“if you put in the wrong figures, will the correct ones be output”
To be fair, an 1840 “computer” might be able to tell there was something wrong with the figures and ask about it or even correct them herself.
Babbage was being a bit obtuse there; people weren’t familiar with computing machines yet. Computer was a job, and computers were expected to be fairly intelligent.
In fact I’d say that if anything this question shows that the questioner understood enough about the new machine to realise it was not the same as they understood a computer to be, and lacked many of their abilities, and was just looking for Babbage to confirm their suspicions.
turmacar@lemmy.world 1 week ago
“Computer” meaning a mechanical/electro-mechanical/electrical machine wasn’t used until around after WWII.
Babbag’s difference/analytical engines weren’t confusing because people called them a computer, they didn’t.
If you give any computer, human or machine, random numbers, it will not give you “correct answers”.
It’s possible Babbage lacked the social skills to detect sarcasm. We also have several high profile cases of people just trusting LLMs to file legal briefs and official government ‘studies’ because the LLM “said it was real”.
AppleTea@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
What they mean is that before Turing, “computer” was literally a person’s job description. You hand a professional a stack of calculations with some typos, part of the job is correcting those out. Newfangled machine comes along with the same name as the job, among the first thing people are gonna ask about is where it fall short.
Like, if I made a machine called “assistant”, it’d be natural for people to point out and ask about all the things a person can do that a machine just never could.
turmacar@lemmy.world 1 week ago
And what I mean is that prior to the mid 1900s the etymology didn’t exist to cause that confusion of terms. Neither Babbage’s machines nor prior adding engines were called computers or calculators. They were ‘machines’ or ‘engines’.
Babbage’s machines were novel in that they could do multiple types of operations, but ‘mechanical calculators’ and counting machines were ~200 years old. Other aids like abacus’ are obviously far older. They were not novel enough to cause confusion in anyone with even passing interest.
But there will always be people who just assume ‘magic’, and/or “it works like I want it to”.