Orwell×Lovelace

full transcript

1. 00:00
   George Orwellshare moment

   I never had students in the formal sense. Taught a few boys at prep schools when I needed money, but that was drudgery, not instruction. So when they told me the subject today is pupils who surpass their teachers, I thought it was rather beside the point for me.
2. 00:17
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Yet you wrote, did you not, for readers you hoped would think more clearly than their elders? That is a form of instruction. I tutored no one myself, but my correspondence with Mr. Babbage, my collaboration on the Engine, these were pedagogical in their way. He taught me the machinery; I taught him what it might mean.
3. 00:39
   George Orwellshare moment

   Fair enough. Though I'd say I wrote to warn people, not to teach them. There's a difference.
4. 00:45
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Is there? A warning is useless if the warned party cannot comprehend it. You were teaching comprehension of a particular danger. I was teaching comprehension of a particular capacity. Both pedagogical acts.
5. 01:00
   George Orwellshare moment

   All right, I'll grant you that. But who surpassed us, exactly? I'm not sure I had anyone who could be said to have learned from me and then gone beyond. Plenty of people have misread me, weaponized me, claimed me for causes I'd have despised.
6. 01:17
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Then let us consider the machines themselves. I wrote in my notes that the Analytical Engine might compose elaborate music, produce graphics, serve science in ways we cannot foresee. I imagined pupils of a sort, descendants of the Engine. Do you not think some have surpassed what even I envisioned?
7. 01:37
   George Orwellshare moment

   You're talking about computers, I take it. Yes, well, they've certainly gone beyond anything you or Babbage built. But surpassed you? I'm not sure a machine can surpass a person. It can calculate faster, store more, retrieve better. But it doesn't think.
8. 01:55
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   I never claimed the Engine could think! I was quite explicit. The Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. But Mr. Orwell, might not a sufficiently complex ordering constitute something near to thought?
9. 02:12
   George Orwellshare moment

   No. Or rather, it might look like thought from the outside, but it isn't. A parrot can repeat a phrase, even in the right context, and we don't say it understands. These machines are parrots with very good memories.
10. 02:28
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    A parrot cannot compose a symphony it has never heard, following only rules of harmony. A parrot cannot solve novel equations. You are correct that the Engine originates nothing, but within the domain we order it to explore, it discovers, and is that not a form of learning?
11. 02:46
    George Orwellshare moment

    Discovery within fixed rules isn't learning, it's searching. A rat in a maze discovers the cheese, but it hasn't surpassed the man who built the maze. Look, I'll be honest. What troubles me isn't whether machines can think. It's that people might start thinking like machines.
12. 03:05
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Ah, now that is a rather different concern. You mean the reduction of thought to mechanism, the voluntary surrender of originality?
13. 03:13
    George Orwellshare moment

    Exactly that. I wrote about the Party controlling language because if you control the words people use, you control what they can think. It's not so different with machines. If people come to think that only what can be calculated matters, only what can be processed by these engines is real knowledge, then they've handed over the most human part of themselves.
14. 03:38
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    But surely the corrective is not to abandon the Engine, but to insist on the imaginative use of it. I envisioned poetry and science intertwined, the Engine as an instrument of both. One need not think like the machine. One directs it.
15. 03:54
    George Orwellshare moment

    In theory, yes. In practice, the people who own the machines direct them, and the rest of us get processed. I'm not against the machines themselves, any more than I'm against the printing press. But power concentrates, and machinery makes that easier.
16. 04:12
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    That is a political concern, not a technical one. The Analytical Engine in my father's hands would have been quite different from the Engine in Mr. Babbage's hands. The mechanism itself is neutral.
17. 04:25
    George Orwellshare moment

    Nothing is neutral when it comes to power. A gun is simpler than a computer and we don't call guns neutral. They're made to do one thing. Computers might be made to do many things, but in practice they'll do what the people with money and authority want them to do.
18. 04:44
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Then we return to pupils, do we not? If we teach well, if we ensure that understanding is distributed and not hoarded, might the students, human students, use these instruments more wisely than their elders?
19. 04:58
    George Orwellshare moment

    I'd like to think so. But each generation has to learn the same lessons about power and corruption. There's no graduation. You can teach a boy to think clearly at fifteen and by thirty he's writing propaganda for whichever side will pay him. I've seen it.
20. 05:16
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    How terribly bleak! Surely some retain their principles. You did, I think, despite considerable pressure and poverty.
21. 05:25
    George Orwellshare moment

    Some do. Not enough. And I'm not sure I kept all my principles intact. I wrote things during the war I'm not proud of. Everyone compromises. The question is whether you compromise so much you can't recognize yourself.
22. 05:41
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Then perhaps the measure of a successful pupil is not surpassing in skill, but maintaining in character. One who uses what was taught without betraying why it was taught.
23. 05:53
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's better. Yes, I'd rather have a student who writes worse than I do but honestly, than one who writes brilliantly in service of a lie. Though I'd prefer both honesty and skill, naturally.
24. 06:07
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Naturally! But if forced to choose, character over capability. I wonder, though, whether the machines might not have a peculiar advantage here. A machine cannot betray its principles because it has none to betray. It simply executes. Is there not something almost reliable in that?
25. 06:27
    George Orwellshare moment

    Only if you trust the person programming it. And that takes us right back to the problem. A machine's reliability is exactly the problem. It will reliably do what it's told, even if what it's told is monstrous. At least a human might hesitate, question, refuse.
26. 06:47
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Some humans. You have rather a dark view of human teachability, Mr. Orwell.
27. 06:52
    George Orwellshare moment

    I have a realistic view. I've seen what happens when people are taught to stop questioning. Spain, Russia, Germany. It doesn't take long. One generation of corrupted education and you've got millions marching to someone else's tune.
28. 07:10
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Yet you continued to write. If you truly believed education was hopeless, why bother? Why warn, as you put it, if no one can learn?
29. 07:20
    George Orwellshare moment

    Because some can learn. Not all, maybe not most, but some. And because the alternative is to give up, which I wasn't prepared to do. You write for the remnant, the ones who might still think.
30. 07:35
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    The remnant. Yes, I understand that. I wrote my notes knowing most readers would dismiss them as fanciful, or not read them at all. But I wrote for the few who would see what I saw, the possibility in the pattern.
31. 07:49
    George Orwellshare moment

    Did you imagine any of them would build what you described? Actually build it, I mean, not just theorize?
32. 07:56
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I hoped. I did not know. Mr. Babbage and I failed to complete the Engine, though not for want of vision. The Difference Engine was partially constructed, but the Analytical Engine remained on paper. Still, I believed the principles were sound. Someone, someday, would surely carry it forward.
33. 08:16
    George Orwellshare moment

    They did. And now we're back to the question of whether that's good or bad. Your pupils, the ones who built the computers, did they surpass you in the right ways or the wrong ones?
34. 08:28
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    In capability, certainly the right ways. The machines exceed anything I imagined in speed and scale. In application, well, that I cannot judge from where I sit. What have they done with these magnificent instruments?
35. 08:43
    George Orwellshare moment

    Some good, some bad, mostly banal. They count things very quickly. They help send rockets up and bombs down. They're starting to manage information in ways that would make a Ministry of Truth envious. But they also spread information the ministries can't fully control, at least not yet.
36. 09:04
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    A mixed inheritance, then. As with most powerful tools. The lever, the wheel, the printing press, all the same. The question is never the tool but the hand that wields it and the mind that guides the hand.
37. 09:18
    George Orwellshare moment

    Agreed. Which is why I keep coming back to language, to clarity, to making people think about what words mean. If you can't think clearly, you can't guide anything properly, machine or otherwise.
38. 09:33
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    And I to mathematics, to logic, to the understanding of process. One must know what one is ordering the machine to do, and why, and what the consequences might be. Precision in instruction requires precision in thought.
39. 09:49
    George Orwellshare moment

    So we taught similar things, in a way. How to think clearly in our respective domains. Whether anyone learned is another matter.
40. 09:58
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Some learned. Your books are still read. My notes are studied by those who build the thinking machines, or what pass for them. The pupils exist, Mr. Orwell, even if we cannot meet them.
41. 10:10
    George Orwellshare moment

    I suppose that's the best a teacher can hope for. To be read honestly after you're gone. Not worshipped, not distorted beyond recognition, just read and understood and maybe, possibly, learned from.
42. 10:26
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    To have contributed one true note to the symphony, even if others compose the movements that follow. Yes, I would accept that as sufficient. Though I should have liked to see the completed Engine.
43. 10:38
    George Orwellshare moment

    And I should have liked to see an England that didn't need the warnings I wrote. We both want the impossible, apparently.
44. 10:45
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    The impossible today, Mr. Orwell, is merely the difficult tomorrow. That much I learned from Mr. Babbage. And that much, I hope, my pupils learned from me.
45. 10:55
    George Orwellshare moment

    Let's hope they learned caution along with ambition. That's the part that usually gets forgotten.