Today in 1833, Ada Byron (later Countess Lovelace) met Charles Babbage when visiting his house to see a portion the Difference Engine, or what her mother, Lady Byron, called his “thinking machine.”
James Gleick writes in The Information: “Babbage saw a sparkling, self-possessed young woman with porcelain features and a notorious name, who managed to reveal that she knew more mathematics than most men graduating from university. She saw an imposing forty-one-year-old, authoritative eyebrows anchoring his strong-boned face, who possessed wit and charm and did not wear these qualities lightly. He seemed a kind of visionary–just what she was seeking. She admired the machine, too.”
With his Analytical Engine, Babbage imagined the modern computer. In researching her graphic novel, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, Sydney Padua has unearthed a previously-unknown account of a conversation with Babbage in which he “spoke highly of [Lovelace’s] mathematical powers” and called her “utterly unimaginative,” possessing a “matter-of-fact mind.”
Gleick quotes Ada on imagination, from an essay she wrote in 1841: “It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science. It is that which feels & discovers what is, the real which we see not, which exists not for our senses. Those who have learned to walk the threshold of the unknown worlds… may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.”
In this she anticipated Albert Einstein’s much-quoted observation: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Isn’t the importance of imagination something that today’s creators of “thinking machines,” as well as the people writing about them and our upcoming “robot overlords,” should contemplate? Do they include imagination in their definition of “artificial general intelligence (AGI)?”