Computation and Intelligence Bearing Marks of Gender with reference to life of Ada Lovelace

Abstract :

               In this blogpost, I’ll explain about the Computation & Intelligence not only bearing marks of class but also of gender by starting from the history of women & weaving, and then taking the life of Ada Lovelace, as discussed in the articles by Plant & Schaffer.

History of Women & Weaving - Modern Computation:

             The connection between women and weaving runs deep: even Athena and Isis wove their own veils. “The traditional picture of the wife was one in which she spun by the village fire at night, listening to the children’s riddles, and to the myth-telling of the men, eventually making cloth which her husband could sell to make wealth for the family; cloth-making was a service from a wife to a husband.” This is from Margaret Mead’s research from the Tiv of Nigeria, but it is a pattern repeated in many societies before manufactured cloth and automated weaving made their marks.
              It is weaving by which woman is known; the activity of weaving which defines her. But, it seems to be foolish to suggest that weaving is women’s only contribution to “the discoveries and inventions of the history of civilisation?”

               The computer is described to be emerged out of the history of weaving, the process so often said to be the quintessence of women’s work. The loom is the vanguard site of software development. Indeed, it is from the loom, or rather the process of weaving, that this paper takes another cue. Perhaps this paper is an instance of this process of weaving as well, for tales and texts are woven as surely as threads and fabrics. It is a yarn in both senses. It is about weaving women and cybernetics, and is also weaving women and cybernetics. Perhaps, weaving is even the fabric of every other discovery and invention, perhaps the beginning and the end of their history. The loom is a fatal innovation which weaves its way from squared paper to the data net.

Life of Ada Lovelace:

                Ada Lovelace, with whom the histories of computing and women’s liberation are first directly woven together, is central to this post. She is, moreover, often remembered as Charles Babbage’s voice, expressing his ideas with levels of clarity, efficiency, and accuracy he could never have mustered himself. Babbage had a tendency to flit between obsessions; a remarkably prolific explorer of the most fascinating questions of science and technology, he nevertheless rarely managed to complete his studies; neither the Difference Engine nor the Analytical Engine were developed to his satisfaction. Ada, on the other hand, was determined to see things through; perhaps her own commitment to Babbage’s machine was greater than his own. Knowing that the Difference Engine had suffered for lack of funding, publicity, and organisation, she was convinced that the Analytical Engine would be better served by her own attentions. She was often annoyed by what she perceived as Babbage’s sloppiness, and after an argument in 1843, she laid down several conditions for the continuation of their collaboration.

                Ada Lovelace herself worked with a mixture of coyness and confidence; attributes which often extended to terrible losses of self-esteem and megalomaniac delight in her own brilliance. Sometimes she was convinced of her own immortal genius as a mathematician. At other times, she lost all confidence, and often wondered whether she should not have pursued her musical abilities. Ada was always trapped by the duty to be dutiful; caught in a cleft stick of moral obligations she did not understand. Ada’s letters—and indeed her scientific papers—are full of suspicions of her own strange relation to humanity. Babbage called her his fairy, because of her dexterous mind and light presence, and this appealed to Ada’s inherited romanticism.

                 Ada may have been Babbage’s fairy, but she was not allowed to forget that she was also a wife, mother, and victim of countless ‘female disorders’. She was often described her strange intimacy with death; it was rather the constraints of life with which she had to struggle. “I mean to do what I mean to do,” she once wrote, but there is no doubt that Ada was horribly confined by the familiar—her marriage, her children, and her indomitable mother conspired against her independence, and it was no wonder that she was so attracted to the unfamiliar expanses of mathematical worlds.

                 Ada was not really Ada Byron, but Ada Lovelace, and her father was never Prime Minister: these are the fictions of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, whose book The Difference Engine sets its tale in a Victorian England in which the software she designed was already running; a country in which the Luddites were defeated, the Prime Minister was a poet, and Ada Lovelace still bore her maiden name. And one still grander: Queen of Engines. Set in the mid-1850s, the novel takes Ada into a middle-age she never saw: the real Ada died in 1852 while she was still in her thirties. Much of her life with unspecified disorders, she was eventually diagnosed as suffering from cancer of the womb, and she died after months of extraordinary pain.

Conclusion:

                   In this way, women suffered from the male dominance society by forcing them to have weaving as their profession & recognition regarding it to be a mechanical process rather than an intellectual supporting my initial argument of gender bias in terms of Computation & Intelligence.

                                                                                                                Submitted by: Syed Ashruf,
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