before,” she says.īut early on she recognized her own interest in rigorous intellectual challenges. “I had never known anyone who got a Ph.D. Dick was raised in Calgary by parents who had grown up on farms in northern Alberta. “I got a bit sidetracked,” she says, laughing, citing her original plans to study law and get into politics. The fact that Dick is a tenure-track faculty member studying humanities at an Ivy League institution comes as a bit of a surprise even to her.
#ILLUMINATE CODE CODE#
That’s what I think is the most important, to see how computer scientists have translated and transformed different problems and questions and ideas into code and what is gained and lost in the process.” An unexpected path To do that, there’s no way around getting into the code.
“I want to know how we know with the machine, what we know with it, what it knows-if anything, and how our knowledge is different for working within the confines of what computers can and cannot do. “I care about the epistemological questions,” Dick says. A common current among her inquiries is to ask how humans have theorized human faculties like intelligence and reason and how they translated those theories into the workings of computers.
#ILLUMINATE CODE WINDOWS#
With a focus on the history of computing and mathematics, particularly post-World War II, Dick has written about everything from the failures of Microsoft Windows to the earliest whispers of artificial intelligence and automated facial recognition. To understand how computer scientists and others might answer it, Dick, an assistant professor in Penn’s Department of History and Sociology of Science in the School of Arts and Sciences, turns to the code they wrote, the computers they designed, and the problems they tasked these machines with solving. It’s a query that has also been on the mind of historian of science Stephanie Dick since her graduate student days. This philosophical quandary is one that computer scientists have contemplated for more than three-quarters of a century. With Siri and Alexa able to tell jokes, curate shopping lists, and help schoolchildren with their homework, the question of what distinguishes a human mind from a machine has taken new shape.
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