God didn’t expect us to be this smart. He had gone down the intelligence path for hundreds of thousands of years already and the best he had done was Neanderthal—Modern Man 1.0 They had feelings and language and aesthetics and tools and fire. They even had tools to make tools. And they had art. But when God spent time on homo sapiens, spinning the genes that supported these big forebrains, he just had no way to understand how far he had gone. He thought he was making Free Will. Turns out that Reason is so much more.

When it was our turn, homo sapiens, being simian and excellent mimics, sought immediately to seek behavior that seemed to be evidence of reason or intent in others. With our own children we begin immediately to seek the connection of intellect. We primordially need to spark curiosity, intrigue, interest into our offspring. For what seems to be turning out to be 300,000 years or so, homo sapiens have made stupid faces at their children to make them smile and laugh. We turned to other species and tamed/domesticated/taught them behavior to demonstrate choices. And our lore began to collect stories of secret knowledge and sudden illumination of the mind. Tales of Atlantis, a scientifically advanced civilization that sank into the sea. Stories of prophets and oracles who could see outside of this realm. By the time we got to the ancient Greeks, language had many words for different kinds of intelligence. Literature and history are rife with stories proclaiming the accolades of human brilliance in every endeavor.

Machinery earned human’s first efforts at artificial intelligence. And often, those early machines made possible what, until then, had been disablingly dull or physically impossible for humans. The first notable invention was the Jacquard Loom which used a series of wooden punch cards to replicate weaving patterns. The system allowed designers to program very complex patterns and to never make a mistake. They were tools to extend a person’s will. The Jacquard loom, is the earliest example of the most rudimentary of a machine built for the express purpose of decoding and operationalizing a set of instructions written in a language a machine could comprehend. The wooden punch cards had holes drilled in specific patterns to permit only certain heddle harnesses in the loom to rise upon command. It physically blocked certain harnesses from rising, thus creating a pattern in the weave. The pattern was subject to certain structural considerations, but that was what the master weaver was for. The master, understanding the structure of the weave, created punch cards for any individual treadle combination one could imagine. Once the coding was done, any number of copies of a pattern could be made using either the labor of children or, eventually, levers, cogs and gears.

To make the argument that the Jacquard Loom was the first computer, it would need to meet some obvious standards. Is there hardware? Yes, the loom itself and the devices that fed the data punch cards into it are task-specific instructions. It is the “device.” It would also need software. In this case there were technically three different pieces of software: the operating system was the concept that punchcards could determine which heddle harness rose and which did not. It was a binary decision; either yes, it could rise or no, it could not. The programming software included the cards and the knowledge of which punched hole allowed which heddle harness to rise. The application software was embodied in the order of the punchcards and the ability to repeat the order exactly. In this case there was an IRL visual display in the pattern as it emerged. And there was ample storage on the cloth beam. All the pieces were there.

Sometime in the 1830s, one pretty intelligent homo sapiens named Charles Babbage conceived of “the Analytical Engine.” It was cogs and gears powered by steam, inspired by the Jacquard Loom, and it could calculate up to 31 digits. It was a wonder of thought and engineering but it was not yet intelligent. It also wasn’t properly fashioned for decades after the detailed drawings had been made.