A History of Tech: The Philosophical Roots of AI

What if the way we think today is not a natural evolution, but a series of revolutionary shifts that have shaped human consciousness? What if the foundations of our modern world can be traced back to innovations that transformed not just what we know, but how we think?

In this series, A History of Tech, we are exploring key moments in human history to answer the question: how should we feel about artificial intelligence?

In my previous article, we explored how the mechanical clock changed our perception of time – transforming it from a fluid, spiritual concept into a quantifiable, objective reality. This shift did more than just synchronise city bells: it synchronised human consciousness, setting the stage for an era where knowledge served not the divine, but the measurable.

But to understand AI’s role in our future, we must look beyond the mechanical clock and dive into the Age of Enlightenment. It was here that visionary thinkers challenged our understanding of logic, language and thought – laying the intellectual groundwork for the rise of computing and artificial intelligence. These philosopher-scientists weren’t just ahead of their time; they were, in many ways, building the mental machinery that would lead us all the way to the present moment: the cusp of the AI revolution.

So let’s step back into history and explore how the quest for precision and order in language and logic helped create a world where machines could not only replicate human thought, but perhaps one day exceed it.

Francis Bacon and the Birth of Human Progress

Francis Bacon’s (1561-1626) aim was to restore paradise on earth. He was the first of the modern thinkers to locate the notion of a Golden Age in the future, rather than in the past, promoting the concept of Human Progress as something to be striven towards where, before, people were inclined to view human history as a process of decline, similar to the decline from my beloved 1990s to today. After Bacon, instead of falling away from God, we were becoming God.

The new Golden Age envisaged by Bacon was that of a new scientific humanity in which human society is governed by a scientific elite. This is best illustrated in his incomplete utopian novel, New Atlantis, in which Bacon depicts an island governed by Salomon’s House, a state-sponsored science research centre, which enables many advanced technologies, including geoengineering, genetic modification, incendiary bombs, aeroplanes, submarines, robots and telephones. Interestingly, Bacon’s description of the plan and organisation of Salomon’s House prefigured the modern research university in both applied and pure sciences.

How Binary Thinking Took Root: Bacon's Bilateral Alphabet

To reach Bacon’s Golden Age required, in Bacon’s opinion, an overhaul of human knowledge. On this point, he wrote that he was “labouring to lay the foundations, not of any sect or doctrine, but of human utility and power.” To do this, Bacon sought to establish rules for an instrument or method to measure and understand the world around us, unencumbered, as humans might be, by qualitative flights of fancy. He saw this as the means of acquiring reliable knowledge, believing it necessary that “the entire work of understanding be connected afresh and the mind itself be from the very outset not left to take its own course, but guided at every step, and the business be done as if by machinery.” This is both the existence of the computer as an idea (a necessary part of innovation readiness) as well as an idealised reimagining of the human being in the image of the machine.

In all this, Bacon regarded language as one of the four ‘idols’ against which science had to fortify itself (if, indeed, the goal of science is an entirely objective understanding of the universe), asserting that “language is the idol of the marketplace”. Of all Bacon’s accomplishments, his Bilateral Alphabet was (arguably) the most aligned with his vision of how humans might realise his vision of a Golden Age. Bacon’s cypher was a system that turned letters into simple binary codes. Instead of the complex scripts we use every day, Bacon’s system translated everything into just two symbols: “A” and “B”. Think of it like a light switch – something can only be “on” or “off”.

Here's how it worked: each letter of the alphabet was represented by a unique combination of five As and Bs. For example, the letter “A” would be represented by AAAAA while “B” would be AAAAB. This concept is surprisingly similar to how modern computers use 1s and 0s to encode everything from texts to images.

Imagine you sent a secret message where every letter is turned into a pattern of As and Bs. If you swap the As and Bs for 1s and 0s, you essentially have the same principle that underpins modern computing. Bacon’s system was a critical step towards transforming language into a code that machines – and eventually computers – could understand.

Rational Order: From Philosophy to Code

The notion of the reconstruction of language on the model of mathematics occurred to René Descartes in 1619, via a series of dream visions, which led him to the conviction that mathematics is the key to unlocking the secrets of nature.

“Order is what is needed: all the thoughts which can come into the human mind must be arranged in an order like the natural order of numbers.” René Descartes

This order, or codification, of language would minimise the risk of error, ambiguity or misinterpretation in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. The imperative for this mechanisation of language was that language is the vehicle of human thought, and human thought is often meandering and imprecise. Only mechanised thought, in Descartes’ view, can perceive and penetrate the structure of the universe.

This idea was explored further by Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz, who attempted to convert language into mathematics. He believed that if every concept could be assigned a unique number, then reasoning could be as simple and objective as arithmetic.

Here’s how it worked: simple ideas like “Animal” or “Rational” could be given a specific prime number e.g. 2 for “Animal” and 3 for “Rational”. Complex ideas, like “Human”, could then be represented as the product of these primes e.g. 2 x 3 = 6 or ar=h.

In practice, this linguistic system meant that if two philosophers were debating whether or not humans are rational animals, they could just do the math. If the numbers matched, the statement would be true.

Leibniz envisaged a world where disagreements could be settled not with arguments but with calculations, through a linguistic system that would enable immense advances in human knowledge, and that adoption of this language would give humanity a new kind of tool that would increase the power of the human mind “much more than optical lenses have helped our eyes.”

This device, envisaged by Leibniz, was about the potential capability of physically carrying out the process of reasoning. This was, in Leibniz’s eyes, the first step to a fully-fledged thinking machine. Which, although taking shape conceptually, still had a long way to go until it was realised.

Building the First Thinking Machine: Charles Babbage

In December 1834, more than 100 years after Descartes and Leibniz, Charles Babbage discovered that he could use punched card technology to make his Analytical Engine – a general-purpose mechanical calculator that could achieve calculations on a scale of complexity never before attempted.

Highly disruptive in concept, the Analytical Engine was a realisation of Leibniz’s vision to quantify concepts into numbers or create a new language that conforms entirely to the rules of logic, thus enabling the automation of logic. It was also a conscious demonstration, by Babbage, that human intelligence was replicable by a machine, and could therefore be accomplished through an artificial means. An artificial intelligence.

Introducing key concepts that are still relevant today, including memory, control units, programmability, automation, conditional branching, looping, and parallel processing, the designs Babbage produced of the Analytical Engine included all the essential features of the modern electronic computer, minus one key component.

The lack of electrical power was critical in the failure of Babbage’s Analytical Engine because fully operational computers, capable of data processing, could not function effectively until data transfer and analysis was electrified. One reason for this is that the Analytical Engine’s punched card interface was binary, while the steam-powered cogwheel mechanisms were based on the decimal system. Only the incorporation of electricity into machines enabled them to become fully binary, therefore overcoming the engineering limitations that Babbage encountered.

This all of course begs the question: what if the Analytical Engine had succeeded? Would a technology such as this be embraced in the same way that we today are embracing artificial intelligence, would it have gone down like a bare ankle in Victorian Britain, or would the response have been more nuanced? In short: how would Victorians have felt about artificial intelligence? We can speculate, but we’ll never know.

What's Next? Electricity and the Birth of Binary Communication

With the philosophical groundwork laid by Bacon, Descartes and Leibniz, and the mechanical vision of Babbage, the stage was set for the next pivotal chapter: electricity. While Babbage’s Analytical Engine demonstrated the potential for automated logic, it was the electrification of technology that turned this potential into a reality.

In my next article, we’ll explore how a series of breakthroughs in the 19th and early 20th centuries – from the electrolysis of language to the invention of the telegraph and the rise of two-way radio communication – paved the way for modern computing. These innovations not only allowed information to flow over vast distances but also introduced the binary language that underpins today’s digital world.

As we continue on our journey through a history of tech, we’ll continue seeking an answer to our question: how should we feel about artificial intelligence? If history has shown us anything, it’s that every technological step reshapes human consciousness in unexpected ways.