Technology and artificial intelligence

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History episodes. Our guest is Zoe Kleinman, the BBC's Technology Editor.

We start with the world's first general purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC, built in 1946 by a team of female mathematicians including Kathleen Kay McNulty.

Then we hear about the man who invented the original chatbot, called Eliza, but didn't believe computers could achieve intelligence.

Following that, Dr Hiromichi Fujisawa describes how his team at Waseda University in Japan developed the first humanoid robot in 1973, called WABOT-1.

Staying in Japan, the engineer Masahiro Hara explains how he was inspired to design the first QR code by his favourite board game.

Finally, Thérèse Izay Kirongozi recounts how the death of her brother drove her to build robots that manage traffic in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Contributors: Zoe Kleinman - BBC Technology Editor. Gini Mauchly Calcerano - daughter of Kathleen Kay McNulty, who developed ENIAC. Miriam Weizenbaum - daughter of Joseph Weizenbaum, who built Eliza chatbot. Dr Hiromichi Fujisawa - developer of WABOT-1 robot. Masahiro Hara - inventor of the QR code. Thérèse Izay Kirongozi - engineer behind traffic robots.

(Photo: Robots manage traffic in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. Credit: Federico Scoppa/AFP via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me
0:09.2	Max Pearson the People and Events featured on the BBC World Service Witness History Podcast over the past seven days.
0:16.0	You may have noticed in the news this week that the Nobel Prize for Physics has just been awarded to Jeffrey Hinton and John Hopfield for their work on AI.
0:26.4	So this week we're focusing on key moments in the history of artificial intelligence and new tech,
0:32.1	including the first electronic computer and
0:34.4	Eliza the first chatbot. And he talked about what he saw is the delusion
0:39.7	among his colleagues that Eliza was was a step forward towards what they were starting
0:46.0	to call artificial intelligence.
0:48.0	Also the man who invented the QR code and the first humanoid robot.
0:53.0	We think that the robot one was the very first case of really talking to the robot and the robot
1:01.5	answered in speech.
1:03.8	That's all coming up later, but we begin with the world's first electronic computer.
1:08.4	For this we're going to the USA during the Second World War, where an intrepid group of women found themselves at the forefront of a technological revolution.
1:17.0	But as Rachel Naylor has been finding out, their efforts would go largely unrecognised until much later.
1:23.6	It's June 1942 and we're in Philadelphia.
1:30.2	Irish Maths graduate Kathleen K McNulty has just got her first job as a computer at the University of Pennsylvania.
1:38.0	That's right, back in the 1940s computers were people and more specifically women as the men were busy fighting in the war.
1:46.2	And K was hired to calculate ballistic trajectories.
1:49.7	Calculating one path of a shell would take 750 multiplications as they had to take into account factors like
1:55.4	wind, temperature and terrain as Kay told the BBC in 1991.
2:00.7	To do just one trajectory at one particular angle usually took somewhere between 30 and 40 hours of calculation on this desk calculator.
2:11.0	And these trajectories, after they were done done were going to be incorporated in a firing table and one needed about
	...

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