This was the first fully-automatic calculating machine. British computing pioneer Charles Babbage (1791-1871) first conceived the idea of an advanced calculating machine to calculate and print mathematical tables in 1812. This machine, conceived by Babbage in 1834, was designed to evaluate any mathematical formula and to have even higher powers of analysis than his original Difference engine of the 1820s. Only part of the machine was completed before his death in 1871. This is a portion of the mill with a printing mechanism. Babbage was also a reformer, mathematician, philosopher, inventor and political economist.
Just before the COVID outbreak in 2019, a number of us put together a speculative paper about our disciplinary limitations in an era of increasingly technological confusion and division. Give the rise and hype and fears about AI, it is probably still relevant.
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— We grapple with the grand challenge of increasingly mutating and rhizomic ICTs systems as forms of ‘power container of modernity’ (Giddens) or power-knowledge (Foucault) that can both enable and constrain our ways of thinking and acting in the world.
This paper reflects a transdisciplinary conversation between researchers coming out of very different disciplinary paradigms – an engineer, a data scientist, a philosopher and two journeyman-sociologists and historians with action orientations. Can we develop a common language or metaphors? Or in fact, is the problem one that is continual because digital technologies and their effects continue to evolve and impact in as things in themselves as agents in the world and even reaching comment understandings is a Sisyphean task?
Each of us has written a position statement with ripostes and rejoinders from the others. We have everything in common as humans, but in some ways, our intellectual orientations and limitations fragment us. We ask each other: ‘What are our intellectual and practical concerns?’ What can do we bring them together to influence what we think is important?” —
Stillman, L., Doogan, C. H., Howard, M., Wright, S., & Mansilla, E. V. (2019). POWER AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES: A TRANSDISCIPLINARY DISCOURSE (pp. 236-261 BT-17th CIRN Conference 6-8 November 2019, Monash Centre, Prato, Italy; L. Stillman, M. Anwar, C. Rhinesmith, & V. Rhinesmith, Eds.). pp. 236-261 BT-17th CIRN Conference 6-8 November 2019, Monash Centre, Prato, Italy. Clayon, Vic: Department of Human Centred Computing, Faculty of IT, Monash University.
