Lady Lovelace's Objection By Alan Turing Summary

Alan Turing’s paper “Computing machinery and intelligence” in 1950 is one of the foundational documents from the early days of Cognitive Science. After its publication, critics proposing objections have never stopped. One of the most reasonable objections similar to so called “Lady Lovelace’s Objection” argues that a machine can never do anything really new, which is to say no machine has the capacity for original thought. In this way, it follows that no computer can have human intelligence. From my perspective, this objection is strong enough and can threaten Turing’s idea about intelligent computers. In addition, Turing’s response can only overcome a part of this objection and is still not robust enough.

I would like to begin the demonstration with summarizing what Turing argues. To answer the question “Can machines think?”, Turing comes up with the “Imitation game”. Three participates are involved in such a test, a human being, a computer and an interrogator. They are locked in separate rooms and
He claims that human’s original work may be also the result of well-known rules and principles. So people themselves may not create something new. This seems to be a good point at the first glance. However, it is not hard to figure out that his statement is quite vague. By common sense, people classify the things that can hardly think of as new things. If human’s creativity is indeed coming from common principles without any “wisdom”, everyone has the knowledge can come up with the same “original idea” which, in that case, is not original at all. Going over the history of invention, it is not hard to tell it is hard to do “original work” even with all the “well-known principles”. In fact, even Turing himself cannot give an example of how a list of well-known principles leads to something “original”. As a result, I think Turing’s response is still not robust