Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology
(Princeton, $30) The possibility of robots turning against us may seem a very new worry, but “as with so many other things, the Greeks got there first,” said The Economist.
In her entertaining new book, classicist Adrienne Mayor combs through ancient myth to show how long humans have been imagining—and fearing—the automatons that engineering might achieve. Though her focus is on Greco-Roman sources, Etruscan, Persian, and Hindu tales also pop up, allowing in a 1,000-strong troop of fire-breathing cavalry. We also hear about a mechanical dog that always catches its prey, drone-like arrows that never miss, and—in a starring role—the giant robot Talos, rock-hurling foe of
Jason and the Argonauts. Drill into any such story, and you’ll unearth “surprisingly modern-sounding questions.”
“Mythic Crete is for Mayor a Silicon Valley of the ancient world,” said Peter Stothard in The Spectator (U.K.). Daedalus, in her telling, turns his son Icarus into a virtual flying cyborg. She describes Pandora as “an evil fembot,” calling the idea of a “box” a mistranslation and describing Pandora as a woman-like automaton and trap. “This is much-disputed territory,” so Mayor often argues against other classicists who doubt the Greeks had fears about technology, including artificial intelligence, long before the technology was developed. Sometimes she goes too far, said Peter Thonemann in The Wall Street Journal. Do Icarus’ feathered wings or a giant snail built by the Athenians really foretell any challenges of modern biotechnology? “These gadgets have about as much to do with artificial intelligence as does a modern cuckoo clock.”
But she’s right that the Greeks did dream of robots, said William Wilson in Weekly Standard.com. They imagined the building of artificial beings that are entirely the product of knowledge and craft, whereas those of us who today research AI are beginning to see that “artificial” is “ever more a misnomer.” The intelligence technologies we are now creating frequently surprise us, as children do: They surpass our predictions of what they’re capable of doing.