12 Bytes: How We Got Here, Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson
It was Lord Byron’s daughter the mathematician Ada Lovelace who first saw the possibilities for artificial intelligence in the early 19th century. She understood that if her fellow mathematician Charles Babbage’s calculating machine, considered by many to be the first computer, “could be programmed to calculate something,” the novelist Jeanette Winterson writes in her new book, 12 Bytes, “it could be programmed to calculate anything.”
Lovelace doubted, however, whether a machine could ever replicate the “leap-capacity of human intelligence,” as Winterson puts it. Lovelace described her own work as a mathematician and researcher as “poetical science,” the kind of work only a human could perform.
