servomechanism

An Indian is the servomechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his clock.

Fictions are of course applied on top as the existential dread of being reduced to a servomechanism is too hard to bear.

Saying that a thermostat with a servomechanism is self-aware is just repeating the same broadening-beyond-usefulness with a different (though related) concept, in this case self-awareness.

Thermostat with a servomechanism is self-aware of its state.

There's a frictionless door that can be open and closed by an ultrafast servomechanism.

A simple passive mechanical system is replaced with a complex servomechanism featuring sensors and actuators which live a hard life under a car.

Go read some objective studies and you won’t be yet another servomechanism blindly spreading incorrect assumptions based on anecdotes from attention starved bloggers.

It’s for moral and epistemological reasons that I don’t want be reduced to a servomechanism of a global information system.

They were rigging a servomechanism to automatically aim the antenna and wanted to write the control software in Chicken Scheme (for whatever reason, never questioned because Chicken is fun).

If you use an encoder to adjust your position, then you are a servo; you probably won't use a stepper motor because the main advantage to a stepper motor is that you don't need position feedback to estimate the position accurately, but a stepper motor with feedback is just as much a servomechanism as any other motor with negative feedback.

And I have to assume when you say "how a servo worked" that you don't mean how to analyze a servomechanism or feedback control system (Bode plots & root locus, anyone?), but how to control an R/C servo.

Increasingly, man becomes an automaton (McLuhan uses the word, "servomechanism,") or a servant of his technology and prosthetics: That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions.