1950 - Alan Turing and Lady Lovelace’s Objection

In 1950, over 100 years after Ada’s death, Alan Turing published a paper, with the premise “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’” In his paper, he “devotes a significant portion … to countering what he calls Lady Lovelace’s objection and … quotes her verbatim” (Jardine).

In “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” Turing felt Ada’s statement that a machine could never think for itself but rather had to be told what to do, equated to “computers can never take us by surprise.” In his paper he stated, “Lovelace was misled into thinking the contrary because she could have had no idea of the enormous speed and storage capacity of modern computers, making them a match for that of the human brain, and thus, like the brain, capable of processing their stored information to arrive at sometimes “surprising” conclusions” (Jardine).

Alan Turing was “trying to convince people that it might be possible for computers to have humanlike abilities … ” (O’Neill), “by suggesting that we can ‘order’ the machine to be original, by programming it to produce answers that we cannot predict” (Hollings et al.). Turing “proposed that a computer can be said to possess artificial intelligence if it can mimic human responses under specific conditions … ” (Mind Matters). Ada stated the opposite in her 1843 Notes on the Analytical Engine.

From Ada’s notes: “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us to making available what we are already acquainted with.” To this day, no one has proven her wrong.

Did Turing set out to prove Ada wrong?

Whatever his reason, he must have “considered her important enough to engage with in print.” Imagine the “magnitude of Lovelace’s achievement.” “When Turing argued that machines would eventually be able to think, he had in front of him … Britain’s first ‘super-computer'” — Lovelace … had only the idea of a computer” (Jardine).