> On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

I guess many of us quality for british parliament.

I cannot shake the feeling that with that quote the people were trying to point out a problem with something he’d said.

“With this machine, all the results will be correct, no more errors in log tables”

“And what if people put the wrong figures in?” (Hint - we’d still have the wrong results)

Babbage walks away thinking them an idiot, they walk away thinking Babbage hasn’t considered anything outside of the machine itself.

Maybe the joke was on Babbage. Possible that they were asking about trust and over-reliance, which turned out to be the real problem.

Funnily enough, with the most recent models (having reduced sycophancy), putting in the wrong assumptions often still leads to the right output.