Lady Lovelace's Objection

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

-- Ada Lovelace, 1842

This law received its title from Alan Turing, in his famous 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Few people consider Lady Lovelace’s Objection a proper law of software development, although it is one of the most fundamental statements of the capabilities of software by the person who invented the practice. There is a great deal of debate about this idea today, as artificial intelligence appears to do more and more astounding things every year. However, given the lack of precise definitions for many of the terms of debate, no suitable conclusion is available.