CONCEPT
The Lovelace Objection
Ada Lovelace's 1843 proposition that a computing machine “has no pretensions whatever to originate anything”—the oldest and sharpest argument in the history of artificial intelligence, named by Turing, still unresolved.
In Note G of her 1843 translation of Menabrea's account of
Babbage's Analytical Engine,
Ada Lovelace wrote the most consequential sentence in the prehistory of artificial intelligence: “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” The sentence draws a precise limit relative to human knowledge: the machine's reach is exactly coextensive with what its authors know how to specify; it can elaborate and execute, but it cannot anticipate.
Alan Turing read the objection in 1950, named it “Lady Lovelace's Objection,” and devoted a section of “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” to answering it—arguing that machines take us by surprise constantly, and that surprise is the right test for creativity. The rebuttal is clever but may change the subject: surprise is a fact about the observer's cognitive limits, not about the machine's origination, and Lovelace's deeper question—whether the new thing originates
in the machine or merely passes
through it—survives the Turing reply.