Can AI Come Up With Original Ideas? Rational Animations Explains AI Brilliantly

This video by Rational Animations begins with Babbage's Analytical Engine, which may leave you wondering why. Well, he did design history’s first programmable computer and even though it was back in the Victorian era, a video about AI must start somewhere. Of course, as the video is called Can AI Come Up With Original Ideas? we know that more is to come – and it gets to Aletheia and Google’s AlphaEvolve in due course. Babbage’s design was never built, so the steampunk era remains (more or less) a fantasy. His ideas were expanded upon by Ada Lovelace, who took things to another level by wondering whether machines – computers – could come up with their own ideas. Now, Ada thought that they couldn’t (not Babbage’s at any rate). After all, artificial intelligence lacks artifice, therefore intelligence (not to get too philosophical). Or does it? Coming up to our own day and age, it is the lack of clarity around what counts as a new idea that complicates things. As an English teacher, I…