“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform” - An objection by Lady Lovelace

Lady Lovelace in her memoirs (1942) states that how so ever a learning machine evolves with technological advancement; its execution would always be restricted to its programming (set of instructions), fed to it by humans. A machine can never produce original thoughts & ideas. Turning defying the argument said that the kind of machines Lady Lovelace saw lacked such properties. She couldn't witness sufficient evidence to prove that when speed and storage capacity of the machine will increase, machine might “surprise” you. Further he adds that even humans are trained specie. The thoughts they generate are either results of the genetic information they inherit at birth or due to their nurturing by various social institutions. I beg to differ with Turing’s arguments.

Turing hoped that in the new millennium, with increased speed and storage capacity a machine might be able to imitate human mind. But as we can see, Machines till now are only capable of deduction and induction mechanism. They cannot produce original ideas. E.g. Let us take the invention of Submarine. A human mind observed the motion of a fish in water, how its stream lined body facilitated its movement. It thus made a mental representation and imagined a watercraft designed on similar lines to travel water bodies. I doubt that a machine fed with similar information could generate the idea of a submarine. Moreover, can a machine think of using paper towels to wipe liquids by observing the capillary action in a tree? Can a machine perform ‘jugaad’, innovation? Answer till now is a NO.

Humans, undoubtedly are nurtured under various institutions, be it family, school etc. But there they are educated and not trained. They are imparted knowledge, yet have the power to execute their choice. It is not the case with machines. Their outputs are restricted to the set of instructions given to them by humans. Many AI theorists propose that if machine’s table is included with some kind of probabilistic calculations, it might produce original, unexpected results. Arguably the results would be unexpected and ‘by chance’, not by ideas and innovation which only human mind is capable of. Machines are thus not empowered but bound by programming which leaves them inefficient to generate new ideas.