19th century silent film that first captured a robot attack

damnitbuilds

"[...] attacks a human clown with a stick." Why does NPR call Gugusse "a human clown" ? He is not wearing clown clothes. Gugusse looks more to me like the "mad inventor" of the robot, with a comedic bald head.

alephnerd

Oh boy, this takes me down memory lane. George Meliese's silent films and automatons were at the core of the beautifully illustrated and written YA novel from the mid-2000s named The Invention of Hugo Cabret [0]. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Hugo_Cabret

technothrasher

Well, to be pedantic, if it's 19th century it would have to be an automaton. The word robot wasn't coined until 1923.

ynac

I worked on a massive audio (78s) digitization project for the LOC and it was a blast to see the process of how these archivists and their outsourced crews (like us) worked to maintain the human arts. It was an odd feeling, I never had a client prior to that make me feel like our work was so important.

sonofhans

As usual, science fiction is a cautionary tale of the future. The more effort we put into robots the bigger and stronger they get. Sooner or later one of them will hurt a human, and then what do we do? You can’t hold a robot accountable. Well, where are we now? If that robot is a driverless car, it can pretty much run over humans with impunity. The owner and manufacturer of the car will suffer minor penalties (compared with the victim being dead or maimed). They will not be required to change their actions. The robots will continue to be allowed to harm people in public. Personally, I liked it better when we told ourselves stories about breaking the damn things as soon as they hurt someone.

observationist

The embedded video is unwatchable, for some reason, so here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojqcjzzjN2Q