Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”
- Date
- 1843
- English wording
- Ada King, Countess of Lovelace — Translator and note author · from French for Menabrea’s memoir; Note G itself authored in English
Meaning of “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to…”
Lovelace cautions readers not to attribute independent origination to Babbage’s proposed machine, distinguishing programmed operations from the human knowledge used to specify them.
Where does it come from?
Ada Lovelace, Note G to her 1843 translation of Luigi Menabrea’s “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.” The claim concerns the proposed Analytical Engine in its historical design context and is not generalized into a factual limit on modern AI systems.