Page 167 - Concise Encyclopedia of Robotics

Two engineers, George Devol and Joseph Engelberger, were largely re-
sponsible for getting industry executives interested in robotics. Business
people were hard to convince at first, but Devol and Engelberger translated
things into language the business people understood: profit. The roboti-
zation of industry has not been welcomed by everyone.Humans have been
displaced by robots in some industries, putting people out of work. How-
ever, the judicious use of robots in industry can improve worker safety
because the machines can perform tasks that would be dangerous or
deadly if done by people. Infinite Regress
INERTIAL GUIDANCE
See GYROSCOPE.
INFERENCE ENGINE
An inference engine is a circuit that gives instructions to a robot. It does
this by applying programmed rules to commands given by a human op-
erator. The inference engine is something like a computer that performs
IF/THEN/ELSE operations on a database of facts. The inference engine is
the functional part of an expert system. See EXPERT SYSTEM and IF/THEN/ELSE.
INFINITE REGRESS
An infinite regress is a hypothetical scenario in which a logical process or
data-transfer sequence extends backward in time indefinitely, thus having
no original source. The apparent existence of an infinite regress is some-
times taken as an indication that there is something wrong with a logical
argument.
Most engineers and scientists believe that computers cannot create
original information. It has been assumed that meaningful data must
come from outside a machine. An idea stored in a computer might come
from some other computer, but if that is the case, where did the previous
computer get it? From a human being, or from another computer? Based
on the assumption that a computer cannot generate original thought, it
follows that any idea must come either from an infinite succession of
computers, one before the other before the other, without any begin-
ning, or else from some human being. It is easier to intuit the latter
scenario. Besides, computers have only been around for a few decades,
so in the real world, an infinite regress of purely computer-based knowl-
edge is an impossibility.
Some scientists have no problem with the notion that a machine can
“invent” knowledge. They suggest that if a human can come up with an
original thought,then a sufficiently complex machine ought to be able to do
the same. Still other scientists have suggested that there is no such thing

