Ada Lovelace's Argumentative Analysis

A major counterargument to the possibility of artificial intelligence is Ada Lovelace’s Argument of Various Disabilities. This states that computers can only perform the functions the programmer knows how to make it perform rather than questioning why they execute this action. One of the various disabilities is free will. This is important because for a computer to exhibit any kind of artificial intelligence, it must be able to exhibit every form of intelligence humans can. In this essay, I will argue that a computer’s lack of free will is not evidence of their inability to be intelligent since free will is not a quality that humans possess. This is because thoughts occur due to brain states, which are physical and are necessitated by causal …show more content…
This stance combines Determinism with free will, asserting that they are not mutually exclusive. Everyday, people encounter a myriad of choices, however they subconsciously choose to follow one path. People act according to their motives, and because they have the freedom to do so, they have free will regardless of the fact that these motives are programmed and causal. This is a completely different position on free will from the one I took at the beginning of this essay, and relies on physical constraints determining freedom rather than looking at what caused a person to perform an action. In other words, compatibilists view freedom as constrained by the second stage in a thought, the execution stage. This definition becomes more plausible when looking at how criminals are persecuted in courts of law. While it may be true that physical, causal events in their brain led the criminal to commit the crime, society still holds them morally responsible for their actions because they had the freedom to do something bad and did it. They exercised their free will despite not choosing to have the motive to perform the