Charles Babbage and the Emergence of Automated Reason
Charles Babbage and the Emergence of Automated Reason
This chapter examines some of the historical research that has focused on Charles Babbage’s (1791–1871) early machine intelligence and its ramifications. First, it presents Babbage’s use of computing within academic research. It then discusses the implications of this activity on the wider question of machine intelligence, and explores the relationship between automation and intelligibility. Intermittently throughout these considerations, connections between the concerns of Babbage and his contemporaries and those of modern artificial intelligence (AI) are noted.
Keywords: computing machinery, machine intelligence, automation, intelligibility, artificial intelligence
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