Can Machines Think?

1843

Charles Babbage (1791–1871), Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852)

In 1747 the French physician and provocateur Julien Offray de La Mettrie published his book L’homme machine (“Man, a Machine”) and created an outrage. But almost a century later, the British polymath Charles Babbage designed a machine that could “think.” He called his machine the Analytical Engine. In doing so, Babbage prefigured work on cognition, computers, and artificial intelligence in the mid-twentieth century.

Babbage designed the device in the hope that machines could improve on human calculation. His first machine, the Difference Engine, was intended to calculate and print arithmetical tables automatically by using the principle of finite differences.

Later Babbage designed a complex machine that could perform general computation, and it is this that makes him a pioneer of modern computing. The Analytical Engine was designed to use punched cards to control a mechanical calculator that could, in turn, use the input of prior computations. Babbage continued to tinker with his design until his death.

Ada Lovelace (as she is commonly known) was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron. A skilled mathematician, she struck up a friendship with Babbage. Her most important contribution to modern computing was her notes on a lecture given by an Italian engineer, Luigi Menabrea, concerning the Analytical Engine. In her notes, published in 1843, she explored the potential of the machine to operate not just on numbers but on any material that could be represented in an abstract form, such as musical pitch. She then surmised that it might be possible for the machine to compose, for example, elaborate pieces of music. She cautioned, however, against the possibility that machines were capable of true creativity; she claimed they can only accomplish what they are programmed to do. This became known as the “Lovelace objection.”

Certainly, the Analytical Engine had some of the characteristics of the modern computer, such as programmability, a memory store, and a central processor. While never completed, Babbage’s machine foreshadowed the modern computer and served as an inspiration for later scientists. Aspects of Babbage’s work also anticipated modern cognitve science and artificial intelligence studies.

SEE ALSO Turing Machine (1937), Cybernetics (1943), Logic Theorist (1956)

A painted portrait of Ada, Countess of Lovelace, by Margaret Sarah Carpenter. Oil on canvas, 1836.