Godmothers of AI

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Godmothers of AI

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In 1843, a young woman wrote what is widely recognised as the world’s first computer program, a century before the modern computer existed.

Ada Lovelace saw something in Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine that even Babbage himself had not fully imagined: that a machine designed to calculate could potentially do far more than mathematics. It could manipulate symbols, compose music and, one day, perhaps create things that had nothing to do with numbers at all.

She called this 'poetical science', a way of thinking that brought imagination and logic together.

Yet after her death, Ada was largely written out of the history she had helped to shape. It would take decades for her contribution to computing to be properly recognised. Today, her name lives on in a programming language used by the US Department of Defense, the Ada Lovelace Institute, and Ada Lovelace Day, celebrated around the world.

But beyond the mythology of the Victorian mathematical prodigy is a more interesting question: what did Ada actually see when she looked at the future of machines?

In this episode of The Unseen, Claire Belhassine speaks with Julia Gray, author of I, Ada, who brings Ada's early life and imagination vividly into focus, and Octavia Field Reid, Associate Director of the Ada Lovelace Institute, whose work asks a question that feels profoundly Ada-like today: not simply what can technology do, but what kind of society do we want technology to create?

We also return to Meredith Whittaker’s Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers and Industrial Control to place this turning point in a wider context of labour, power and systems of control.

Ada Lovelace saw, 183 years ago, that the capacity of machines would one day exceed the limits of the imagination that built them. We are living in that moment now.

In this episode, we explore:

Ada's leap beyond calculation and why her ability to imagine what the Analytical Engine might become was so far ahead of her time.
The making of Ada Lovelace through Julia Gray's research into Ada's childhood, education, relationships and intellectual formation.
Who gets remembered, and how including the portrait Ada disliked, the mother who loved it, and what this small story reveals about the ways women's histories are constructed.
Why Ada disappeared from computing history for decades, while Babbage's contribution became increasingly celebrated.
Poetical science, Ada's extraordinary idea that imagination and mathematics could belong to the same intellectual world.
The Ada Lovelace Institute today and why asking what kind of society we want before asking what technology can do is a political act.
The hidden histories of computing through Meredith Whittaker's Origin Stories and its examination of computation, industrial control, labour and power.
Why Ada belongs in the story of AI as an early thinker about the possibilities and limits of machines.
The founding idea behind Godmothers: that technology is never just about what machines can do; it is about the people, values and societies we choose to build around them.