Imagine you have to perform a difficult calculation: pick your smartphone, point the camera at the formula, and just read off the result. Done. Did you calculate the result? No, not really, your device did all the work for you. Such apps, and calculators in general, replace doing math in your head. But can you really say you “know” the result? Well, not really. You completely trust the knowledge and processes in the machine.
And we do that increasingly often for a growing number of tasks: we outsource our thinking. Actually, this is a quite recent phenomenon. Until the invention of mechanical calculators, humans were the only ones able to calculate. Sure, we did have supporting tools, but notches on sticks, an abacus, or logarithmic tables didn’t do any calculations on their own. Only in the 17th century the first calculating machines appeared, that step by step could take over more and more cognitive tasks.
At the beginning of the 19th century Charles Babbage designed the first universal mechanical computer, which in principle could have calculated anything and everything. Translate your task into a program and the computer will take over: from simple calculations to “can I get a mortgage or a credit card?”
According to the pioneers, like Ada Lovelace, the important question wasn’t really whether such a machine could think, but what it could do for us in practice: what would it enable us to do? The more powerful our tools, the more tasks within our reach. That’s the idea that I would like to dedicate this ode to: that with relatively simple mechanical tools we can greatly enhance the speed and reach of our cognitive capacities. As Steve Jobs already said: the computer is a bicycle for the mind.
Text: Carlo Ierna. This article was first published (in Dutch) on Bij Nader Inzien. Photo: Jeffery Erhunse via Unsplash.