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Title: The 19th Century Silent Film That First Captured a Robot Attack

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/03/03/...

The Library of Congress has restored Gugusse et l'Automate, an 1897 short by
Georges Melies that likely features the first robot ever shown on film. Long
thought lost, the reel was discovered in a box of decaying nitrate films
donated from a Michigan family collection. NPR reports: The film, which can
be viewed on the Library of Congress' website, depicts a child-sized robot
clown who grows to the size of an adult and then attacks a human clown with a
stick. The human then decimates the machine with a hammer. In an Instagram
post, Library of Congress moving image curator Jason Evans Groth said the
film represents, "probably the first instance of a robot ever captured in a
moving image." (The word "robot" didn't appear until 1921, when Czech
dramatist Karel Capek coined it in his science fiction play R.U.R..) "Today,
many of us are worried about AI and robots," said archivist and filmmaker
Rick Prelinger, in an email to NPR. "Well, people were thinking about robots
in 1897. Very little is new."

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