Women had an outsized role in producing the software that would later evolve into AI, we learn. Toon suggests that this is in a strange sense the by-product of misogyny: in the early days of computing firms, men worked on the hardware, what they considered the serious stuff, while women were left to test and fine-tune the software, perceived as largely cosmetic — a reason that it was a woman, Grace Hopper, who first referred to a computer glitch as a “bug” after finding a dead moth inside the machine.
