By Shaunak Kulkarni
We face a very real choice; to experience a perfect world that doesn’t exist, or to face a flawed reality that we can understand better with technology.
On March 28, 1935, a burst of flame in the distance signals success to Dr. Robert Goddard, Harry Guggenheim, and their entourage of engineers. The group watches a tall structure of metal scaffolding that supported an experimental rocket just moments earlier.
Thick smoke from the engines has barely begun to form as a slender 3-metre-tall rocket accelerates past its supports, achieving speeds unimaginable at the time, mere seconds after clearing the top of the scaffolding. This rocket, since known as Goddard’s A5, goes on to maintain a nearly perfect vertical trajectory to an altitude of 1500 metres; 1.5 kilometres high, the A5 precisely reorients itself for a horizontal course, as if by magic – now holding the new heading at speeds upward of 800 km/h for almost 4 kilometres.
To the uninitiated observer, it would appear that the rocket had a mind of its own! This extraordinary test figures amongst the greatest milestones of modern rocketry, recognised as one of the earliest successful demonstrations of an autonomously guided rocket; a rocket that has a mind of its own, thanks to a precisely calibrated instrument; the gyroscope.
Mechanically delicate, and fascinating to watch in action, the gyroscope has been employed for navigation long before Goddard’s demonstration with the A5 rocket. The use of a gyroscope in an integrated high-speed sensing and guidance system makes the test in March 1935 unique; obvious in retrospect, programming and installing such a system in 1935 was no mean feat – it was achieved at a time when the creation of Mickey Mouse was recent history, and general-use digital computers wouldn’t make an appearance for another decade! The aviation industry was also exploring applications for the use of gyroscopes in control and navigation, with the adoption of standard autopilot and cockpit instruments making use of mechanical gyroscopes picking up in the decades that followed.
The rise of widespread commercial air travel resulted in aircraft getting larger, faster, and harder to manually control. Gyroscopes and similar inertial navigation systems were frequently used to automate minor attitude corrections, with the intention of reducing pressure on the crew; however, the mechanical complexity of these systems created scope for ever widening sources of failure. Failure that would prove fatal at high speeds.
In later decades of the 20th century, Airplane crashes claimed thousands of lives on an annual basis, despite stringent regulation and elaborate checks; the vast majority of these fatalities find their root in the inherent complexity of aircraft systems. Commercial airliners have grown bigger and more sophisticated over the years, and the number of air travellers continues to grow.
More commercial aircraft are in the air at any given time today than there are years between now and the construction of the Great Pyramids, yet even non-fatal incidents have now become rare enough to warrant week-long prime-time coverage. The near-perfect safety record we see today has been made possible through a combination of regulatory and technological factors involving robust, failsafe controls and feedback mechanisms. One vital aspect of technical resilience in a system links to the degree of independent interaction between components; this relates to the risk posed by the system, such that a higher degree of interaction poses greater risk of failure. These risks are addressed through the use of more dynamic materials and by designing simpler interactions in mechanical systems.
Advances in digital sensing technology now allow delicate and complex apparatus like gyroscopes to be replaced with more mechanically resilient digital accelerometers; that said, such measures are only a small part of the solution, as digital technology necessitates use of digital computers, which are inherently complex and volatile. While physical sources of failure like impact shocks and power failure can be managed by instituting physical failsafe mechanisms, everybody who regularly uses a smartphone will vouch for the fact that software failure strikes with no apparent stimulus, for no apparent reason. Such uncertainty cannot be allowed to manifest 35000 feet in the air, and these concerns have led to the adoption of specialised programming languages for use in vital systems, notable amongst which is a relatively obscure language called Ada.
Ada was developed in the 1980s for mission-critical defence software, and has since found relevance for controlling key infrastructure in fields as varied as finance, space exploration, and railways; although specific information is classified, the software that enables you to pay for a flight may well use the same framework as systems that control national nuclear arsenals!
It is apt that a programming language forming the basis of vital IT infrastructure is named for Augusta Ada King, the Countess of Lovelace, a 19th century noblewoman who helped lay the foundation for modern computing. Also known as Ada Lovelace, she is widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer. As a teenager, Ada Lovelace was introduced to Charles Babbage, popularly called the father of computing for his groundbreaking work in computational technology; their meeting marked the beginning of correspondence discussing computing algorithms and the practical relevance of digital computers, examining technology that their contemporaries relegated to the realm of science fiction.
In 1842, she began translating the notes of an Italian engineer, Luigi Menabrea, reporting on Babbage’s concept of an analytical engine; intending to disseminate the work of Charles Babbage to an English-speaking audience, Ada Lovelace added original notes and observations to the translation, which are said to have been twice the length of the original text. It was with these notes that she began to systematically study and describe scientific applications of digital computers, which eventually led to the conception of a ‘program’ to calculate Bernoulli numbers — a notoriously time-consuming task when done manually.
During the second World War, a full century later, mathematicians at Bletchley Park would use vastly improved digital computation techniques to break the Enigma code; key players like Alan Turing would develop on that experience in their study of sentience and artificial intelligence.
In 2024, it has been more than three-quarters of a century since Turing’s historic work, and we have achieved another milestone in AI research; software now blurs the line between probabilistic iterative processing and original creative sense.
Software that can beat the Turing test with impunity is still some way off, but we have come a long way from an era when there were jobs with the specific purpose of performing repeated mathematical computation. Whether one considers the contribution of Ada Lovelace through the lens of computer science, or the importance of Ada as a programming language that runs the world, automatic computers and computation have become central to modern life.
Computers have become central to modern life, yet is up to every one of us to decide what purpose they serve. On a global scale, Ada can be used to guide ballistic missiles; Ada is also used to control the Ariane 5 rocket which has been used to launch space missions that yield breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe. At a personal level, computers can help adapt to change, and inform the world; they can also distract from reality, and drain the user. With the rise of productivity/separation enhancement technologies like VR on the rise, it is up to us to draw the line between productivity and separation; world leaders chose politics of dialogue over nuclear Armageddon during the cold war. We face a very real choice between life in a perfect world that — by definition — doesn’t exist, and facing a flawed reality that we can understand better with technology.
We don’t make this choice for what we stand to gain; this is a choice we make for the society we decide to leave, because the events of yesterday leave ripples today, and actions today make waves forever more.
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