The closest match is Waldemar Kaempffert in The New York Times, October 23, 1927: “There will never be a Robot — a brainless, tireless, unemotional mechanism fashioned in the image of a man.” He added that no technologist “can make a collection of wheels, shafts, magnets and wires think.” G. K. Chesterton followed in April 1928, predicting there would never be a robot schoolmaster or governess.