After a busy spring semester, I’m finally getting around to reading this year’s winter issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, which is focused on the subject of technology in all its forms — invention, adoption, obsolescence, and all that’s in between. Included in this collection of texts is the following passage from Ada Lovelace’s notes on the Analytical Engine:

‘The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis, but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths’ (Ada Lovelace, London, 1843).

And this, an excerpt from Lewis Mumford’s monumental text Technics and Civilization, which details the history of technological development over time:

‘What remains as the permanent contribution of the machine, carried over from one generation to another, is the technique of cooperative thought and action it has fostered, the aesthetic excellence of the machine forms, the delicate logic of materials and forces, which has added a new canon — the machine canon — to the arts; above all, perhaps, the more objective personality that has come into existence through a more sensitive and understanding intercourse with these new social instruments and through their deliberate cultural assimilation. In projecting one side of the human personality into the concrete forms of the machine, we have created an independent environment that has reacted upon every other side of the personality’ (Lewis Mumford, New York City, 1934).