The dream is much older than that, I suspect. There are references to self-weaving looms, self-playing musical organs, self-grinding mills in classical literature, often in descriptions of some sort of idealized utopia or afterlife. But I think some in antiquity would have considered them quite possible in this life, if only their construction and the underlying principles were understood. That work, in the physics sense, can captured and redirected by machinery is an ancient realization. Around 20 AD a Greek poet (Antipater of Thessalonica) made a passing reference to how machines had already freed people from the toil of grinding grain by harnessing nature's power:
> Hold back your hand from the mill, you grinding girls; even if the cockcrow heralds the dawn, sleep on. For Demeter has imposed the labours of your hands on the nymphs, who leaping down upon the topmost part of the wheel, rotate its axle; with encircling cogs, it turns the hollow weight of the Nisyrian millstones. If we learn to feast toil-free on the fruits of the earth, we taste again the golden age.