The meme that man's creations will eventually kill their maker is at least as old as the jewish Golem. They're classic tales warning of hubris. Whether it's automata or summoned demons doesn't make much of a difference I think.

What's interesting to me is that as technology progressed, the gap between fiction and fact keeps narrowing. Take for example Der Sandmann. While true artificial intelligence is still far away, I think we'll see animated sex dolls in the next ten or twenty years that rival the capabilities Olimpia displays. As we already have a small number of people that prefer dolls to humans, I wonder where the tipping point will be where, say, about as many people are gay as are robophile.