"If you asked to see a computer in the 1700s, no one would point you to a glowing rectangle. They'd point you to a person. Yes, a human. For centuries, "computer" wasn't a gadget you bought; it was a job title, literally. A computer was a human being sitting in a quiet room with a stack of parchment, paid to do calculations all day. They were the original hardware, the original software, and the original "processing power" of civilization."
"What were they computing? The same stuff that now lives in your phone's apps and your bank's backend. If you were crossing the Atlantic in the 1700s, you didn't have GPS. You had printed almanacs and navigation tables, thick books of precomputed values that helped a human "computer" turn sun-and-star observations into an estimated position. It wasn't Google Maps, but it was the closest thing to offline map data before satellites."
Human beings historically filled the role of "computers," performing calculations by hand for navigation, finance, taxation, and commerce. Mariners used printed almanacs and navigation tables to convert celestial observations into estimated positions, functioning as precursors to modern map data. Merchants and officials hired human calculators to compute interest, taxes, and other numerical obligations through manual long division. The term "computer" shifted to describe machines only after mechanical and electronic devices began replacing human labor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Contemporary AI systems continue to rely on large quantities of human-generated text, code, images, audio, and human reviewers to shape outputs.
Read at Iterative Wonders
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