Page 198 - Concise Encyclopedia of Robotics

Luddite
not be solved. The problems did not involve esoteric principles, but the
trillions upon trillions of steps would take a single person, even equipped
with a powerful calculator (or an abacus),more than a lifetime to grind out.
Sometimes errors are made in the programming, and a computer
ends up going through a loop without ever reaching a condition in which
it can exit the loop. This is called an infinite loop or endless loop. It always
results in a failure of the program to come to a satisfactory conclusion. In
the extreme, it can cause the computer to crash.
In any system involving feedback, the path of the feedback signal is
called the loop. The term loop can also refer to a graphical rendition of the
operation of a system that employs feedback.
See also FEEDBACK and SERVOMECHANISM.
LUDDITE
Whenever there is a major new technological innovation, some people
fear that they will lose their jobs. Job loss can occur for at least two reasons.
First, greater efficiency reduces the number of people needed for a corpo-
ration or agency to function. Second, human workers have occasionally
been replaced by machines because they do not get sick, do not take coffee
breaks,and do not demand vacation time.People who have an exaggerated
fear of technology for any reason are called technophobes.
During the Industrial Revolution in England, technophobes went on
rampages and destroyed new equipment that they feared would take their
jobs from them. Their leader was a man named Ned Ludd, and so these
people became known as Luddites.
Robotization has not caused a latter-day Luddite-type reaction in the
United States, Japan, or Europe. The reasons for this are not completely
known. Some roboticists suggest that the absence of a major Luddite
movement today is due to the fact that the standard of living is higher now
than it was in Ned Ludd’s time. Society is, by all indications, dependent
on computers, robots, and other high-tech devices, and everyone—even
the technophobes—know that destroying these machines would do more
harm than good.

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