Original artwork, not a still
Notes on the Analytical Engine · 1843
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything.
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
A founding statement of the idea that a computer only does what it is told. Lovelace drew a line between executing instructions and having original ideas, and later AI debates keep reopening it, since people still ask whether a machine can ever surprise its makers. It is quoted in nearly every argument about machine creativity, usually with her italics trimmed.
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In context
Spoilers for Notes on the Analytical EngineShow the scene
Lovelace wrote this in Note G, among the notes she appended to her 1843 English translation of Luigi Menabrea's account of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, printed in Richard Taylor's Scientific Memoirs. Having shown the engine at work on a calculation, she cooled the grander claims: it can do whatever we know how to order it to perform, she wrote, but has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province, she said, is to help us make available what we already know.
Sources (1)
- Wikiquote: Ada Lovelacesection 'On computer creativity'Reference checked
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