He also distinguished between a rational, indeed mechanistic, natural world populated by living automatons and a sentient humanity.
Manukyan, L., Montandon, S. A., Fofonjka, A., Smirnov, S. & Milinkovitch, M. C. A living mesoscopic cellular automaton made of skin scales.
People with depersonalisation disorder describe a sense of complete detachment, a life lived as an automaton or on autopilot, characterised by an absence of emotions, either good or bad.
The politically acceptable term must be "Automaton-American".
I've been hearing reports from both flight attendant patients and flight attendant friends that many passengers are actually looking them straight in the eyes--for the first time in years--as if suddenly realizing that flight attendants are living, breathing human beings and not robotic automatons with no feelings.
Hopefully at the end of these next five years, we'll all be living with an army of Dyson home cleaning automatons, but at the very least we should see some advancements in terms of the ocular powers of our robotic friends.
Automatons - mechanical moving machines, usually in the form of living things - have fascinated humans for more than 2,000 years.
Hugo is an orphan secretly living in a Parisian train station, where he tends the clocks while trying to repair an automaton his father left him.
In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", the Mariner is a stricken, enthralled automaton; the doomed ship moves, bewitched, laden with its "ghastly crew", all of them living dead whose sounds and terrible, accursed looks deepen the Mariner's own spellbound state.
The men who made them, as Gaby Wood relates in "Living Dolls", were driven by the desire to play God.Jacques de Vaucanson, a French inventor, made his name in the 1730s by building a flute-playing automaton that (with the aid of a set of bellows) actually breathed.
It was an automaton, mechanically powered, that could sign his name just in the same way that he once signed his name using his own living hand.
