automaton

Charles Babbage was partial to Merlin’s Mechanical Museum, with its many automata.

At first, I saw the game like a machine, not unlike the Mechanical Turk, that impressive 18th-century hoax of a chess-playing automaton, its parts moving and interacting according to complex yet intuitive principles.

These included instructions for how to make elaborate dioramas with moving figures, musical automata, mechanical servants, and automata powered by steam, water, air, and mechanics.

I would much rather share the world with them than with thoughtless automatons.

For much of the 20th century, nonhuman creatures were seen as essentially biological automatons that responded in certain instinctual ways to external stimulus, but lacked the rich inner lives and selfhood that humans possess.

“It was no brute whom Smiley was pursuing with such mastery, no unqualified fanatic after all, no automaton,” le Carré writes.

Despite how he might come across in the history books, he wasn't some bland, rule-following "high-integrity" automaton.

But it did suggest that Rubio was more than a Reaganite automaton.

On one hand she's a pitch-perfect automaton; indeed, her longest speaking part is half a sentence in Russian.

Crawley came walking like an automaton from whose joints the oil had suddenly dried.

The scrivener did look up accordingly, with the action of an automaton which suddenly obeys the impulse of a pressed spring.

Like an automaton the man stepped forward, and after him paced the white horse.

I have again the old feeling of having surrendered my imagination and of moving like an automaton.

The same gentleman exhibited an automaton in England, of the figure of a man, as large as life.