Charles Babbage and the Emergence of Automated Reason

Complexity at the social science interface

“…There are many other instances of systems thinking interfacing with social policy on a variety of fronts and at a variety of levels: from Alfred Marshall's imagined use of automated evolutionary machinery to drive the economy of 1860s Victorian England , through policy‐relevant cybernetic models such as that underpinning Limits to Growth (1972) and Schelling's work on segregation, to more recent attempts to shape, for example, education policy through the lens of complex systems ideas (Cummins, 2013).…”

Levins and the Lure of Artificial Worlds

“…This characterisation of the difference between manual and automatic design offered by Clark (1990), in his terms a "methodological inversion", is reminiscent of a more general admonishment of automaticity, where the reduced effort associated with machine intelligence is compromised by the risk of a concomitant loss of understanding or insight (Bullock 2008). …”

“…This interface has a long and interesting history with significant contributions from pioneers of computing science such as von Neumann, Turing and Babbage (Bullock 2008 One of Maynard Smith's most significant contributions to evolutionary biology was the origination of the Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) concept and the development of the game theoretic mathematical apparatus for identifying ESSs (Maynard Smith 1982). However, his first published ESS model, jointly authored with Price (Maynard Smith & Price 1973), was solved via a simple computational model.…”

Automata : a babbage machine analyst based human automation paradigm

“…This approach yielded literatures that would provide contextual support to interpret CMI and AI's motivations. These includes one scientific observation of allor-nothing states of nervous activity which fuelled AI's hype in 1940s [28]; one oration deliberating about similarities between nerve and electricity [15]; one historical study of our present day programmable computers [19] revealing potential designers' intent; one foundational philosophy [18] revealing AI's motivation as under the automata grand challenge. This was followed by a review on the scientific advancements regarding mental activities since CMI.…”

“…A preliminary reading of CMI revealed key information were overlooked or excluded by past methodologies which prompted further investigation to be free from syntactical and siloed semantical constraints. In essence, CMI would ground AI with the automata grand challenge set out by Mind-Body Philosophy [18] or goal to automate reason or universe's natural proceedings by Charles Babbage's demonstration of the programmable computer [19]. Moreover, a corollary would debunk AI anthropomorphic arguments and as Alan Turing puts it in the past [16], rendering human-like AI demonstrations as trivial 5 and resolve much application concerns.…”