Word: automatonism
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...front of you on your syllabus (and, literally, at the Coop), there is no need to think for yourself or challenge any of the professor’s assumptions. There is no impetus to consider the merits and drawbacks of a radically different point of view. Any automaton can amass pre-processed arguments on both sides of an issue and take one side or the other while never approaching the sublime thrill of creating an innovative idea...
President George W. Bush is a tax-cutting, neoconservative automaton. His State of the Union Address last night, filled with trickle-down rhetoric so blindingly simplistic that even the most delinquent of Ec. 10 students could knock it down, confirmed this. What is a lot more disturbing, though, is how the Democrats fall for his predictable political ploys...
...orgy of collective identity, voters cannot possibly succeed in discerning which of the candidates is a better human being and policymaker. With both the House and the Senate up for grabs, if voters cannot bear to check the box next to the name of a mindless automaton pretending to be a thinking candidate, they should look instead to the emblem of the one, residual difference of this campaign season’s politics...
Those ideas had their genesis in the early 1980s, when Wolfram began to explore a type of computer program called a cellular automaton. It typically consists of a row of black and white pixels on a computer screen--the "cells"--and a simple rule for transforming that row into a new one. A rule might go like this: If a pixel in a given position is flanked by pixels of its opposite color, reverse its color when drawing the corresponding pixel in the next row; if not, keep it the same. By automatically applying the rule on each...
...lose. The elder Bush's belated attempts at empathy were feeble and sometimes laughable. In a famous photo op in 1991 to send the message to consumers to spend, he bought some tube socks. On a visit to economically devastated New Hampshire, Bush Sr. sounded like an automaton when he uttered the words, "Message: I care." The son is different, say aides. "He's learned his father's lesson," says a senior White House aide. "The American people need to see you, and you need to show them that you care...