Ada Lovelace

In this course

Ada Lovelace stands as an inaugural figure in the genealogy of computation itself, having conceived the algorithm and recursive loop as conceptual structures—ideas now foundational to contemporary AI and machine learning. The course positions her within a longer imaginative history of "thinking machines" (running from Llull and Leibniz through to modern AI's "shoggoth" tropes) to show how the dream of automated reasoning has shaped both technical possibility and cultural expectation. Her work enables arguments about the deep historical continuity between early mechanical abstraction and today's neural networks, suggesting that platform logic and AI's standardization of transaction have older philosophical roots than we might assume.

Mentioned in 2 readings