Moritz, Elan: The Moral Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence: Ada Lovelace, Mary Shelley, Poetical Science, and Created Agency

This paper evaluates the proposal that Ada Lovelace may be called the Mother of A and Mary Shelley the Godmother of AI. The claim is not defended as an institutional priority thesis: artificial intelligence as a named technical field belongs to the twentieth century. Rather, the paper argues that Lovelace and Shelley supply two indispensable pre-disciplinary structures for understanding artificial intelligence as both symbolic machinery and cultural-moral problem. Lovelace's poetical science, de