Lovelace objection
In plain wordsThe argument, traced to Ada Lovelace in 1843, that computers cannot be truly creative because they can only do what they have been programmed to do.
The objection to machine intelligence that a computer cannot originate anything — cannot create, surprise its makers or learn anything genuinely new — because it can only do what its programmers have instructed. Alan Turing named it after Ada LovelaceAda Lovelace, prop. n.: A 19th-century English mathematician who published the first program written for a planned mechanical computer, and who argued that such a machine could only do what it was told. and replied that machines often surprise their makers and that a learning machine's behavior is not fixed in advance by its programmer. The objection survives in debates over whether generative modelsgenerative AI, n.: AI that produces something new on request, such as an essay, a picture, a song or a piece of code, having absorbed from enormous numbers of existing examples what such things typically look like. are creative or merely recombine their training datatraining data, n.: The examples an AI system learns from. Whatever patterns, skills, gaps and biases are in the training data tend to show up in the finished system., and it inspired the Lovelace test proposed by Selmer Bringsjord, Paul Bello and David Ferrucci (2001), which a system passes only if it produces an artifact that its designers cannot explain from their knowledge of the system.
Origin
From Ada Lovelace's Note G (1843) to her translation of Luigi Menabrea's paper on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, which says the Engine 'has no pretensions whatever to originate anything'. Alan Turing named and answered 'Lady Lovelace's Objection' in Computing Machinery and IntelligenceComputing Machinery and Intelligence, prop. n.: Alan Turing's 1950 essay asking whether machines can think. It proposed a conversation test in place of that question, answered objections to thinking machines and suggested that machines might learn like children. (1950).
Related
- Ada LovelaceAda Lovelace, prop. n.: A 19th-century English mathematician who published the first program written for a planned mechanical computer, and who argued that such a machine could only do what it was told.
- Computing Machinery and IntelligenceComputing Machinery and Intelligence, prop. n.: Alan Turing's 1950 essay asking whether machines can think. It proposed a conversation test in place of that question, answered objections to thinking machines and suggested that machines might learn like children.
- Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out.
- Lucas–Penrose argumentLucas–Penrose argument, n.: An argument that human minds cannot be computers because, using a famous result in logic, people can see that certain statements are true that no fixed computer program could prove.
- Polanyi's paradoxPolanyi's paradox, n.: The observation that we know how to do many things — recognize a face, ride a bike — that we cannot explain in words. That made such skills hard to program until machines learned them from examples.
Sources
- Lovelace, A. A. (1843). Notes by the Translator, appended to L. F. Menabrea, Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage. Scientific Memoirs 3, 666–731.
- Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind 59(236), 433–460.
- Bringsjord, S., Bello, P. & Ferrucci, D. (2001). Creativity, the Turing Test, and the (Better) Lovelace Test. Minds and Machines 11(1), 3–27.
Mentioned in
Alan TuringAlan Turing, prop. n.: A British mathematician who worked out what computers can do in principle, helped break German codes in the Second World War, and proposed the best-known test of machine intelligence., Ada LovelaceAda Lovelace, prop. n.: A 19th-century English mathematician who published the first program written for a planned mechanical computer, and who argued that such a machine could only do what it was told., Computing Machinery and IntelligenceComputing Machinery and Intelligence, prop. n.: Alan Turing's 1950 essay asking whether machines can think. It proposed a conversation test in place of that question, answered objections to thinking machines and suggested that machines might learn like children., Harold CohenHarold Cohen, prop. n.: A British-born painter who wrote AARON, a program that made its own drawings and paintings from the early 1970s, making him a pioneer of art produced by AI., Lucas–Penrose argumentLucas–Penrose argument, n.: An argument that human minds cannot be computers because, using a famous result in logic, people can see that certain statements are true that no fixed computer program could prove.