The whole point of Babbage's classic anecdote is that it is possible to create garbage in the step where we encode our expectations into the commands of the mac

The whole point of Babbage's classic anecdote is that it is possible to create garbage in the step where we encode our expectations into the commands of the machine. Even if the machine operates on its inputs properly, if we gave it inputs that did not properly encode our expectations, that's garbage, and the outcome will be garbage.