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Pray tell Mr Babbage, what if you were to only put into the machine the right questions, would the wrong answers come out?
-Some aristocratic idiot 1869, april 20.
EDIT : I should really provide the source just for fun.
On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), ch. 5 "Difference Engine No. 1"
It gives me such a Terry Pratchett Discworld vibe. Where death is talking to the wizards at the unseen University about Hex, their computer analogous contraption.
I don't recall the books well enough to be sure, but knowing Pratchett, there is almost certainly a direct reference to that quote in there.
If Hex believes what it's told, and it's told that it's had lots of Dried Frog Pills, then Hex will believe that it's had lots of Dried Frog Pills. This appears to be a reference to an early computer virus that caused the computer to display a message "Computer wants a Cookie", and freeze until "COOKIE" or "HAVECOOKIE" was typed in. As described by guerrilla ontologist Robert Anton Wilson, this was frequently done to large mainframes in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s: the response of the computer to the prompt "COOKIE" was usually "Yummy, that was good" followed by a return to normal programming.
+++Out Of Cheese Error ???????+++
To be fair, the idea of a computer basically only existed in the minds of Babbage and a few of his peers at the time.
To be unfair, "If I ask you directions to the church, but I actually wanted to get directions to the library, would you give me the right directions" doesn't need a computer, and the guy is just as stupid.
Yeah honestly Babbage sounds like kind of a dick in this one response. It's 160 years later but it is actually possible now, in some specific circumstances, to ask a computer the wrong question and still get the right answer. "AI" is probably what popped into your head but search engine spell correction absolutely counts, and many examples predate that one by a large margin. Around the time compilers were first outputting error messages, compiler writers were also saying "ok the author typed This but obviously they meant That, what if we just compile the program they meant and output a warning?"
These people just weren't sure what the technology was capable of, and were examining the possible parameters.
EDIT: Went from +6-0 to +6-5, so I'm being brigaded by a niche faction I didn't even know existed: Babbage stans. These mfs LOVE difference engines
Lol, a useful political tool that would be. Put in garbage numbers and get the right answer. IOW he could try to sell people on bad numbers and say “See?! The miraculous computer says it works out!”
Proof politicians have been idiots basically forever.
Isn’t the whole point of modern UX to help users get the correct answer with incorrect inputs? Spellcheckers, etc.
look at the dates
Yes I’m well aware of the quote by the buddy of the mother of the namesake of one of the most expensive violins ever sold. But my point is this is the type of short sighted statement made by engineers and the world has moved to be more user centric.
the world has moved to be more user centric.
good, go back to a platform filled with user centric people like truth social or facebook