Today’s robots owe a lot to a 1990s MIT effort with a different vision of machine intelligence

Long before killer cyborgs stalked Sarah Connor or sentinels patrolled dystopian skies, the low-budget 1962 film The Creation of the Humanoids (which can be found on YouTube) asked a worrying question which seems even more pertinent today: what if machines didn’t just serve humanity, but replaced it?

Set in a post-nuclear world, the film imagines a society dependent on robots. A scientist perfects a “thalamic transplant,” transferring human memories into synthetic bodies connected to a “huge central computer.”

Yet centralized knowledge alone is not enough. Only when machines gain lived sensory experience do they begin to transcend their programming — and threaten humanity.

The premise of the low-budget production covered ...