Computer Ethics Historical Notes
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Computer Ethics Historical Notes Norberto Patrignani 1 / 42 Imhotep, the First Engineer High priest of the Sun God Ra Chancellor to the Pharaoh Djoser Architect of the "step-pyramid" Imhotep (He who comes in peace) Pyramid of Djoser (2700 B.C.) Saqqara, Egypt 2 / 42 Data, Information and Knowledge Communication Revolutions 0 Ä -200.000 -100.000 Homo Sapiens biological Language support (WetWare) 3500 B.C. 0 1455 1950 Writing Printing paper support stone, paper support ... space/time diffusion ... Computer (Networks) silicon support ¼ arithmetic engine communication device 3 / 42 The Dream of a "Reasoning" Machine 4 / 42 Abacus, circa 300 B.C. Modern abacus Salamis tablet (originally thought to be a gaming board), used by the Babylonians circa 300 B.C., discovered in 1846 5 / 42 1274: Ramon Lull Ars Magna • • Ramon Lull (Raimundo Lulio) (1232-1315) - Ars Magna: a Logical Device/Method for arriving at True Knowledge ... - Logical Machines ... by moving a lever the Propositions would prove themselves to be True or False! Source: Gardner, Martin. "The Ars Magna of Ramon Lull." In Logic Machines, Diagrams and Boolean Algebra. New York: Dover Publications, 1968 6 / 42 1623: Wilhelm Schickard • The "Speeding Clock": 1st calculating machine (1623) • A machine for calculating astronomical tables Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635) Replica of the "Speeding Clock" 7 / 42 1637: Rene© Descartes - Committed to using reason to prove the truth of God - "... Regarding logic, its syllogisms and most of its other precepts serve more to explain to others what one already knows, or even, like the art of Lully, to speak without judgment of those things one does not know, than to learn anything new" - You must doubt your senses (mind/body split) ... the only thing of which one can be certain is that one is thinking: René Descartes cogito ergo sum (Cartesius) - The body is like a machine (1596-1650) - Reality = ideas in the mind (the AI dilemma!) Source: Descartes, René. Discourses 1, 2, 4, and 5. Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One©s Reason and of Seeking the Truth in the Sciences (1637). Translated from the French by F. E. Sutcliffe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968 8 / 42 1642: Blaise Pascal - At the age of 19 built the first arithmetical machine, a digital calculator (to help his father with his work collecting taxes); 50 prototypes produced - Known for Theory of Probabilities (principles designed after a correspondence with Fermat in 1650) - Pascal claimed to prove that belief in God is rational with the following: Blaise Pascal "If God does not exist, (1623-1662) one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing." The "pascaline" calculator Source: Pascal, Blaise. "The Wager." Pensées (~1660). Translated with an Introduction by A. J. Krailsheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966 9 / 42 1671: Leibniz Machine A system for Human Knowledge - Binary System - Calculus (at the same time of Newton!) - A system to collate all human knowledge - All reasoning and discovery = A combination of basic elements Gottfried W. Leibniz such as numbers, letters, (1646 - 1716) sounds and colors (inspired by Lull) - Mathematics is the language of nature - Everything can be understood through numbers (Pythagoras) - Universe = a clock without maintenance and support "The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right" Leibniz Source: (1951), Leibniz: Selections, P. P. Wiener (Ed. Trans.), New York: Scribner, p. 51 Source: "Dissertatio de arte combinatoria", 1666; "Leibniz: A Biography", E.J.Aiton, Hilger (UK), 1985 10 / 42 1714: Leibniz The ideas of his youth never left him "... I should venture to add that if I had been less distracted, or if I were younger or had talented young men to help me, I should still hope to create a kind of spécieuse générale, in which all truths of reason would be reduced to a kind of calculus. At the same time this could be a kind of universal language ..." Gottfried Leibniz, 1714 (2 years before his death) Source: Quoted in Rutherford, D. (1995) ªPhilosophy and Language in Leibnizº in The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, N. Jolley (Ed.), Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 239 11 / 42 1726: Gulliver©s Travels by Jonathan Swift JonathanSwift (1667-1745) "the engine" Jonathan Swift's satirical classic Gulliver's Travels (1726) parodied the mechanical conception of invention advanced by Llull and Leibniz. In the fictional city of Lagado, the protagonist encounters a device known as "the engine" which is intended by its inventor to enable anyone to "... write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study" Source: Jonathan Swift (1899) Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, London, George Bell and Sons, pp. 191-192. 12 / 42 1801: Joseph Jacquard Joseph Marie Jacquard (1752-1834) 1801: First "punched-cards" machine Jacquard©s loom 13 / 42 1814: The Universe©s Formula ¼ Despite 6,022 x 1023 (Avogadro©s constant, 1811) Number of molecules in a mole! Laplace had strong influence on Reductionist Approach of modern science! Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827) "Une intelligence qui, pour un instant donné, connaîtrait toutes les forces dont la nature est animée et la situation respective des êtres qui la composent, si d©ailleurs elle était assez vaste pour soumettre ces données à l©analyse, embrasserait dans la même formule les mouvements des plus grands corps de l©univers et ceux du plus léger atome: rien ne serait incertain pour elle, et l©avenir, comme le passé, serait présent à ses yeux" Source: Pierre-Simon Laplace, "Essai philosophique sur les probabilités", 1814 14 / 42 1820: Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar 1820: Arithmometer Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar (France, 1785-1870) 15 / 42 1831: Torino! 16 / 42 1831: Calendario Meccanico Universale Giovanni Plana (1781-1864) Calendario Meccanico Universale, 1831-1835, Cappella dei Mercanti, Via Garibaldi 25, Torino Studio dei 3 studenti del Politecnico di Torino: Cappato Roberto, Spano Sergio, Nasiri Meysam http://www.cappelladeimercanti.it/calendariouniversale/ Composto da memorie a tamburo, a disco e nastro, con mezzi di accesso e di lettura azionati da ruote dentate, catene e viti, è un vero e proprio computer, (racchiude al suo interno circa 46 mila dati), permette scegliendo un giorno, un mese e un anno qualunque (dall©anno 1 all©anno 4000) di identificare, il giorno della settimana corrispondente, le festività, i cicli lunari e le maree relativi a quell©anno ... concilia giorni, settimane, mesi, anni, secoli, lune, solstizi, equinozi e festività fisse e mobili, riconosce sia il calendario giuliano, che quello gregoriano introdotto nel 1582 cancellando dieci giorni... 17 / 42 1834: The Analytical Engine Charles Babbage (London, England, 1791 - 1871) Difference Engine (replica), London Science Museum Computer Latin origin: "cum-putare" (that is, "together-cut", "compare and extract a result") 18 / 42 1842: Luigi Federico Menabrea Giovanni Plana Luigi Federico Menabrea (1781 - 1864) (1809-1896) 1840, Torino II Congresso Scienziati Italiani invita Charles Babbage 19 / 42 1843: The 1st Programmer in History Ada Byron (1815 - 1852) (daughter Anne Isabella Milbanke - George Gordon Byron) Distinction between operations (Instructions) and objects operated upon (Data), the objects may not only be numbers, but anything that may be represented by numbers Poetical Science: ability by using imagination and metaphor to evaluate accurately a concept or an idea. Babbage was focused on number crunching She developed a vision of the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating Source: Ada Byron, Notes by the Translator on L. F. Menabrea©s Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage. 1842. 20 / 42 1854: George Boole - New ideas on the Calculus of Variations - Published as an outsider in: "An Investigation into the Laws of Thought, on which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities", The Cambridge Mathematical Journal, 1854 - "We ought no longer to associate Logic and George Boole Metaphysics, but Logic and Mathematics" (1815-1864) - The Analytical Engine made use of Operations and Objects of Operations and that it could be a completely general machine if both were written in the same language (Ada Lovelace) - Boole: Mathematizing logic would translate Operations (logic) and Objects of Operations (mathematical objects for example) into the same language - Boole: Representing logical statements (like syllogisms and other things with sets of AND, OR, and NOTs) as mathematical statements that were TRUE or FALSE, and then represent this outcome as ON or OFF, 1 or 0 (the binary system!) - Boolean algebra = algebra on logic statements (not numbers); - TRUE & FALSE could represent functions of switches in electronic circuits (Claude Shannon) Source: "An investigation on the laws of thought", G.Boole, Walton and Maberly, London, 1854 21 / 42 1878: Ramon Silvestre Verea Garcia Ramón Silvestre Verea García 1878: Verea©s Multiplying Machine (1833-1899) 22 / 42 1878: Christopher Latham Sholes ChristopherChristopher Latham Sholes Latham (USA, Sholes 1819 - 1890) (1819-1890) 1878: QWERTY keyboard 23 / 42 1890: Herman Hollerith Herman Hollerith 1890: Tabulating Machine (1860-1929) Punched cards used to record census data 24 / 42 1896: Human Computing Annie Cannon Antonia Maury Henrietta Leavitt (1863-1941) (1866-1952) (1868-1921) The Glass Universe, How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars Dava Sobel, PenguinRandomHouse, 2016 25 / 42 1908: Camillo Olivetti Camillo Olivetti (1868-1943) Graduated in 1891 at Politecnico di Torino (with prof. Galileo Ferraris) 1908: Olivetti founded in Ivrea 26 / 42 1916: Thomas J. Watson Thomas J.Watson (1874-1956) 1916: Computing Tabulating Recording Corp. (CTR) listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1916 1924: CTR Corp.