DD82 – Gods and Robots
It is hard not to be fascinated by robots, machines that are capable of carrying out complex actions automatically, not under the immediate control of a human. Although some robots are constructed to resemble people, most are task-performing machines designed with an emphasis on functionality, with little regard for aesthetics. Going back to ancient civilisations, there have been accounts of user-configurable automated devices resembling humans and other animals, many in the form of animatronics, primarily developed as a form of entertainment. In more recent times it was electronics that enabled the development of robots, right back to those three-wheeled tortoise robots created by William Grey in 1948.
Today robots are familiar, especially after visits to manufacturing facilities. They have replaced humans in performing repetitive and dangerous tasks, often those that people prefer not to do or avoid because of the limitations of size. It is also the case that recent years have seen increasing concerns over the use of robots and their role in society. Robots are blamed for rising unemployment, and their use in various forms military combat have raised ethical concerns. The possibilities of robot autonomy and potential repercussions have been addressed in fiction and may be a realistic concern in the future.
It is easy to assume that robots are a Twentieth Century development. However, many ancient mythologies referred to artificial people, such as the mechanical servants built by the Greek god Hephaestus (or Vulcan in Roman times), the clay golems of Jewish legends, let alone the story of Galatea, the mythical statue of Pygmalion. In the 4th century BC, a Greek mathematician, Archytas of Tarentum suggested a mechanical steam-operated bird he called ‘The Pigeon’, later followed by such writers as Philo of Byzantium, who made a washstand automaton, and Hero of Alexandria, an inventor who created several user-configurable automated devices, and went on to describe machines powered by air pressure, steam and water, including a ‘speaking’ automaton. Not just the Greeks. In ancient China, the 3rd-century text of the Lie Zi describes an account of humanoid automata developed by Yan Shi for the Chinese emperor King Mu of Zhou. To my surprise, I read the 5th century BC philosopher Mozi contributed to invention of artificial wooden birds (ma yuan) that could fly.
All this is the background to Adrienne Mayor’s 2018 book, Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology (published by Princeton University Press). She reveals that first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine wasn’t created in MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. As she points out “More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life—and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, ‘life through craft’.” In her nicely illustrated book, Adrienne Mayor tells the surprising story of how ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese myths envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices, and human enhancements, and how these visions reflect the invention of real animated machines.
To quote from her preface: “As early as Homer, Greeks were imagining robotic servants, animated statues, and even ancient versions of Artificial Intelligence, while in Indian legend, Buddha’s precious relics were defended by robot warriors copied from Greco-Roman designs for making automata. Mythic animations appear in tales about Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, Daedalus, Prometheus, and Pandora, and many of these machines are described as being built with the same materials and methods that human technicians used to make tools and statues. And, indeed, many sophisticated animated devices weren’t just imagined but actually built in antiquity, reaching a climax with the creation of a host of automata in the ancient city of learning, Alexandria, [perhaps] the original Silicon Valley.”
The word “robot” will soon celebrate its 100th anniversary, as it was coined in 1920 by Czech writer Karel Čapek. But our enduring interest with self-moving devices, or automata, is far older. In her book classicist and science historian Adrienne Mayor surveys the many living statues, robotic warriors, and artificial devices that populated Greek mythology to show the deep roots of our fascination with beings “made, not born”. However, I should make it clear that Mayor, who is a researcher in the history of science, is not offering a broad historical overview of ancient automata, as her book is largely about Greek mythology, with only some material from ancient India and China. If you are interested in mediaeval automata, this isn’t the book for you: she doesn’t even mention Leonardo da Vinci.
Indeed, in the spirit of further clarification, I should explain that the focus of Gods and Robots is on myths and the dreams of the subtitle, rather than on the machines. As Mayor explains, the ancient Greeks imagined their gods capable of crafting robots without necessarily explaining how these were supposed to work (obviously the gods’ expertise is beyond scrutiny!). However, this is a serious and scholarly account, coming from Princeton University Press, and it provides us with interesting look into the minds and thoughts of some fascinating ancient Greeks. Mayor opens with the bronze giant Talos who was said to patrol the borders of Crete. Despite his origins, he turns out to be susceptible to all-too-human ruses and is destroyed by removing a bolt in his ankle, suggesting similarities to the story of Achilles. This causes him to “bleed out” his ichor, a vital substance akin to blood.
An important figure is Daedalus, a prolific tinkerer. Mayor reminds us that, as with much about the ancient world, the surviving literature and other evidence is incredibly fragmentary, so opinions are divided on whether Daedalus was a real person, a mythical character, or even a group of inventors. It is an excellent example of her cautious approach. Indeed, some of the content also makes you wonder whether her book should have a content warning. She advises us that “the adulterous King Minos, who ruled over the same Crete patrolled by the above Talos, was cursed by his wife Pasiphae. Any attempt at extra-marital sex would result in him ejaculating scorpions, millipedes, and snakes. Pasiphae, in turn, was punished by Zeus to lust after a bull in Minos’s herd. To satisfy her cravings she turns to Daedalus to make her a hollow replica of a cow that she can crawl into and that the bull can then mount.” Those who working in the livestock industry and who use similar devices to collect bulls semen for artificial insemination might want to ponder some claims about the roots of their profession.
Only some authors have an (often much needed) sense of humour. That this is true in this case is evident when you read some of Mayor’s commentaries in her book . For example, she notes Daedalus was so good at making his statues life-like that the theme of statues escaping their plinths became, well, a recurring element in period dramas. But it also led to Socrates questioning whether such automata should be tethered to prevent them from escaping like runaway slaves. Mayor sees many parallels to current conundrums. Are we comfortable considering robots and artificial intelligence (AI) as property, or even as slaves? And who, then, is responsible for their actions? Early accidents with self-driving cars have already shown that this is no mere academic question.
In God and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor opens up ancient history to new interpretations by adopting a rather capacious definition of technology, one that many scholars of the ancient world—according to Mayor—may reject out of hand. Focusing on biotechne, or artificial life, Mayor accepts any figure from the texts and artifacts of the ancient world which was “made, not born” as a technological creation. Though many of Mayor’s subjects—such as Talos, mentioned before, the bronze automaton that defended Crete from outsiders—were made through divine processes apparently unknown to humans, Mayor argues that ancient cultural constructions of technology were less about the inner workings of a black box (e.g., a giant metal robot) than about the imagining of such things existing in the first place. As Mayor writes, “Ideas about creating artificial life were thinkable long before technology made such enterprises possible. The myths reinforce the notion that imagination is the spirit that unites myth and science”. Yet such an interpretation of these ancient stories raises the question of whether it is not precisely the inscrutable nature of so many technologies that encourages us to, like the Titan Epimetheus, accept them into our lives and societies with little forethought.
Of course, the ancient Greeks could not have predicted the rise of the godlike techno-capitalists of the early twenty-first century, not to mention our relatively unbridled embrace of their freely-given technological wonders. Nonetheless, the idea that we might not so eagerly trust those more powerful than us is central to the character of technological myths through the ages. In Gods and Robots, Mayor offers a new interpretation of many texts and artifacts from ancient mythologies and cultures. She opens up new ways of thinking about some very old cultural considerations of the relationship between technology and culture. As Mayor argues in the epilogue, technological wonder “might seem a uniquely modern response to the juggernaut of scientific progress in the age of technology” but an ambivalent fascination with technology “surfaced thousands of years ago in the ancient Greek world”.
In nine chapters, Mayor recasts various myths and figures of the ancient Greek world in this new light. The aforementioned myth of Talos represents an early expression of the idea that a sort of independent, if limited, form of life might be replicated through technology. Likewise, Medea luring Pelias into a “cauldron of rejuvenation” represents a forebearer of the “hope and horror [that] still coexist in modern Western reactions to ‘playing god’ with science” (page 42). Mayor also finds evidence for earlier technologies in Celtic and Norse mythology, calling the goddess Freyja an “organic cyborg” (page 68). Ancient “techne-pornography” can be traced back at least as far as the myth of Pasiphae, in which Daedalus—he of the wax wings and Minotaur—built what Mayor calls a “realistic, life-size sex toy” (page 71). Early philosophical writings on the nature of automata, Mayor argues, presaged the complex work of more contemporary philosophers and ethicists on artificial intelligence. Ancient anxieties about how artificial images and beings could seem eerily lifelike find their contemporary analogy, here, in the phenomenon of the uncanny valley. Mayor finds some unnerving references to these myths in the contemporary world, such as TALOS, a “computerized exoskeleton” being developed by the U.S. military (page 138). Each of the chapters is illustrated with reproductions of ancient art representing the myths under discussion.
But as Mayor’s overarching interpretation of the relationship between myth and technology suggests, Gods and Robots is more about ancient Greek imaginings of technology—or how “mechanical technology, evoked sebas, thauma, and thambos . . awe, wonder, and astonishment” (page 102)—than it is about how technology has been wielded as a form of power, both in these stories and in the cultures in which these stories circulated. However, technology and myth do not act as mere vessels for the imagination. For instance, Pygmalion sculpted a sort of semi-living statue that pleased him in a way that “vulgar real women” could not (107). What does this story say about the ancient Greek world’s understanding of who could claim technological power and how that power had been or ought to be wielded?
Among her many fascinating exegeses of ancient myths, Mayor acknowledges these are often focussed on power and technology, noting, for example, that “one of the essential motivations for the creation of machines and robots is economic” (page 152). It’s a pity that, building on this text, she didn’t explore this motivation further, as she covers mythic and factual material in the context of these narratives. Despite this, Gods and Robots is a revealing account of how technology has functioned in both ways from the beginning of recorded history.
It is easy to get swept up by the stories Mayor uses to illustrate her study of technology and ‘magical transformations’. However, to do so is to miss the point. As in so many other ways, her book reveals an important truth, which is that so much of what we think of as modern thinking finds echoes in ideas form 2,500 years ago. What is old becomes new each time we re-discover themes. Major does go outside classical Greece, and in one case study looks at Qin Shi Huang , an early emperor in China. Back in 219 BC, he sent people (‘three thousand young people’) to discover the elixir for immortality. He failed, and it seems such searches end up in failure, as immortality of the body (and mind) seems impossible. Indeed, it appears the dream of eternal and ageless life never goes away – it‘s still with us in 2025, with some of the new ‘super-heroes’ of the virtual computer technologies seeking ways to live for ever.
In one section she touches on another dream , that of enhancing ourselves, finding ways, through technology to be like other members of the animal kingdom. In Roman times one example was the story of Daedalus who focussed this energies on creating wings for humans, his way to save Icarus. His attempt failed because the wax he used to fix the feathers to his artificial wings melted as Icarus strayed too close to the sun. It was an improbable story, but it has left us with that image of many dangers in ‘flying too close to the sun’.
If we stand back from the various stories and myths she relates, Mayor’s book is a thoughtful piece about the ongoing desire humans possess to step beyond their limitations. We can go down deep in oceans, fly, and even travel away from the earth. However, this is only because we sit inside inventions that are designed to protect us. We remain weak, easily crushed., killed and readily eaten, our only hope to build artificial carapaces to protect us. It’s not surprising, those ancient Greek and Roman dreams of changing our bodies live on.
Mayor writes of the “tensions and gaps between imagination and actuality, representation and reality”, an issue that somewhat mirrors William Shakespeare’s comedy The Winter’s Tale, which ends with Leontes, the King of Sicily encountering a statue of his wife Hermione, whom he had had unjustly executed years before for an infidelity of which she was innocent. Standing before the sculpture of Hermione, Leontes mournfully intones “Still, methinks, /There is an air comes from her! What fine chisel/Could ever yet cut breath?” Suddenly, Helios arrives on his chariot and the statue of Hermione comes to life and embraces her husband.?
After reading Mayor, perhaps we should think of Hermione in a third way, as an Artificial Intelligence programmed with the consciousness of Hermione, encased in the body of a robot shaped like a woman. Such robots (and their ancestors) have always existed in that uncanny valley between the inert and the living, the artificial and the natural, the human and the divine. They encourage a sense of wonder, with a god from the machine emerging above an Athenian stage, or a statue coming to life in a Sicilian workshop, or in any of the innumerable dreams and myths which animated both classical and the contemporary minds. The idea won’t go away.
