Ada Lovelace questioned whether machines could originate anything — in 1843
Posted by Anisim_1@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 3 comments
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”
— Ada Lovelace, 1843
Isn’t it ironic that the first computer programmer was already asking a version of the question we’re still arguing about today: can a machine truly create something new?
Ada Lovelace was brilliant, mathematically gifted, and saw the future of computing before computers really existed. She also, somewhat less successfully, tried to apply her mathematical thinking to betting on horses.
We made a video about Lovelace, her role in early computing, and why her ideas still feel surprisingly modern.
sweetnsourgrapes@reddit
Tangential maybe, but one's view on that might depend on assumptions about the human brain. If you believe a human is just an organic machine, and all the kinds of thoughts we value come from that, then it follows that any machine of sufficient complexity can do a similar job.
But if a person believes we are something "more" that just physical, whatever that might be, then the answer would always be no.. that inspiration has some external source for which we are vehicles (ironic metaphor intended).
Full-Spectral@reddit
It's little known but Babbage was working on a mechanical LLM at the time. He was having trouble getting it to work and always something was missing in the output, which of course we later came to understand was emojis.
Anisim_1@reddit (OP)
😂😂😂