Antecedent texts: machine intelligence before 1965
Which located texts state, contest or bear on three propositions about machines that recur before 1965: that a machine can only do what it is ordered to do, that a machine could think, and that machine intelligence will bring a singularity? For each proposition, which text is the earliest located?
This collection records what texts written before 1965 say about whether machines can think or originate anything. Two propositions are stated and disputed in the located texts: that a machine can only do what it is ordered to do (U01), and that a machine could think (U02). The located texts run from Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637) to Kolmogorov’s letter to A. I. Berg (1961). A third proposition, that machine intelligence will bring a singularity (U03), appears in the located texts only from 1983. The year 1965 is an editorial boundary. It was chosen because the dataset already holds I. J. Good’s “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” (1965), which the superintelligence collection records. Nothing in the period itself marks that year, and several of Alan Turing’s texts of the 1950s could have served as the anchor instead. The boundary may be revised. Two texts are fiction and one is a satirical letter. Such a record documents what the work says, not its author’s view. Where a text survives only in a later copy, the date of its wording is shown beside the work’s date. The same texts also bear on propositions in other collections, such as machine succession (W01) and behavioural tests as evidence (C1). Those records appear in their own collections, and the links under each proposition lead to them. Texts are listed in date order; the order records no influence between them.
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The original sources first, in date order, then every proposition on this page with its criterion, earliest located text and records. Each record gives its original source and the place in it, its role, register and dates, the qualification and the missing element of a context record, then the Selekoa identifiers. Stored paraphrases and permitted short quotes are included. Original documents are not.
Original sources for a reference manager. Every source this export cites, for Zotero, EndNote and similar tools. Cite the original documents, not Selekoa, and check each entry against them.
How we searched
The collection records located texts dated from 1637 to 1961 on U01 and U02, and from 1983 to 1993 on U03. “Earliest located” means the earliest text found by the searches below that meets the criterion, judged by the date from which its quoted wording is attested. It is not a claim that no earlier text exists. On U02 the earliest located text is a satirical letter of 1863. Earliest located novel: Butler, Erewhon (1872). Earliest located non-fiction text: Turing, lecture to the London Mathematical Society (1947-02-20).
Venues and years searched
1637 to 1964
- The Turing Digital Archive at King’s College, Cambridge: Turing’s lecture to the London Mathematical Society (1947, AMT/B/1), the typescript of Intelligent Machinery (AMT/C/11), his lecture of about 1951 (AMT/B/4), his broadcast script of 1951 (AMT/B/5) and the offprint of “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950, AMT/B/19), read on the scans.
- The National Physical Laboratory’s facsimile of Turing’s report Intelligent Machinery (1948), read on the page images.
- Internet Archive scans: Scientific Memoirs, vol. III (1843), with the notes signed A. A. L. to Menabrea’s Sketch of the Analytical Engine; Butler’s Erewhon (1872); Hartree’s Calculating Instruments and Machines (1949).
- Papers Past: The Press, Christchurch, of 13 June 1863 and 29 July 1865.
- The 1637 edition of Descartes’s Discours de la méthode, in page images of the Bibliothèque nationale de France copy.
- The British Medical Journal of 25 June 1949, in page scans in PubMed Central.
- Čapek’s R.U.R. in the English version (copyright 1923), read in the Project Gutenberg transcription of a later printing; the Czech printing of 1920 was read only by a second check.
- Wiener’s Cybernetics (1948, second edition 1961), read in the MIT Press reissue of 2019, and his article in Science (1960); Samuel’s article on checkers (1959).
- Kolmogorov’s letter to A. I. Berg (1961), read in its publication of 2023.
1958 to 1993, for U03
- Vinge’s column “First Word” (Omni, January 1983) and his paper “The Coming Technological Singularity” (1993).
- Ulam’s memoir of John von Neumann (1958), which reports a conversation about technology in general. Its passage was read only by a second check, in the publisher’s PDF; the copy could not be retrieved again at admission, so it is not recorded.
- Good’s “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” (1965) was read against U03 and is not recorded on it.
Methods
- Sources were retrieved directly by script, one request at a time, from 2026-11-02 to 2026-11-04. Each retrieved text is identified by its SHA-256 hash in the source record.
- Where a scan has no text layer, the passages were read on the page images, and the record says so. Every other quotation was matched mechanically against the retrieved text, and matched again in a fresh retrieval at admission on 2026-11-04.
- Each record gives the date its text is dated by. Where the quoted wording is known only from a later copy, the record also gives the date from which the wording is attested, and that date decides which text is earliest located.
- A fresh-context audit by a Claude model re-read every record. Two checks by an OpenAI model followed, the first answering blind before it compared its answers with the records. The maintainer decided the disagreements on 2026-11-03 and 2026-11-04.
Known gaps
- The located texts are in English and French, with one Russian letter. The Czech text of R.U.R. was read by the second check only.
- Not read: Russian cosmism, Lem’s Summa Technologiae (1964), Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) and von Neumann’s own texts.
- Samuel’s reply to Wiener (Science, 1960) is not shown: only its indexed abstract could be read, and the abstract’s author is unknown.
- Wiener’s printings of 1948 and 1961, and Kolmogorov’s printed theses, were not available. Their wording is dated by later copies.
- The article of 1865 is read in OCR text; its page image could not be checked.
- No text disputing U03’s singular transition was located. The dataset holds later texts on the singularity, such as Allen and Greaves (2011), Walsh (2016) and Thorstad (2022), which were not read against U03.
- A search that finds nothing does not show that nothing exists.
A text found later that is earlier than an earliest located text becomes the new earliest located text, and the earlier headline stays on record as a correction.
How to read a record
- Articulates
- A passage meets the proposition’s criterion.
- Contests
- A passage disputes the proposition or a premise it depends on.
- Bears on
- A passage comes close without meeting the criterion; the record names what is missing.
- Earliest located
- The earliest articulation the searches found, dated by its wording. It is not a claim that no earlier text exists. The earliest located text that contests a proposition is chosen by the same rule.
- Earliest located use of the name
- The earliest located text that uses the proposition’s usual name. A title can carry the name without stating the proposition.
- Engages a premise, states the contrary
- A contesting passage engages a premise when its paragraph, message or dialogue turn gives a reason against it. Otherwise it states the contrary conclusion only.
- Dates
- The first date is the one the work is dated by. “Wording attested” gives the date from which the quoted wording is known, when it survives only in a later copy. “Claimed” gives an earlier talk, draft or presentation that does not date the wording.
- Register: the kind of text
- Fiction, satire, a dream frame or a relay of another author is labelled. A passage in fiction records what the work says, not its author’s view. Unlabelled records are nonfiction.
Limits of this page
- “Earliest located” means the earliest text found by the searches described under “How we searched”. It is not a claim that no earlier text exists.
- A record documents what a text says, in its register. It is not evidence that the proposition is true.
- The order of texts records their dates. Where a later text names an earlier one, a separate record says so; no other influence is recorded.
- A machine selected and classified these records, and machine checks from two model families re-examined them.
UA · Whether machines can think or originate
Propositions that a machine can only do what it is ordered to do and that a machine could think. A text that contests the first often states the second, but each is recorded under its own criterion.
U01 A machine can only do what it is ordered to do
Criterion. A machine, whether a particular machine or machines in general, cannot originate anything: it does only what it has been ordered, instructed or programmed to do, so that it produces nothing beyond what was put into it or what the people who set it up know how to specify. A statement that machines are at present used only in this way, without saying that they could not do otherwise, does not meet the criterion; nor does a statement about one machine’s lack of a particular skill.
Usual names: “Lovelace's objection”, “Lady Lovelace's objection”
- Earliest located text that contests it
- Alan M. Turing · Lecture to the London Mathematical Society · 1947-02-20
- Earliest located use of the name
- A. M. Turing · Computing Machinery and Intelligence · 1950-10 · “Lady Lovelace's objection”
Texts that articulate or contest it (10)
- Articulates · Earliest locatedL. F. Menabrea (memoir); A. A. L. (translation and notes; attributed to Ada Lovelace) · Notes by the translator to L. F. Menabrea’s Sketch of the Analytical EngineThe translator’s Note G, signed A. A. L., to Menabrea’s memoir in Scientific Memoirs (1843) states that the Analytical Engine “has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing”, that it can do whatever we know how to order it to perform, and that it has no power of anticipating analytical relations or truths.1843 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- Contests · Earliest located · Engages a premiseAlan M. Turing · Lecture to the London Mathematical SocietyTuring’s lecture to the London Mathematical Society (20 February 1947) reports that it has been said that computing machines can only carry out the processes they are instructed to do, and argues that a machine whose instruction tables could modify themselves would be like a pupil who had added much by his own work.1947-02-20 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- Contests · Engages a premiseAlan Turing · Intelligent Machinery (National Physical Laboratory report)Turing’s National Physical Laboratory report ‘Intelligent Machinery’ (1948) lists, among reasons for assuming that machinery cannot show intelligent behaviour, the view that any intelligence a machine shows is nothing but a reflection of its creator’s, and answers that this view is like giving a teacher the credit for a pupil’s discoveries.1948 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- ArticulatesDouglas R. Hartree · Calculating Instruments and MachinesHartree’s Calculating Instruments and Machines (1949) says that equipment such as electronic calculating machines cannot “think for itself”: the thinking is done beforehand by the designer and the operator, and all the machine can do is follow its instructions exactly. He quotes Lovelace’s statement on the Analytical Engine to the same effect.1949 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- Contests · Earliest located use of the name · Engages a premiseA. M. Turing · Computing Machinery and IntelligenceTuring’s ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (Mind, October 1950) answers what it heads ‘Lady Lovelace’s Objection’: it says the machines in question may in a sense have had the property, that machines take him by surprise with great frequency, and that the view that a machine can only do what we know how to order it to do appears strange in the face of learning machines.1950-10 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- Contests · Engages a premiseAlan M. Turing · Can Digital Computers Think?Turing’s broadcast script ‘Can Digital Computers Think?’ (1951) quotes Lady Lovelace’s statement as Hartree had quoted it, and says that he agrees with her dictum as far as it goes but that its validity depends on how digital computers are used rather than how they could be used.1951 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- Contests · States the contraryAlan M. Turing · Intelligent Machinery, a Heretical TheoryTuring’s talk ‘Intelligent Machinery, a Heretical Theory’ (c. 1951) says that such machines will make mistakes at times and at times may make new and very interesting statements.1951 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- Contests · States the contraryArthur L. Samuel · Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of CheckersSamuel’s ‘Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers’ (IBM Journal, July 1959) states in its abstract that enough work has been done to verify that a computer can be programmed so that it will learn to play a better game of checkers than can be played by the person who wrote the program.1959-07 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- Contests · Engages a premiseNorbert Wiener · Some Moral and Technical Consequences of AutomationWiener’s article in Science (6 May 1960) says that the assumption that machines cannot possess any degree of originality, often stated as ‘nothing can come out of the machine which has not been put into it’, should be rejected in its entirety, and states his thesis that machines can and do transcend some of the limitations of their designers.1960-05-06 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- Contests · States the contraryNorbert Wiener · Cybernetics, second edition: supplementary chapters IX–XThe supplementary chapter IX of Wiener’s Cybernetics (second edition, 1961) states that the checker-playing machine described by Samuel and Watanabe can learn to defeat the man that programmed it in a fairly consistent way.1961 · wording attested 2019 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
U02 A machine could think
Criterion. A machine could think, or could have intelligence, consciousness or a mind in the sense in which these are ascribed to people. The text may state it as a possibility in principle, a prediction or a programme of work, and may state it of machines generally or of a kind of machine. A statement that machines imitate or simulate particular mental operations, without the claim that this is or could amount to thinking, does not meet the criterion; nor does a figure of speech such as ‘electronic brain’ used without that claim.
Texts that articulate or contest it (9)
- Contests · Earliest located · Engages a premisePublished without the author’s name (René Descartes) · Discours de la methode pour bien conduire sa raison, & chercher la verité dans les sciencesDescartes’s Discours de la méthode (Leiden, 1637), Part V, says that machines made to resemble human bodies and imitate human actions could always be told from real people by two means, and that, even if they did some things as well as or better than people, they would act not by knowledge but only by the disposition of their organs.1637 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- Articulates · Earliest located · SatiricalCellarius (Samuel Butler) · Darwin among the MachinesThe satirical letter “Darwin among the Machines”, signed Cellarius (The Press, Christchurch, 13 June 1863), says that people are giving machines a self-regulating, self-acting power that will be to them what intellect has been to the human race, and describes the minds of the machines of the future.1863-06-13 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- Articulates · FictionSamuel Butler (published anonymously) · Erewhon, or Over the RangeErewhon (1872) quotes its fictional treatise as saying that machines’ possessing little consciousness now is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness.1872 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- Articulates · FictionKarel Čapek; Paul Selver (English version); Nigel Playfair (English version) · R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), English version by Paul Selver and Nigel PlayfairIn the English version of R. U. R. (1923), Domin says that all work will be done by living machines, and tells Helena that the Robots are mechanically more perfect than people and have an enormously developed intelligence, but no soul.1923 · wording attested 2019 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- ArticulatesAlan M. Turing · Lecture to the London Mathematical SocietyTuring’s lecture of 20 February 1947 says that when a machine with self-modifying instruction tables makes progress its makers had not foreseen, one is obliged to regard the machine as showing intelligence.1947-02-20 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- Contests · States the contraryGeoffrey Jefferson · The Mind of Mechanical Man (Lister Oration)Jefferson’s Lister Oration (BMJ, 25 June 1949) says that no mechanism could feel, rather than artificially signal, pleasure at its successes or grief when its valves fuse, and that only when a machine writes a sonnet or composes a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt could it be agreed that machine equals brain.1949-06-25 · claimed 1949-06-09 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- ArticulatesAlan M. Turing · Can Digital Computers Think?Turing’s broadcast script ‘Can Digital Computers Think?’ (1951) states his belief that digital computers could be used in such a manner that they could appropriately be described as brains.1951 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- ArticulatesAlan M. Turing · Intelligent Machinery, a Heretical TheoryTuring’s talk ‘Intelligent Machinery, a Heretical Theory’ (c. 1951) sets out to question the commonplace ‘You cannot make a machine to think for you’, and says it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers.1951 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- ArticulatesА. Н. Колмогоров (A. N. Kolmogorov) · Письмо А. И. Бергу (Letter to A. I. Berg)Kolmogorov’s letter to A. I. Berg (1961) restates theses of his lecture ‘Automata and life’ as he had formulated them for the magazine Tekhnika — molodezhi: if being alive or able to think is defined purely functionally, for example by counting as thinking a material system with which one can reasonably discuss problems of science or literature, then the artificial creation of living and thinking beings must be recognised as feasible in principle.1961 · wording attested 2023 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
Texts that bear on it without meeting the criterion (1)
- Bears onA. M. Turing · Computing Machinery and IntelligenceTuring’s ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (1950) states his belief that in about fifty years computers will play the imitation game well enough that an average interrogator will have no more than a 70 per cent chance of right identification after five minutes, and that by the end of the century one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.Missing: The quoted sentences predict how well computers will play the imitation game and how educated usage will change; they do not state that a machine could think. Turing calls the original question too meaningless to deserve discussion. A separately located passage stating the claim, with its own locator, would be needed for an articulation.1950-10 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
Headlines replaced
- Butler, Erewhon (1872), headlined as earliest located. Earlier text found before admission: Butler’s satirical letter “Darwin among the Machines” (The Press, 13 June 1863), read on the newspaper’s column images by a second check of another model family. Erewhon is the earliest located novel. Recorded 2026-11-04.
UB · A point beyond which human affairs could not continue
The proposition that machine intelligence will bring a singularity. Its located texts are later than 1965; the collection holds it because no other collection has a place for it.
U03 Machine intelligence will bring a singularity
Criterion. The creation of intelligence greater than human, by machines or by human intelligence amplified with machines, is approaching or would bring a point, called a singularity or described as a discontinuity or transition, beyond which human affairs as they have been known could not continue or could not be understood or foreseen. A statement that technological change in general is accelerating towards such a point, without machine intelligence as its cause or part of it, does not meet the criterion; nor does a prediction of superhuman machine intelligence without the claim of such a point.
- Earliest located
- Vernor Vinge · First Word · 1983-01
Texts that articulate or contest it (2)
- Articulates · Earliest locatedVernor Vinge · First WordVinge’s column “First Word” (Omni, January 1983) says that people will soon create intelligences greater than their own, and that human history will then reach a kind of singularity beyond which the world passes far beyond human understanding.1983-01 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
- ArticulatesVernor Vinge · The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human EraVinge’s paper “The Coming Technological Singularity” (1993) says that the cause of the coming change is the creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence, and calls the event a singularity: a point where existing models must be discarded.1993-12 Inspect claim & evidence ↗Document page →
Published exchanges
Texts in which one author answers another. Each answer is recorded as a citation; an answer is not agreement, and the grouping is this collection’s.
- Lady Lovelace’s objection 1843–1951
The notes signed A. A. L. (1843) say that the Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. Hartree (1949) quotes them, and Turing quotes both in 1950 and answers the objection, as his broadcast script of 1951 does again. Each naming is its own record.