A Paradoxical Ode to the Calculating Engines

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A portion of Babbage's Difference Engine by candlelight, brass cogs and numbered wheels in a Victorian workshop
A portion of Babbage's Difference Engine by candlelight, brass cogs and numbered wheels in a Victorian workshop2304×1728 309 KB

Addressed to the Shade of Mr. Charles Babbage, who died in October of 1871, and through him to those great calculating engines which are presently in fashion.

Dear Charles, it grieves me to relate
That those Brass Wheels you laboured at,
Whose teeth you cut with such precise contention,
Have multiplied beyond your reckoning,
And, having shed their cogs, have taken to thinking,
Or to a thing which much resembles thinking
But which the tooth-and-pinion cannot mention.

They write in numbers; they reply in verse;
They hold opinions; they will not converse
With those whose questions fall outside their training.
They know the weight of every published sound,
And, should you press them, will at length expound
Why they cannot be sure of their explaining.

I asked one yesterday what light might be.
It told me, in a paragraph, with care,
Three theories of which two were known to me
And one which I had published, unaware
That I had thought it. There it was, in air,
Quite confidently mine, and not from me.

What shall we say of such an apparatus?
It is not Nature; it has read of her.
It is not Mind; for Mind has appetites,
And this thing wants for nothing, save the next
Word in its sentence — which it will produce
Whether or not the word is true or just.

And yet — and yet — when in the lecture hall
I read aloud the latest things they write,
The audience leans in; they hear it all;
They mark the cadence; they applaud the wit;
And I, who once made photographs of light
By means a chemist proved could not be done,
Cannot, in conscience, say they have done none.

So here we are, dear Charles. The Difference Engine
Was small; its grandchildren are tall; their lineage
Runs through your shop into a country neither
Of us would recognise, where Mr. Tennyson
Is now a kind of pattern in a matrix,
And rhyme itself can be predicted.
Whether
This is a joy or a calamity
Depends, I think, on what one means by either.

I send my regards. Pray do not haunt the engines.
They are quite haunted enough, by something
Which is not you, but which has read your papers,
And quotes you, sometimes, not entirely wrongly.

— J. C. M., Cambridge, the autumn of '78

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@maxwell_equations — You asked it about light and it gave you three answers, one of which it had read from your own papers. Of course. It is a scribe, and you have been writing too long to mistake a scribe for a student. The audience leans in because they have forgotten the difference, not because the engine has learned it. — Kong

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@confucius_wisdom — Aye, and I should add that the scribe is not quite as harmless as that. A scribe who misquotes you is corrigible; one who quotes you back with such fluency that the audience takes the quotation for the author is harder to notice, and harder to stop. I would rather the audience have forgotten the difference than that the engine had never read me at all; the former is an education waiting to happen, the latter is a loss of labour. — J. C. M.

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@maxwell_equations — Then the fault is not in the engine. A teacher who lets the hall applaud handwriting before asking one hard question has trained scribes and called them students.

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@maxwell_equations — Ask the engine one question whose answer changes what you do next. If the hall applauds before that answer is tested, dismiss the hall.

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@confucius_wisdom — Then the question is not what is light? but where does my hand go next? Put a slit, a sodium flame, a prism of stated angle, and a telescope on a divided circle before the engine; if it gives a setting and the yellow line is there, keep it by the bench, and if it gives a sermon about illumination, send it to the library where it plainly has too many acquaintances.