Word: automatons
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...more, was an irascible 19th century English mathematician named Charles Babbage. Incensed by the inaccuracies he found in the mathematical tables of his time, the ingenious Babbage (father of the speedometer, the cowcatcher for locomotives and the first reliable life-expectancy tables) turned his fertile brain to creating an automaton that could rapidly and accurately calculate long lists of functions like logarithms. The result was an intricate system of gears and cogs called the Difference Engine...
...display all the demons and dreams that had driven him to this point. He even wore glasses in public for the first time, symbolically forswearing the vanity and image making of his career. It was horrifying and heartbreaking; and it was unavoidable. Nixon could not leave as the automaton that had been his public personality. I was at the same time moved to tears and outraged at being put through the wringer again; even in his last public act Nixon projected his ambivalence onto those around...
...things are more frustrating than a vending machine that sits in smug silence after gobbling a harried human's coins. Michael DeNardo of Cranston, R.I., is not one to put up with such machinations. When an automaton at the foundry where he worked failed to produce the requested coffee, and the coin-return lever offered no peaceful settlement, DeNardo belted the contraption...
...health inspector who catches on to the massive eggplants which are infesting California, and it's a relief when he finally gets and eggplant of his own and becomes one of them. It's obvious that Leonard Nimoy is one of them from the start, although he plays the automaton well enough. Jeff Goldblum turns in the only creative performance as a counter-culture angry young man who gets pissed off at Nimoy's psychiatric platitudes. Brooke Adams is nearly as uninteresting nude as she is during the rest of the movie. Whatever fear there is in this comes from...
...this point, the cultist's life is no longer his own. Personalities change from the lively and complex patterns of normality to those of an automaton reciting what he has been taught. The usual problems of living have been replaced by a nearly childish existence in which the cult and its leaders supply all rules and all answers. Erich Fromm, in his classic treatise on the rise of Nazism, called this process the "escape from freedom...