this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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"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".
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.