The quip by Babbage is clever, but Babbage was too early and didn't know what we know. He could not anticipate the digital abstraction, error-correcting codes,

The quip by Babbage is clever, but Babbage was too early and didn't know what we know. He could not anticipate the digital abstraction, error-correcting codes, compressed sensing, and machine learning. Modern computing systems have components that produce output that's "better" than their input, at every level. Because we have information theory now, we know it is possible for a machine to produce good output even when some of its input is bad. Google, incidentally, has aimed to do that for its entire existence. From the first time the Google search engine was deployed, its job was to take in the messy Web, full of misdirection and spam, and show you the useful pages you were looking for. And we can keep hoping for Google to keep doing this as the threats to information become more insidious.