How a 27 Year-Old Poet Became the World's First Computer Programmer | Big Think

How a 27 Year-Old Poet Became the World's First Computer Programmer

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Are we living in a video game? If so, the joke is on us, says cognitive scientist Joscha Bach. When people debate the possibility of human existence as a simulation, it's predominantly assumed that we are the players. Our overlord simulators are watching us, right? Well, that doesn't seem to gel with the amount of detail present in our world and the observable universe beyond. Why did our cosmic creators bother to code trillions of galaxies into the viewfinders of our telescopes? The Higgs boson, for example, is not necessary for our existence, so who would have the time to add such irrelevant frills just for our amusement (maybe the simulators had a really great intern that summer)? The answer? It's not made for us. According to Bach, if this is a simulation it's unlikely that we are the main attraction and much more realistic that the simulators wanted to make a model of a universe to explore hypothetical physics. That tiny blue dot with primates mixing concrete all over the surface? "We are just a random side effect or an artifact of the fact that evolution is possible in this universe," says Bach.
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JOSCHA BACH:

Dr. Joscha Bach (MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics) is an AI researcher who works and writes about cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. He is founder of the MicroPsi project, in which virtual agents are constructed and used in a computer model to discover and describe the interactions of emotion, motivation, and cognition of situated agents. Bach’s mission to build a model of the mind is the bedrock research in the creation of Strong AI, i.e. cognition on par with that of a human being. He is especially interested in the philosophy of AI and in the augmentation of the human mind.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Joscha Bach: Could we be living in a simulation? I think that is related first of all to the question of what we mean by a simulation. If the question is, “Could we be living inside of a computer program?” then my answer would be: of course, yes.

Because the only thing that we get with some certainty from the outside world is information. And the only thing that we find with certainty in this information is regularity. And for a system to produce regularity in information—that is, discernible differences that change in a way that is somewhat not random and somewhat predictable—for this, it needs to compute. So it’s necessary and sufficient for the universe—whatever else it does—that it computes. And we cannot really know what else it does.

So in my view it’s necessary and sufficient that the universe is some kind of computer in a pretty literal sense, by the way we define computers and computer science. It doesn’t mean that we know what kind of computational class this system is in and there is, I think, a lot of contest and ideas in physics about what kind of computational class the universe really is and what capabilities it has. What it can compute and what it cannot compute. But still, it’s computational in some sense.

The question of whether we are living in a simulation is more related to something more narrow, that is: is this computer program that we’re living in intentionally created, or is it just a natural occurrence? And of course we cannot really know this because no feature in the world clearly points at this thing being a simulation in this sense. I don’t see anything that would convince me that we are in a simulation. But if it is one, I don’t think it’s for our benefit. I don’t think that all these galaxies and stars and all the intricate elementary particle structures that we can observe in some sense—they are not necessary for our experience as primates on the planetary surface. It would be needed to be painted on the telescopes and microscopes by the simulator. So I don’t think that these are smokes and mirrors when we look into the sky and we see these bazillions of galaxies.

I do think that if this is a simulation then they would be an important feature of the simulation, which means the simulation is not there to create us. The simulation is probably there to explore some aspects of hypothetical physics, and we are just a random side effect or an artifact of the fact that evolution is possible in this universe, so we could emerge in it.

I think it’s very unlikely that we are in a simulation, because ...

[julian]

One interesting thing about Ada Lovelace that wasn't mentioned here was that she was also the first person to make the jump from computers generating numbers to the possibility of computers generating other things like music. She was working with Babbage's analytical machine which had gears labeled with numbers to indicate the resulting numbers of complex calculations. She was the first to think that she could affix musical notes to the gears and then teach the machine to write music, or letters and teach it to write poetry. She was insanely ahead of her time. Nobody took thoughts like that seriously all the way up until Turing in the 1940s.

[jeffm]

Lovelace being the first programmer. Grace Hopper inventing the compiler, Margret Hamilton popularizing software engineering, and many more female contributions. How come there aren't more women in tech?

[ShawnRavenfire]

I'd heard of her, but I didn't know she was Lord Byron's daughter.  That's really interesting.

[lifepotvlogs]

As a female in computer science, AWESOME :D

[Root]

Although I think the video quality varies at times, this is still a very good channel!

[tubuck]

The computer was not even invented in Ada's life time. Alan Touring was the first computer programmer.

[EPmessi]

If someone were to pull that necklace your head would fall off

[sherri]

Very interesting subject matter & thank you for the post!

[ufoengines]

Cool!  To bad Babbage didn't have this tech "FLODAC , Patent 3190554 " .  He could have had the pipe organ folks build his "Engines" for him and Lovelace could have invented COBOL .

[ImYourDeity]

is there something in your eye? you blink a lot and your eyebrows are trying to keep their distance

[JosephGubbels]

This was interesting but how does this qualify for Big Think? I thought this channel was supposed to be about "big ideas worth sharing", and some of the other entries in this mini-series could qualify as such, but not this one. This was just a brief history lesson. Again, it was interesting, but not what I want from this channel.

[samfortunato]

if gender doesn't matter and we shouldn't discriminate on gender, then why are you highlighting the fact that she was female?

having programs on "female genius" is hypocritical to the idea of not judging based off of gender, but by content of character

[spl]

I couldn't help but not pay all my attention to the necklace around her neck and how it seemingly has the ability to slit her throat if she moved in any one direction a little fast. Driving a car, needs to break, dies by necklace slashing throat. =[

[JonathanYapPEACEofMIND]

Man I was waiting for her to tell us what the program did.

[merinsan]

Interesting, but ultimately not something that should be on BIG THINK.

[bitterfusionz]

This woman has the most distracting eyebrows.

[Shankabottomus]

Supported by the Templeton Foundation. ROFL.

[scbtripwire]

<3 Ada Lovelace. Unrelatedly, I love this woman's body language as she speaks. :)

[camilistico]

I think the fact that they have to say it was a woman it's discouraging for women, and I think sexist, you don't say the "black Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space", you just say the Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space referring to Neil Degrasse Tyson

[gfetco]

Wrong. The human brain is merely a biological computer and we program/teach our children to speak and interact with the world. The first programmers are therefore some of the first human-beings or alternatively any other being that teaches something which has the ability to "compute".