As his production company is called Bad Robot, I suppose it was only a matter of time before J.J. Abrams made a movie involving an automaton. Abrams is set to produce a rather bizarre-sounding project called Boilerplate, which is like Forrest Gump but with a robot. A Good Robot.

Via Heat Vision Blog, "Boilerplate" purports to tell the story of the world’s first robot, who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt and Lawrence of Arabia, journeyed to the South Pole and was involved in the silent movie business before disappearing on the battlefields of World War I.