George Méliès tried to warn us about an AI robot uprising 130 years ago, and I’m not surprised

A showman powers up a robot, which then grows out of control and attacks him. It’s a familiar theme, perhaps the plot of any number of 20th and 21st-century robot tales, but this one is from 1897.

We’ve been obsessed with humanoid robots for a long time, more than a century in fact. While most credit Czech writer Karel Čapek with coining the term “robot” in 1920, we now have evidence of a robot run amok from one of film’s first artists: George Méliès.

Lasting a mere 45 seconds, the silent film appears to depict an inventor who powers up (or hand cranks to generate some kind of energy) and stick-weilding clown automaton (a.k.a. robot) that starts the size of a child but with each crank grows until it’s an adult-size clown robot.

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The robot then quickly turns on its owner, whacking him in the head. Naturally, the showman panics, grabs a huge mallet, and whacks the robot back through its growth spurts until it’s a child, then what appears to be a small statue, which the showman smashes (or it vanishes; it’s hard to tell).