that she wanted to try to fly. Unlike that
alchemist John Damian that we mentioned earlier, she didn't yeah,
she had immediately strapped chicken feathers to herself and jump
off a building. She said, okay, well, let me let
me learn from the pros who were the flying pros
I'm aware of, And she started looking at birds. She
(12:31):
became a birdwatcher, and she was thinking, okay, how do
birds fly? Could I build something that could help me fly?
Could I build wings? So she worked with feathers, paper,
and silk, and according to her biographer Betty Alexandre Toole,
this is her research began in eight is and she
(12:54):
went on to write an illustrated guide about her research
called fly Ology, which is just like the sweetest, most
impressive thing. It's durable, uh, and then it's just to
be clear too. She wrote and illustrated that book herself.
Definitely had some pretty broad talents. Sure. Her mom a
let her about this, saying, I've got a scheme to
(13:15):
make a thing in the form of a horse with
a steam engine on the inside, so contrived as to
move an immense pair of wings fixed on the outside
of the horse in such a manner as to carry
it up into the air while a person sits on
his back. Okay, first of all, this is basically like
a super nerdy, high functioning version of a unicorn or
a pegasus. So she's like a little girl, and she's
(13:37):
combining like the kind of dreams and daydreams that little
girls have, you know, um stereotypically with a massive intellect
and creating like a steam powered kind of steampunk unicorn
pegasus situation. I think that's pretty awesome. Yeah, And her
mother is if if we can get a beep there,
(13:59):
little Her mother is terrified because this is too fanciful,
and she's like, I'm throwing all this money out the
window to make sure that you have a mindset based
in logic and you are a rational thinker. I don't
want to be at all crazy like your dad. Uh.
And Aida doesn't quite agree, because she feels that this
(14:23):
poetic stuff that her imagination is a big part of
who she is. She's also a teenager at this point
and fast forwarded and she says in a letter to
her mother, you will not concede me philosophical poetry invert
the order, will you give me poetical philosophy poetical science?
(14:43):
And uh, this is is strange because this new iteration
of that same tension between her parents originally is a
big part of what led Aida Lovelace to become a
pioneer of what you could call poetical science. And and
(15:03):
people have written about this and imagine these moments of
her early life in depth, and there are there are
a lot of good things to check out in that regard. Uh,
we would like to recommend a work, a nonfiction work
called The Innovators How a group of hackers, geniuses and
geeks created the Digital Revolution. In this book which talks
(15:24):
about a lost a lot of things and a lot
of players Walter Isaacs, and the author profiles Ada Lovelace
at the opening chapter, which should let you know how
important she is to you today. Totally. There's also a
really good um uh talk that I watched on YouTube
on the Computer History Museum YouTube channel by co authors
(15:45):
of Ada Lovelace, The Making of a Computer Scientists. The
names are Ursula Martin and Adrian Rice and believe they
both had are associated with Oxford. But I'm really really
interesting deep dive. They have the Ada Lovelace Archives at
housed at Oxford, So I had like incredible access to
all these letters and things that we're talking about. Um
but yeah, but poetical science, that's not really a thing.
(16:07):
It's more of a concept that she more or less invented. Uh.
And it makes sense because she is you can tell
from the start even with that, I'm making a joke
about the whole Pegasus thing about how it's like the
kind of whimsical thinking of like a child combined with
this like huge massive intellect. But it's ultimately super forward
(16:28):
thinking and like everything that she conceives of so ahead
of its time, like she is incredibly pressing it. So
all of this continues exponentially, much like a computer technology.
And in that book you mentioned, Been the Innovators, um
Isaacson writes this wonderful kind of crystallization of like her
(16:49):
whole vibe. Um Ada had inherited her father's romantic spirit,
a trait that her mother tried to temper by having
her tortured tortured by having her tutored in mathematics. The
combination produced in Ada a love for what she took
to calling poetical science, which linked her rebellious imagination to
her enchantment with numbers. For many, including her father, the
(17:10):
rarefied sensibilities of the Romantic era clashed with the techno
excitement of the Industrial Revolution, but Ada was comfortable at
the intersection of both eras, I think that's the key.
I love that sentence. Um. So she finds her niche.
And it's not really even a niche that exists yet,
because the Industrial Revolution is still a relatively new thing
(17:34):
in terms of, like, you know, overall history. But on
January one, she proposed this question about the nature of imagination. Um.
And she decides that it's two things. One the combining
faculty that seizes points in common between subjects having no
apparent connection, and imagination is the discovering faculty. Pre eminently,
(17:59):
it is that which of traits into the unseen worlds
around us, the worlds of science. UM. Yeah, beautiful, I'd
like to talk about that. Yeah, it's a step back here.
So this is something what I find so inspiring about
this is the this is the kind of thinking that
a lot of people have practiced, or a lot of
(18:20):
people have It's a route to people have gone down
cognitively in the past. But haven't always written about, and
they've just sort of restricted it at times to their
their musings, or, if you want to be a little
more lord Byron about it, their flights of fancy. I
would argue, this is one guy talking on the internet.
But I would argue that this represents a new form
(18:44):
of a very ancient thing, because the early days of
science were uh inextricably rooted in spirituality, right, the early
centers of learning were also themselves spiritual centers. And so
now what she's doing is um maybe a little more
secular version, and she's saying, Hey, these two things which
(19:06):
we might today call qualitative and quantitative forms of knowledge,
they're not so different, and together perhaps they can vultron
up into more than the some of their parts. And this,
as you said, is a pretty freaky, unfamiliar idea for
a lot of people that she's interacting with at the time,
(19:27):
except for one person she meets who changes her life
and therefore ridiculous historians, changes the lives of everyone who
is listening to the show today. His name Charles Babbage,
his gig, his bag. He is renowned mathematician. He meets
(19:48):
aid Up on June five three. She's at this wild party.
It's chock full of London's socialites, the move ers and
the shakers. And she's about seventeen years old making her debut,
and Babbage is much older. He's in his forties. He
(20:10):
is a widower, and he is telling everybody he can
buttonhole like anyone will listen to him. He's saying, let
me tell you about this idea I have. It's called
the Difference Machine, which is also a side note. Babbage
didn't know this. It's the name of an underground hip
hop group in Atlanta. That's quite good. So if you're
like in the ground hip hop, check out Difference Machine. Yeah,
(20:31):
they're cool, dudes, they are. I don't know. One of
the guys that makes the beats for him, gauge what
his difference machine is is essentially, it's a tower of wheels,
numbered wheels, and you can turn a handle and it'll
do math for you. It'll do calculations. Yeah, I mean,
(20:54):
it's it's it's essentially a super bespoke, glorified adding machine.
That's what it's called the difference machine, right, the difference
It literally is a mechanical calculator. It does more elaborate
math than just adding and subtracting and doing differences. I
think it you know, maybe I don't know if it
(21:14):
would do calculus, but it definitely not existed. And that
was the idea was that it could do. It was
more like a graphic calculator maybe, but probably you couldn't
play snake on it. Uh. It never actually got built,
and he was obviously pitching this idea amongst these movers
and shakers to try to get funding to build the thing,
but he ultimately never quite went on to build the
full uh difference machine. I think he did like a
(21:36):
test version of it that was much smaller, Um. But
she was super into it. She loved the poetical sensibilities
of it all. Um. She it could be argued, kind
of got it even more than the inventor himself. One
of her friends said of this miss Byron Young as
she was understood it's working and saw the great beauty
of the invention. And Isaacson in that book talks about
(21:59):
how important that moment was when she met Babbage um
in her life. And also he said, Ben, the trajectory
of computers and these little things we carry around in
our pockets that we were allowed on so much to
get us from point A to point B and to
you know, play snake on and like google things. Um.
But her love of poetry and math, according to isaacson
(22:21):
Um primed her to see beauty in a computing machine. Um,
which is crazy. It's like no one else. Apparently it
was regarded as a bit of a gimmick by people
that he was pitching it too at the party, like
they weren't into it. They because they couldn't see it.
They could they only saw it for what it was,
which was something that already existed in the form of
like an abacus or like pen and paper, right, like
(22:42):
why why I need this machine? Would have been huge,
like what forty ft wide and fifteen feet tall something
along those lines. Yeah, it would be a different innovation
on the way, but that's what they what he was envisioning,
and those were the materials of the I'm and obviously
a tow sees something more here. She is thinking big,
(23:07):
you know what I mean, kind of like a Hollywood
producer people brainstorming in a writer's room. And she thinks,
this is the first step, one of the biggest steps
I can make in this poetical science. I've been dreaming
about for so long. I need to get this Babbage
guy to work with me. I need to get him
(23:29):
to teach me. And so she tries to convince him
by writing him a letter. And here's just a piece
of what she says. You can read it at brain
pickings dot org. She says, I have a peculiar way
of learning, and I think it must be a peculiar
man to teach me successfully. You know, I reckon me conceded,
but I believe I have the power of going just
(23:50):
as far as I like in such pursuits. And where
there is so decided a taste I should almost say
a passion as I have for them, I question if
there is not always some poor shouldn't have natural genius.
Even what that means in the parlance of these our
times is look, I'm special. I think you got something too.
(24:13):
I'm not trying to be a jerk about it, but
I'm a pretty smart cookie. I think you're a smart cookie.
Let's be a smart set of cookies. This Babbage is sold,
and they write correspondencies to each other for years and
years after this, and he talks about her plan. He
talks about his plans that the stuff he wants to
(24:35):
innovate the stuff he wants to build, and she talks
to him about her ambition. Uh, and Babbage agrees with her.
It turns into like this, you ever have those times, Noel, Well,
we're hanging out with your buds and sometimes you might
have a couple of beers and they just are big
up in each other and it's like, no, dude, you're
the man. No, you're the you know you're awesome. You're awesome.
(24:59):
They kind to start doing this, and at one eight
thirty nine that big even says, despite the rampant massogyny
of the age, I think you are so so good
at math that no one should get in your way.
That's that we're translating. He really said, I think you'll tasteful.
Mathematics is so decided that it ought ought to be checked.
But that's basically the same don't check herself lest she
(25:22):
wrecked herself, um or yourself, because she was a force
to be reckoned with my friend. Um. She did get
married and started a family. Uh and you know, lived
the domestic life for a little bit, but ultimately the
siren call of mathematics was just too loud. Uh and
uh and seductive for her to to stay away for
(25:44):
too long. Um. She was, you know, kind of told
by her mother to follow that kind of more conventional
child rearing. Upper middle class UM model. Lady Byron at
this point is one of the wealthiest women in all
of Britain um and had a lot of influence and
could ensure that Adah was able to do what she wanted. Um. So,
(26:08):
in a thirty five, with her mom's approval, she married
a not particularly intelligent, but but friendly enough young aristocrat
by the name of Lord William King, who eventually became
the Earl of Lovelace. I don't know love Lovelace what
I'm gonna call it? Um and uh he really loved
(26:31):
Ada a lot. He also admired her smarts uh and
remarked that she would would make a great general. He
felt that she would was a good tactician. A lot
of that is required to to be good at mathematics.
You have to have some strategy solving puzzles in the like. Uh.
So for the next several years, Um, she's mainly rearing kids,
(26:56):
popping out babies. She's got three of them. Uh. And
she's you know, she's managing a household you know the lady,
the lady of the house. Literally it's center title. Um.
She did a little bit of horseback riding. She she
learned how to play the harp, uh, and continued um
doing math. She really was getting into something called spherical trigonometry.
I I, for one, was always quite bad at math
(27:17):
and struggled just to even like get through college algebra,
so never never took trigg. I don't think I did
any calculus, but um, yeah, she was into all that stuff. Uh.
And within a few months of the birth of her
third kid in eighteen thirty nine, she decided it was
time to get back on the horse, the math horse,
and she had some support, I think from Lord William King.
(27:41):
They had what I like to call the best relationship,
not as in the best for them, but when I
say a best relationship, I mean one person in the relationship,
William King, was like, oh, Aida, you're the best. And
the other person in the relationship, Ada Lovelace, was like, ah, Willie,
trying your best. Yeah, you're you're you're What was it?
(28:05):
One time a German speaker I was in a conversation
with them and they called something I did severely adequate,
which was like the most biggest burn. Yeah, you guys
get it. I can tell by your faces. But well, no,
I mean it's like, no matter what he did, how
is he going to hold a candle to the Lord
(28:26):
of Math? Right? You know what I mean? That she
was clearly in love with Math. No, ma'am was going
to satisfy that particular you know pursuit. All they could
do was hope to uh ally and support this journey,
right and to work together with this brilliant mind. We
(28:46):
have decided before we recorded today that we were going
to make this a two parter because you need to
know the setup for AIDA's life to know uh to
fully understand the gravity of what she's doing, in many ways,
working against tremendous odds, given how people the way that
(29:07):
academia thought of women at the time. So I think, no,
what do you say we we give it a pause
here and come back Thursday with where things get even crazier. Well, hey,
this is a great place to pause, because you're right,
things do start to heat up in a really interesting
way with a new version of Babbage's machine that we
(29:28):
talked about, and one that would ultimately really truly change
the course of technology. And and and human history. UM.
But we also wanted to take a minute to talk
to our guest superproducer, Lowell Berlante, who is the producer, creator,
and host of a podcast that very much deals with
this exact kind of stuff. Uh, it's called Prodigy, Um, loll,
(29:52):
can you tell us a little bit about Prodigy and
some of the topics that you're stoked about? Yeah, thanks
for having me. So in two thousands and there was
this big behaviorist movement with books like Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Um.
The idea behind it was that genetics or nature basically
just don't matter. But if genetics don't matter, does that
(30:13):
mean that prodigies can be created? So the first three
episodes of Prodigy covered are most up today understanding of
where talent comes from. After that, it kind of just
evolved into like any psychological topic I found interesting, UM,
like lucid dreaming or narcissism or social engineering. UM. I
have an episode coming out soon about ketamine therapy for PTSD.
(30:36):
Totally fascinating stuff. What's your take on on this kind
of nature versus nurture? This idea that Lovelace's mom was
so worried that she was going to become like a
spitting image of her father and so like, Yeah, obviously
they were separated and so there was no nurture there
from the father. But like in your studies and in
some of the episodes you've done, have you found one
(30:57):
or the other to be strong or stronger force and
and how kids end up? Yeah, well, it really depends
on who you ask. Obviously, trauma is incredibly powerful, but
if you take that out of the equation, we do
have some ways to measure the influence of nature versus
nurture um. In fact, we've been doing it for decades UM,
way before the DNA revolution, and we do it with
(31:20):
twin studies. So identical twins have identical DNA. So cases
where identical twins were separated at birth, we could measure
their similarity to each other, their birth parents, and their
adoptive parents, and they found that identical twins were at apart,
shared more similarities with their birth parents. If you want
(31:41):
to hear more about those studies, you can listen to
my third episode the Source Code. Also, there's a documentary
called Three Identical Strangers that's really good. Yeah, and I
can't recommend Prodigy enough this is not me blow and
smoke a little. I've I've told people about this stuff.
You you and I have talked before, particularly about your
episode on the UNI bomber Ted Kaczenski, which which I
(32:04):
think I think would be fantastic. Not if it's a
fantastic listen, um, especially if you're a fan of our
other shows. Stuff they don't want you to know. Also,
I didn't want to interrupt you guys, but I do
have to step in. I don't think this show devolved
into that. I think it evolved really really special. So
(32:26):
so what we're gonna do is we're gonna come back
with one and only guest super producer, Little Brilliante in
part two of our episode on Ada Lovelace. In the meantime,
thank you, thank you, thank you so much to all
the hits, all all our friends and fan are felt
(32:47):
ridiculous historians, Casey Pegram, thanks to Max Williams, Noel of course,
thank you to you. Thanks to both of you guys
for having my back. I totally forgot traffic was a thing. Yeah, well,
I mean it's like you said, uh, we can thank
slash curse people like Babbage and Aida Lovelace for you know,
(33:08):
literally kind of depriving us of parts of our brains
that used to do things like remember directions or like
memorized maps or even just read maps. There's I mean,
it's it's great. It's a double edged sword. Obviously, we
work for the Internet and we love a lot about it,
but technology really does when you start to lean on
it a little too hard, it can kind of become
(33:30):
a crutch, a weird crutch, or something that you know,
makes you dumber while also giving you incredible access to
information or it could make you, you know, weird. Increasingly
into the age of cybernetics, what makes you a cyborg?
Is it an implant in your brain or is it,
you know, being attached to your phone? How much what's
the line of relied on technology? A million percent? We're
(33:52):
gonna definitely talk about that. In the episode two, Lovelace
actually has a pretty awesome hot take about AI before
it was even something everybody can see like she was,
like I said, very very imprescient. Um. So yeah, thank
you too, Ben. Looking forward to getting back um and
tackling part two of Ada Lovelace. We'll see you next time, folks.
(34:19):
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Ben Bowlin
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