Diving into code to illuminate the history of computing | Science & Technology - Penn: Office of University Communications

Science historian Stephanie Dick of the School of Arts and Sciences studies how computer scientists think by studying what they do, notes Katherine Unger Baillie, Science News Officer.

Stephanie Dick’s work explores the history of science, philosophy, and mathematics. “I think my whole academic career has been triangulating between those three different fields in various ways,” she says. 

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. This philosophical quandary is one that computer scientists have contemplated for more than three-quarters of a century. 

It’s a query that has also been on the mind of historian of science Stephanie Dick since her graduate student days. 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.

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. 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. 

“I care about the epistemological questions,” Dick says. “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...

Minds and machines  
Her dissertation evolved into what will become Dick’s first book, tentatively titled “Making Up Minds: Computing, AI, and Proof in the Postwar United States.” The work is a study of the branch of artificial intelligence aimed at automating mathematical theorem-proving during the second half of the 20^th century at academic, industrial, and defense research laboratories across the country...

In a second book, Dick plans to explore what happened when computer technology was introduced to domestic policing, examining the implications of using computerized databasing, algorithms as well as automated recognition of faces, fingerprints, and other identifying details in the 1960s and ‘70s. And while she notes that universities are devoting significant resources to confronting the pervasive ethical and practical challenges that arise around AI, she is concerned that the technology is taking hold faster than those concerns can be fully considered.

“I’m worried,” she says. “We make our machines, but then they constrain and shape and intervene in the course of our development, we accommodate them. We are always accommodating our technology. Everyone is asking, ‘What can we get computers to do?’ But we must also always ask, ‘Who will we become in tandem?’ and ‘Who do we want to be?’ 
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Source: Penn: Office of University Communications