Lady Lovelace’s objection

Lady Lovelace’s objection is the claim that a computer can only do what it is told to do, and so cannot originate anything of its own. Alan Turing named and discussed the objection in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," attributing it to Ada Lovelace’s 1843 notes on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, in which she wrote that the engine "has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform."

Turing treated the objection as one of the most substantial arguments against the possibility of machine intelligence, and offered several replies. He argued that a machine can produce behavior that surprises even its own designer, since the designer cannot always trace out every consequence of a program’s rules in advance, and that surprising the observer is close to what is meant by originating something new. He also questioned whether the objection, if taken strictly, would deny originality to any process, including a human brain, whose outputs are in some sense determined by prior causes.

The objection remains a standard reference point in discussions of artificial intelligence and the Turing test Turing proposed in the same paper, and it resurfaces whenever a new generation of systems, most recently large language models, prompts the question of whether output that was not explicitly programmed counts as genuine originality or is merely a more elaborate recombination of what the system was trained on.

See also

• Laws and principles

References

• Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, 59(236), 433–460.
• Lovelace, Ada (1843). Notes on L. F. Menabrea’s "Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage".