There seem to be even more objections :-(

What is unknown is not the output, but the sensation it generates;

Checking with the original wording: "We never run a computer program unless we know an important fact about the output and we don't know the output."

It seems to specify that the output is what is unknown - not the sensations that output generates in any particular observer.

An automation program that does something is not a computer program at all;

That seems fairly trivially wrong to me. Plenty of scripts that people write to do things surely are computer programs - by most people's definitions. E.g. they are written in common computer programming languages, and execute on conventional computer hardware.

To "know" the output of a program, it must be physically at hand.

That seems like a rather biblical sense of the word "know" ;-)

Do we "know" the output of a program that prints the square root of 81 before we run it? I think most would say "yes" - even if they did not have the printed output in front of them.

Why so much spirited defense of Marcello Herreshoff's inaccurate statement? ;-)