What the machine cannot originate

(AI can follow instructions with astonishing speed. Empathy, judgment, and care still have to come from us, and I believe women already show the way.)

Ada Lovelace was 27 in 1843 when she finished her notes on a machine that barely existed outside Charles Babbage’s drawings. He built the plans. She saw the music in them, literally: she thought it might one day compose. She also wrote, in what she labelled Note G, a warning that still sounds fresh: “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”

More than a century later, Alan Turing called this “Lady Lovelace’s objection” and argued with it. Today AI writes essays, reads scans and answers questions in dozens of languages. Whether it truly originates anything is a question for engineers and philosophers. My concern is simpler. If machines become very good at following instructions, then the qualities that cannot be ordered become the ones that count.

Two kinds of intelligence

We often speak of intelligence as one thing: speed, memory, the ability to solve a puzzle. Machines are winning that contest, and I do not think we should mourn it. A spreadsheet that never tires is a blessing to any accountant.

There is another kind of intelligence, though. It is the ability to read a face, to sense that a neighbour is struggling before she says so, to choose the kind word over the clever one. No programme supplies it on command.

When I look for that second intelligence in my own life, I mostly find it in women. I offer this as a personal observation, not as a theory about anyone. The mothers I know read a child’s mood the way a fisherman reads the sky over the Guimaras Strait, early and without fuss.

In hard moments, among friends or in a family facing a difficult choice, it is often a woman who names the real question first, while the rest of us are still arranging the facts. Many of us men are still growing into that kind of maturity, and I count myself among the learners.

A double load

Women today hold two responsibilities at once. They have claimed careers, education and public voice, and they continue to raise the next generation with extraordinary seriousness. Here the numbers matter. The 2021 National Household Care Survey by Oxfam Pilipinas, UN Women and the Philippine Commission on Women found that Filipino women spend about 13 hours a day on unpaid care work, counting time spent supervising family members, compared with about eight hours for men. Much of that is done while doing something else at the same time. That, I suspect, leaves very little time for themselves.

Here AI and robotics offer something hopeful. I expect these tools to absorb a large share of the repetitive tasks that consume so many hours: the forms, the schedules, the reminders, eventually even some of the housework. I believe capable home robots such as Optimus will one day lift part of that daily burden. The same survey looked at how much care work men do. Closing that gap is a job for us men, not for the machines. I would rather be part of the answer than wait for a robot to be. When the hours return, I expect women in particular to spend them on their own growth, on study, on enterprise, on the community.

That freed time matters because of what this care can do outside the home. Given room, it becomes civic. It shapes how a barangay looks after its elders, how a school treats a slow reader, how a company treats its weakest worker.

The heart that cannot be programmed

The Chinese philosopher Mencius taught that “the feeling of commiseration is the principle of benevolence.” He held that every person is born with this seed of compassion and that it must be cultivated. Elsewhere he told of a farmer from the state of Song who, impatient for his grain to grow, went out and pulled at the young plants, and came home to find them withered. Care cannot be hurried or forced. It has to be tended.

I find his image useful in a time of AI. A machine can be instructed. A sprout can only be tended, and tending is slow, human work.

So I will state my belief plainly. I believe the rescue of this world will come first from women, and I hope the rest of us learn fast enough to help. I do not say this to diminish men, and I know that every person is different. I say it because the qualities the coming decades need most, empathy, patience and a long view, are those I have watched women practise most faithfully.

Lovelace was right that the engine does what we order. The caring was never on the order sheet.

*Dr. Krisztián Galánthai Fekete is a writer, programmer and investor based in Switzerland. His new book is Find Your Meaning in 60 Days, In the Age of AI and Robotics.*

*Sources: Ada Lovelace, Notes by the Translator, Note G, in Sketch of the Analytical Engine (1843); Bodleian Libraries, “Ada Lovelace and the Analytical Engine” (2018); A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind (1950); Mencius 2A6 and 2A2, trans. James Legge; Oxfam Pilipinas, UN Women and Philippine Commission on Women, The 2021 National Household Care Survey (Summary in UN ESCAP, “Valuing and Investing in Unpaid Care and Domestic Work: Philippines”).