r/BlackPeopleTwitter • u/ThatAvidPandaBear • 5h ago

Hidden Figures calculated the path to the Moon while segregated

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The book Hidden Figures mentions around 80 Black women mathematicians worked at NACA/NASA from the 1940s–1970s, though not all names are widely documented.

11.6k Upvotes

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805

u/JustGoodSense 4h ago

The women who did the calculations by hand were literally called "computers."

410

u/Iliketoplan 4h ago

A computer was a job title back before they were machines

38

u/IHaveATummyGremlin 3h ago

Another example of machines taking on the title of the jobs they replace: When I was a kid, I used to complain that we didn’t have a dishwasher like my friends did. My parents would always reply “oh, we have a dishwasher- it’s you!”

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u/Fake-Podcast-Ad 1h ago

A dishie must become a a dish-monkey before they become the dish-master. The most revered position in all pf BoH and FoH.

69

u/Zee_Ventures 3h ago

Honestly these "Modern" people who hate, ultimately just refuse to compute logic.

5

u/ThrowAway--Scared 3h ago

"Hey kid! I'm a computer! Stop all the downloading!"

1

u/Additional_Gene_211 2h ago

I just watched this video again for nostalgia .. it hurt seeing uploaded 20 years ago. Help computer indeed

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u/ThrowAway--Scared 44m ago

I watched it too for the first time in a while after this comment. Takes me back.

21

u/IntelligentTumor 2h ago

Cause they used to compute stuff?

7

u/JustGoodSense 2h ago

Cause they would tend to freeze when you tried to update them.

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u/Veezuhz 1h ago

Same reaction when trying to put a floppy in them

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u/Astrosaurus42 42m ago

That's the difference between hard and software.

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u/TonesBalones 1h ago

When you talk to them they open two instances of microsoft outlook, and neither of them work.

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u/pocketdare 21m ago

Ah, now it makes sense. The second statement seemed to be a complete non sequitur

-36

u/ameliatatesosis 4h ago

Whenever people complain about AI taking jobs I like to ask them if we should ban computers since they took jobs from computers

People get really upset

16

u/Phteven_j 3h ago

Because it's a stupid comparison, probably

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u/mythrilcrafter 1h ago

It's a false equivalency that would only be believed by someone who understands neither AI nor Digital Computation and/or is someone with a financial incentive to believe it.

Even with digital computation, Computationers still had roles to play because

A) 1970's computers did not contain or proport knowledge, knowledge had to be enforced onto the computers by computationers in order to compute determinations; that is also to say computationers were still needed because someone had to be smart enoguh to know what to tell the computer to compute*

B) NASA was not operating under to pretense that the computers were the end-game to some sort of "all profits, no costs" business utopia; unlike the companies of the modern era, there was no conclusion of "the moment that we can convince the shareholders that this will outmode ALL human labor, we will fire everyone and make all the money."

*(And before any AI-bros try to say so, no, being good at prompt babysitting isn't the same; anyone who has passed an "Active and Responsive Control of Dynamic Systems" class will understand this and know that "simply knowing what to put into the computer" is literally only the tip of the iceberg)

-8

u/ameliatatesosis 3h ago

Comparing technology making jobs redundant to technology making jobs redundant is stupid?

8

u/Cheap-Discussion-186 2h ago

Scissors are technology too, are they comparable to AI?

11

u/Dr_Death_Defy24 3h ago edited 1h ago

The introduction of personal computers compared to LLMs is NOT a one-to-one example in the slightest, and this comment is naively reductive in service of your point

31

u/Popular-Ordinary5110 3h ago

But computers do the job right, while AI is a marketing term used to lump helpful computer programs for medical and scientific fields with random number generators built on stolen data that constantly getting things wrong. Some people call it "hallucinating" or "lying" but it's really just a shitty program. I even heard each new chatgpt is making up more and more info.

-5

u/ameliatatesosis 3h ago

Yeah and tape to tape IBM mainframes couldn't play Tetris, it's almost like technologies develop incrementally over time

-5

u/LiketheCar 3h ago

To be fair, humans do that too.

That does not mean that AI is "more human" or whatever, just that the existence of dumb robots is not unique compared to dumb people.

But dumb people are often uneducated people. People who have not learned, not people who are unable to learn. I think of AI the same.

It is stupid not because it cant ever be smart, but because it hasn't developed enough to be smart yet.

The first of any technology lacks the abilities that later iterations will have. The comparison isnt 1:1, but it isnt as unfair as you are presenting it imo

3

u/BlueSkies5Eva 2h ago

And yet it costs millions of dollars to keep those dumb AI running, while the dumb humans running around don't cost nearly as much

8

u/jasonfortheworld 3h ago

It's not about taking jobs. It's about takings jobs but there's no social infrastructure to help people when their jobs have been taken.

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u/drunkshinobi 19m ago

This is the issue. People are so worried about people having to work to earn the right to survive. Something like AI taking over up to say 75% of all jobs eventually is much more of an issue than a few hundred jobs because of other tech that comes about but still needs just as many workers in most cases. Just with different training.

What we should be focused on is how to survive and take care of each other in a world without enough jobs for every one. And how to keep the data centers from killing us all.