Thursday, March 3, 2011

Babbage located intelligence in the Mind, not the attentive crafting Body.

The industrial revolution had brought in its wake a new system of manufacturing on a large scale with the help of machines.The production system relied entirely on manual labour and skills had been replaced by the factory system.Charles Babbage ,a Cambridge trained mathematician and inventor , was a pioneer in the field of calculating machines.His inventions , the diffenece engine and the analytical engine,became the ancestors to the present era computers.
Babbage's calculating machines, the difference engine and the analytical engine were different from the existing prevalent machines in the sence that it was a substitute for the intellectual processes. These machines put an engine in place of a human brain. He used the phrase 'the engine knows' to describe its predetermined move from one calculation state to another.Babbage helped to forge a connection between the development of machinofacture and the design of intelligent machines. Simon Schaffer says” to make machines look intelligent it was necessory to render their sources of power- their labour force invicible”. Babbage defined intelligence as a combination of memory and forsight and was applied to his philosophical theory. His philosophy of machines was the basic idea for the new automatic system which emerged in the machine tool industry and the factory system.
The factory was a rational and transparent system, designed to demolish traditional and customary networks of skills and artisan culture. The properties of the factory system were explained through the medium of theology which was indispensable medium in various era.According to the proponents of this philosophy, the factory system was a product of intelligent reason and was thus providential and virtous.The two qualities attributed to the intelligence of machines were the forsight and memory. The calculability and mechanical quality of both humans and machines are merely instances of calculability and mechanical quality of the universe itself.Further babbage believed that he had their subsequant production.He quotes “ My right to dispose, as i will, of such inventions cannot be .
In response to criticism from contemporaries that the machines are only automatons, he replied that they may be automatons, but they carried intelligence. Intelligence was incorporated in their mechanisms.Babbage intended to use machines as a check for and to discipline human labour. In his own words, 'One great advantage which we may derive from machinery is from the check which it affords against the inattention, the idleness, or the dishonesty of human agents'. In Babbage's philosophy intelligence resides in the mind of the inventor not in the mind of craftmen.

YASIR CM
CS09B035

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