Ada Lovelace Day Breakfast 2018
Thoughtworks Sydney
It’s great to be sharing Ada Lovelace Day and breakfast with you all on Gadigal land that was never ceded but stolen.
Marking this day is a way of celebrating women technologists, most of whom would like to be known as technologists.
In that spirit I invite you to hold someone in your mind who embodies the spirit and the genius and the bold curiosity of Ada Lovelace. Tell someone today about your favourite technologist who happens to be a woman, and if she’s around, why don’t you tell her?
For me it’s Rebecca Parsons, my boss and ThoughtWorks’ CTO, who, just a few days ago, in front of 20,000 people at the Grace Hopper Conference in Houston, was recognized for her impact on business and society with the prestigious Abie Technical Leadership Award.
It’s incredibly inspiring and sometimes intimidating to work with an actual genius. Rebecca is a complex and abstract thinker, someone who is fascinated by and speaks many computer languages, who is a big driver in the Tech Radar publication from ThoughtWorks that regularly maps trends in tech, so she’s across so much. She is not a tech utopian, in fact she’s highly critical of many practices and problems in our industry, but she is a tech optimist. She is a really big part of why I am too.
But we need to tangibly and practically ground our tech optimism so that we deliver technology fairly, and so that we take responsibility for the code we create, the data we collect and the tools and services that we release, confident that they are right for industry, and for people and society. And to deliver this we new standard operating procedures, assumptions and behaviours in our industry.
One of Rebecca’s projects is working up a model and a book which has the very modest goal of revolutionising the IT industries. I’m working on that with her, evolving this set of values and principles that we believe could and should re-pivot some negative trends toward putting technology in the hands of people and building an equitable tech future. Look out for a book probably be called The Metamodern Corporation soon!
Like all women techies, Rebecca, builds on the insights and work of Ada Lovelace, in particular her creativity, and her willingness to step outside the silo, the accepted doctrine, to see what she can see. Like Ada.
Oh Ada. Ada was at least 133 years ahead of her time.
Ada was born on Human Rights Day in 1815, 10 December, 133 years before that day was declared in 1948 by the United Nations when Eleanor Roosevelt, another trailblazer, drove the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into being. The rights of women during Ada’s time were changing, and she was a privileged woman in many ways.
Still, it’s pretty tough being 133 years ahead of your time. At the age of 12 Ada didn’t just dream of flying, she designed some wings and planned a book on Flyology. She was endlessly fascinated by the latest inventions. My favourite quote found when reading for this talk is about her unquenchable hunger for knowledge and her recognition that it always begets the yearning for more:
“You know I always have so many metaphysical enquiries and speculations which intrude themselves that I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it as well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand about the many connections and relations which occur to me, how the matter in question was first thought or arrived at, etc etc.”
Ada of course is most famous for pairing with Charles Babbage on his work on the Analytical Engine. She made it more intelligible when at 27 she wrote a 20,000 word paper that became notes to a translation of one of his papers. She redrafted parts of a Babbage paper to provide explanations to the reader, and her redrafting and additional notes accounted for about 2/3rds. She recognised that computation is not just a number but anything that can be represented by a number, so programs that apply operations to symbols — numbers in calculus, words for poems, notes for music — symbolic processing.
Babbage her ally and collaborator who was 100 years ahead of his time in ideas about computer hardware, called her the “enchantress of numbers” – when maybe just mathematician would do. She called herself an analyst and a metaphysician when she said this,
“I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst (& Metaphysician); for with me the two go together indissolubly”.
She is appreciated for this application of imagination to mathematics, to thinking outside silos and challenging assumptions and for writing the first computer program and algorithm.
She achieved a lot, despite her pretty messed up parents and poor health. She also had a life and apparently liked gambling, swearing, drinking, opium and sex. Good for her. At her request, she’s buried next to her debaucherous and kinky father Lord Byron, whom she never met. They died at the same age – 36 and spookily, Byron died on Ada’s birthday
But what lessons can we draw from Ada’s past today?
I called this talk Ada’s wings, because I want to acknowledge Ada’s great achievements, but also notice that she didn’t finish her wings. How are we going to finish her wings and fly?
We are living in times where there are movements and debates that we badly need to have – we are seeing improvements in our industry where women have had the courage to stand up and name what is going, to have a big belly laugh at ideas like that of James Damore.
But we are also living through some pretty grim and scary times friends where in many parts of the world, things are not going forward. I’m thinking of news overnight from Brazil, the daily news from the United States, the number of repressive regimes that punish women for trying to fly, even think about flying. And I’m thinking about things going on here in Australia.
As Rebecca Solnit has recently said, “This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It’s also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both.”
How can we keep our hope and drive going? Ada had an insight about rainbows when she was 19, which she wrote to William Frend, when she asked, “Why does a rainbow always appear to the spectator to be an arc of a circle? Is the spectator’s eye supposed to be in the centre of the circle of which the arc of the rainbow forms a portion.”
She was speculating a mathematical theory that was not entirely understood at the time, but she got it right. Where the spectator looks from affects how we see the rainbow and hope both, but if we keep expecting individuals to resolve the problems of society, if we think leaning in or being less strident or too soft or too aggressive or not aggressive enough, a do it yourself approach to on the job equality, we are actually kind of gaslighting, and providing a way for institutions to deflect blame, making women question themselves and doubt their sanity. It’s the society that we operate in that needs fixing, not how we ask for money ,the tone of our voices or our outfits. This is too profound and complex to expect individuals to resolve on their own. We need collective action instead, movements, campaigns, good old fashioned organising!
I will finish with another Rebecca Solnit quote because I think it captures the kind of engaged hope we need to have, this is the kind of hope that leads to some gold at the end of the rainbow:
“It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings. … Change is rarely straightforward… Sometimes it’s as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen suddenly arise from deep roots in the past or from long-dormant seeds.”
Now I’m looking forward to hearing from my genius colleague Charlie who is going to scatter some different seeds and thoughts and hopes your way. Thank you.