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0:00:00 Sean Caroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. And you might remember a couple of weeks ago, we did a slight detour from our usual topics. I’m not exactly sure what our usual topics are, but we took a detour back into the ancient world. We talked with Ed Watts about the decline of the Roman Republic. And of course, one of the interesting things about ancient history, or history at all, is its resonances with contemporary history. So today we’re gonna go back to the ancient world. I had a good time in that previous podcast, I hope you did too. So today we’re gonna go back, but with a slightly different twist; connecting it to our issues of technology and artificial intelligence. In fact, we’re gonna be asking what were robots and AI systems like 2,500 years ago.

0:00:43 SC: Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “There weren’t any robots or artificial intelligences back in ancient Greece and Rome,” and you’re correct, but that didn’t stop people from talking about them. The mythology, the stories, the poems of ancient Greece and Rome were, in some sense, similar to the science fiction and fantasy of today. They allowed the authors to let their imaginations roam free, and they would often stop at the point where they were talking about constructed beings in the shape or manner of humans.

0:01:13 SC: So today’s guest is Adrienne Mayor, who’s a historian of ancient scientist and a classical folklorist at Stanford. She’s very interesting at this, because she not only reads the ancient texts, but also consults the archeological paleontological evidence. So we’re gonna talk about all the different appearances in Greek mythology of robot-like creatures. And of course, being that with Greek mythology, there was always a lesson, there was always something went wrong because somebody did something bad. And what it reflects is the fact that the worries or the interesting conundrums that face you when you talk about human-like machines were just as relevant 2,500 years ago when there weren’t no such machines as they are now.

0:01:57 SC: So it’s, at the very least, fun, and hopefully a little bit more than fun, to think about what was pre-figured in ancient mythology about our current worries about artificial intelligence, robots, and how they’re changing society. So I think this is a fun episode. We’ll also touch a little bit at the end on a different book that Adrienne wrote previously about Amazons. Amazons, of course, are mythological female warriors. There was no society that was all female warriors, but she makes the case, quite convincingly, that there were female warriors, historically, on whom the Amazon legends were based. So it’s yet another example of how things going on in the ancient world still have their reflections today. So I think this is a good mind-expanding episode, even if it’s a little bit off of our usual beaten path. So, let’s go.

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0:03:00 SC: Adrienne Mayor, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:03:03 Adrienne Mayor: Thank you for inviting me.

0:03:04 SC: So we’ve had plenty of people in the show, there’s a lot of scientists, technologists, etcetera, but we have this special time that we’re gonna have with you, because you’ve written a book about ancient ideas of technology; robots, cyborgs, artificial intelligence, but for the most part, correct me if I’m wrong, these are not actual stuff that people built. These are mythological tales. These are completely made-up stories. Is that right?

0:03:30 AM: Well, I wondered whether it was possible that the concepts, the ideas about creating artificial life, automatons, robots, even artificial intelligence, I wondered if those ideas were thinkable before the technology made such enterprises possible. And I did find that, remarkably, if you look at mythology, as early as the time of Homer, and now we’re talking about 750 to 650 BC, the first writings in the ancient Greek world, a group of ancient Greek myths were envisioning how to imitate nature and make automatons by means of bio techne, and that’s a Greek word that means life through craft, that would be what we now call biotechnology. And they called them beings that were made, not born.

0:04:26 AM: So in these myths, and I’m talking about myths popular, very famous, beloved myths like Jason and the Argonauts, stories about the sorceress, Medea, and the bronze robot, Talos, who guarded the Island of Crete, the legendary craftsman, Daedalus, and Prometheus, who was known as the fire bringer, and then Pandora, the artificial female who was created by the god of Technology and Invention, Hephaestus. And these were very vivid myths, and I think of them as sort of ancient thought experiments kind of set in an alternate world where technology was marvelously advanced because it’s divine, so it’s the gods making these beings that are made, not born, made by bio techne. But in the last chapter of my book, I do talk about the genuine self-moving devices and automatons that were actually fabricated and made by real inventors and craftsmen, beginning in the 4th Century BC. So even that goes back much earlier than people have recognized.

0:05:42 SC: Yeah. I we wanna hear all these stories ’cause all these stories are fantastic. But just to set the stage a little bit, maybe what would be the way that a person who lived in the 5th Century BC thought about technology. Did they think of machines as a thing? There was obviously simple machines, levers and so forth were being invented back in those days, but these days, in our lives, technological advance is very important to us. Is that a concept that they would have had?

0:06:10 AM: It’s interesting what their technology and machines was used for in the practical world, it’s amusing that they didn’t use them in their everyday life, but they used them in warfare and in the theatre. So there are machines to raise curtains and to bring things onto the stage so that it looks sort of magical. And then there are torsion catapults and other siege machines that use technology, but for everyday life, not so much, unless you consider things like the bow and arrow and things like that as human enhancement machines, in a way, they sort of are. But I think most people, when they thought of technology, they thought of people doing metalwork and things like that. And the god, Hephaestus, of course, was a blacksmith god; he’s the only god with a job, if you think about it. He’s always described as he’s sweating over his work and he’s surrounded by his tools. And what’s interesting is that when he’s described in the literature… In the myths or in the literature, or depicted in ancient vase paintings, Hephaestus is always shown working, surrounded by his tools, and he was thought of, by ordinary people, as using the same tools, the same materials, the same methods that an ordinary craftsman would be using in his workshop on earth. But of course, he’s a god so that his productions are gonna just be marvelous and awesome.

0:07:47 SC: Yeah. I mean, that’s a very interesting point that they would have been used to the products of craftsmanship, right?

0:07:55 AM: Yes.

0:07:56 SC: But the actual… Something that is like a machine in the more modern sense would have been limited to when they went to the theater, or when they went to war, or something like that. So they knew about them, but they weren’t household devices, I guess we should say.

0:08:10 AM: That’s generally true. On the other hand, they probably saw some moving statues of gods in temples, because we do have some descriptions of animated statues at a very early date. And that would be feasible either with or without… If it’s a machine, it means that there’s no one there actually moving the parts, but you could use steam or levers, springs, weights, things like that to cause a statue to blink its eyes for instance, or move its arm, hold out its hands, or cry, or sweat, or bleed, things like that. They could make statues that were animated in that way. And if you think about it, there’s almost an uncanny valley effect that goes all the way back to these times of Homer.

0:09:09 SC: Yeah, that would’ve been very spooky to see a suddenly moving statue, especially back in the days when the idea of machines was not commonplace.

0:09:16 AM: Right. The uncanny valley effect was first identified, I think, in 1970 by Masahiro Mori, the Japanese roboticist. And it describes that eerie sensation that we have when we encounter really hyper-realistic robots. But I’ve found many examples in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, of people who have that same eerie disquieting, but sort of religious awe about hyper-realism of the statues and paintings in antiquity. And of course, now we know that all of these statues, not just the marble ones, but even the bronze ones, were painted realistically. And they weren’t painted with these garish colors that you see as the reconstructions now, that they know what kind of paints they were and colors, they mixed wax with with the pigment, so that it had a warm look, so that it looked real.

0:10:17 SC: Oh, I see. I was under the impression, from these reconstructions that I’ve seen, that they were fairly cartoonish in some way, but you’re saying we were a lot more realistic than that.

0:10:24 AM: They were much more realistic. The recreations are just taking the most strict hue of the pigment that they have found, but we know that they were very realistic-looking, and they even had inlaid eyelashes, and eyes, and pupils, and inlaid fingernails. These were realistic statues. If you think about seeing these in a temple, they’re life-size, they’re painted realistically, they’re in a realistic pose, and if you go there at night, there’s no light except from an oil lamp or perhaps the moon, so you would have that uncanny valley effect.

0:11:09 SC: Yeah, so the audience would have… The audience for these stories would be familiar with the ideas of artificial creatures, artificial human beings. It’s very telling, of course, that as soon as we imagine making artificial machines, we immediately imagine making artificial people. That’s, of course, what we’re gonna do.

0:11:26 AM: That’s right. [chuckle]

0:11:27 SC: And so they start telling stories about them. My idea was just to start with the story of Talos, because he’s clearly one of the stars of your book, and it made me go back and watch some YouTube clips from the famous Jason and The Argonauts movie from the 1960s.

0:11:43 AM: I love that movie. And in fact, the first image in my book is an image of the the great bronze robot from that movie because someone made a bronze cast of the original model, and it shows him crumbling. And Jason and the Argonauts is really a cult film though, it was 1963, I think, but it’s based on ancient epic poem called The Argonautica about Jason and the Argonauts. Some scholars think might be as old or even older than Homer. So we have a story of a great bronze robot created by Hephaestus, the god of technology. Talos was a huge, you could say, giant android, made of bronze. He was charged with defending Crete against invaders, and he patrolled King Minos’ Kingdom of Crete by marching around the island three times a day. Someone has calculated that he would have to travel about 150 miles an hour to accomplish this feat.

0:12:52 SC: Yeah. Well, he was a big guy.

0:12:53 AM: Yeah. Well, we’re talking about ancient science fictions here, right? And so, yeah. And Talos was kind of programmed by Hephaestus to repel invaders. He had several capabilities. He could pick up large rocks and throw them at intruders, he hurled boulders to sink any foreign ships that he saw approaching Crete shores, and in close combat, he could heat his bronze body to red hot and then grab up a victim and hug them to his chest to roast them alive. So he does act like a robot, he fits the definition of a robot in that he can carry out these activities, but even more remarkably, we know about his inner workings. And this is the first… This is the first description of a robot in Greek literature, and we know the details of his inner workings. Apparently, he was built with an internal artery or vein, some sort of conduit, that went from his head to his feet, and we even know his power source. His power source was ichor. And ichor, of course, is a mysterious life fluid of the gods; that’s what makes them immortal. So we’ve got ichor pulsing through this single vein, from his neck to his ankle, and this bronze android’s, you could call it a biomimetic vivisystem, because it is actually described as an artery, using a medical term, the biological term for a vein or artery. And yet, he’s made of bronze, and the whole system is sealed by a bronze bolt on his ankle. And so this is a mythological product.

0:14:40 SC: Sorry, just to… Yeah, no, absolutely. But just to put ourselves in the mood here, I guess people at that time didn’t realize that even for living organisms, blood circulated. It went around and around. It came and went rather than just going in one direction. They hadn’t quite figured out, if I’m putting my history of biology correctly, is that right?

0:15:04 AM: That’s right, but what’s really interesting is that I think I cited a study in my book that shows that people still have that kind of vision about electricity or the body, but especially like electricity, we know that it takes two wires to transmit and conduct electricity.

0:15:28 SC: Like a circuit, yeah.

0:15:29 AM: And yet people still think of it as a single pulsating fluid or substance. So it’s interesting that we still sort of have that sort of primitive view. It’s…

0:15:44 SC: So the author… Who is the author of the Argonautica?

0:15:47 AM: The Argonautica was a set of oral legends and myths and tales or stories before it was ever written down. The first time it was written down, in its entirety in a surviving form, was by Apollonius of Rhodes, a poet from the 3rd Century. But he was writing down what were very old, oral traditions.

0:16:16 SC: But it does seem like whoever invented this story puts a little bit of brainwork into figuring out how Talos would work. It’s kind of impressive that it wasn’t just magic; it really was a machine.

0:16:25 AM: Yes, and that’s one of the distinctions that I wanna make clear when we talk about these automatons and robots, is that they are imagined as products of technology. If you think of metal, metalworking, and the way he’s made of bronze and has inner workings, he’s not brought to life by magic. Every culture has these stories, including Greece, but every ancient culture has stories of inert matter that’s magically brought to life by some sort of spell or maybe a god’s command. You think of Adam and Eve, or even Pygmalion and his ivory statue, she was not made as an automaton or a technological being. She was magically brought to life by the goddess of love. So what I’m interested in is how these mythological stories actually imagine technological products, synthetic androids, and artificial men and women and animals.

0:17:32 SC: Yeah. Is it fair to imagine that there’s three categories here? There’s sort of living organic beings, there are magically created creatures, and then there’s technologically created creatures?

0:17:43 AM: Yes, I think that’s a pretty good distinction. The fact that they describe Talos and Pandora and other of these artificial entities as made, not born. I think that’s a really important distinction because it really draws the line between, as you say, human, non-human, artificial, and natural, and I think that they’re really emphasizing the manufactured nature of Talos and then Pandora.

0:18:14 SC: And I’m sure that the boundary lines here are a little fuzzy. They didn’t exactly know what technology could do. So there’s a little bit of magical thinking going into it, but also, there seemed to be a little bit of ambiguity about how human some of these machines were. I know in the Ray Harryhausen movie, it seemed like Talos maybe has feelings, or at least has some emotion… He feels bad when he’s being defeated. Is that fair to say?

0:18:40 AM: That’s right. In the original myth of Talos, which was actually the first written description of Talos comes from Hesiod, the poet, Hesiod, who lived around the same time as Homer. So Talos was first described in about 700 BC, and he is described as a kind of, I guess you could say, cyborg, because he is sort of half human, half machine. And that line is, as you say, it’s blurry and it’s never really resolved whether he is all machine, a sort of soulless machine, or whether the has a kind of consciousness or emotions. And, yeah, the way he’s destroyed, we can talk about that too. That sort of brings that all into question too.

0:19:32 SC: Well, it’s definitely one of the ways, one of the many ways in which the stories you recall in your book pre-figure debates we’re having right now, right? What is the dividing line between an artificial intelligence or a conscious creature, like an organic being? And they were… Maybe they… I don’t know, I should ask you rather than just guessing, did they ever wonder about that? Was there any ancient discussions about at what point would an artificial being count as human?

0:20:01 AM: Well, I think the story of Talos really brings that to the forefront in the way he was finally destroyed. He was destroyed because Jason and the Argonauts were lucky enough to have Medea, who was kind of a techno-wizard. She had fallen in love with Jason, so she was along with them, and she’s the one who figured out how to neutralize Talos. Otherwise, Jason and the Argonauts would have been killed by this killer robot. Medea figures out… Okay, she knew his inner workings, and she knew that he was powered by ichor, and that ichor bestows immortality on the gods, but she figured out the whole system depends on that bolt on his ankle, and if I can get him to allow me to remove that bolt, then this immortal ichor, the power fluid, will bleed out and he will be destroyed. And so she plays on his emotions, she persuades him, she tells Talos that she can make him immortal.

0:21:11 AM: And of course, that’s a kind of human desire, isn’t it? He wants to become invulnerable, he wants to go on forever. And she says, “I can make you immortal, but only if you allow me to remove that bolt on your ankle,” and he agrees to that. Now he’s stepping out of the role of a pure machine. He’s making a decision that his makers and the people who deploy him, they weren’t expecting him to be able to have this kind of agency, this kind of desire and this kind of human ability to make a bad decision.

0:21:47 SC: It seems like bad programming, honestly. All he was supposed to do was run around Crete and throw boulders. He wasn’t supposed to be thinking about immortality.

0:21:54 AM: Yeah, that’s right. But she persuaded him, and she removes… She and Jason remove the bolt. And we know that this is a very ancient version of the story, because we have face paintings from the 5th Century BC that actually show Jason kneeling by this large bronze man, and he’s using a tool to remove the bolt on the bronze man’s ankle. And Talos is swooning, falling back, reeling off balance, and you can see that he’s made of bronze. He’s painted like ancient artist painted statues or bronze armor. And yet, he’s very humanized. His eyes are rolling up, and one artist actually painted a teardrop falling from his eye. So they really did humanize him, even though they thought of him as made of bronze. So you’ve got all those questions that seem so modern to us are kind of embedded in this story.

0:23:00 SC: Well, one of the things that it seems absolutely characteristic to me of Greek stories, and I’m not an expert, so, again, fill me in, but there’s people trying to do things and then getting their comeuppance one way or the other, being hubristic, trying to fly or achieve immortality, and then paying some sort of terrible price. So I love the fact that even the android, even Talos the robot, still has this kind of human failing.

0:23:28 AM: That’s right. Yes, Medea is kind of like a hacker. She figures out his point of weakness, the vulnerability, and she exploits it. And I think that’s an interesting little modern lesson for us too. He’s a product or technology, but he’s taken down by technology.

0:23:49 SC: Yeah, it was a typological solution to a technological problem. It was very clever.

0:23:52 AM: Exactly. Everyone should have Medea on their side if they’re gonna be facing things like this.

0:23:58 SC: Well, from reading your book, I definitely get the feeling that Medea deserves more credit than she gets in the popular imagination. I think of the play, the Euripides play, and she’s killing her children, and is a tragedy and things like that. But she clearly was, over and over again, saving Jason from terrible things in the journey to the Golden Fleece.

0:24:19 AM: That’s right. And as I like to call her a kind of techno-wizard, because she is a sorceress, she has all this arcane knowledge of drugs and biotechnology, and she could rejuvenate people in her famous special golden cauldron by boiling powerful herbs and other drugs. There’s one story that she was asked by Jason to restore his elderly father’s youth. And all cultures have these stories of the fountain of youth or rejuvenation stories, but the Greek story about Medea doing this really has a lot of bio-technological details in it. Somehow, she drew all the blood out of the old man’s veins and then replaced his blood with a sort of secret concoction of plants and other ingredients that she brewed in her golden cauldron. It’s really, really quite amazing after…

0:25:27 SC: I think they’re working on that in Silicon Valley right now, aren’t they?

0:25:30 AM: Exactly, yes. They really are. This is… They are not just thinking about rejuvenation and extending human lifespan, but trying to think about immortality too. Historians of surgery have pointed out that Medea’s sort of imaginary experiment, this is a myth, of course, that it kind of foreshadows modern blood transfusions, I mean, she withdrew all of his blood and replaced it. So that’s sort of a pre-figuring of what is called exchange or substitution transfusion, where a patient’s blood is completely bled out and then replaced with a donor’s blood. And in the past, I think 15 years, some blood exchange experiments have been carried out with young and old mice, and they’ve been shown to rejuvenate the muscles and the livers of the older mice when their blood is replaced with that of young mice. And so there are some start-up companies here in Silicon Valley that are pretty excited about this, I think. Someone just issued a… I think some large health institution issued a warning, saying that this wasn’t probably not a good idea yet.

0:26:49 SC: Yeah, not yet. Forward-thinking people are always gonna take the risks. But I wonder, again, in contemporary culture, we think of science fiction as trading back and forth with technological advance. Sometimes a technological advance is inspired by science fiction, sometimes it’s the other way around. Do you think that there’s any similar dynamic going on back then? Do you think that there was any slightly overly ambitious doctor who might have tried a blood transfusion based on stories like this, or was it just a guess on the base of the poet?

0:27:23 AM: I don’t really know how they would actually be able to try a blood transfusion like that. I think it’s pretty imaginary in this myth. But there are stories of people making models of birds’ wings or kites in order to fly. And if you think about the story of Daedalus and his son, Icarus, Daedalus wanted to escape with his son. He and his son were imprisoned by Minos in the labyrinth that Daedalus had built himself, but then now it’s a prison for him. He wants to escape, so he’s a legendary, brilliant craftsman, not a god, he’s imagined as a human. He makes imitation bird wings, and he and his son fly off. He anticipates the weak points of his artificial wings. He tells his son, “Don’t fly too high. The heat will melt the glue or the wax. Don’t fly too low, near the ocean, the ocean dampness will weaken the glue.” And of course, Icarus, he experiences the rapture of flight, and he flies higher and higher, and of course, we all know the story that he plunged into the sea.

0:28:38 AM: And sometimes that’s taken as a story of Hubris, and that they got what they deserve for playing God by trying to fly. But if you think about it a little deeper, Daedalus mourns his son and then he flies on. He ends up in Sicily. He escapes and continues his wonderful resume of marvelous animated statue. So they both did succeed in flying, but at a very high cost. I think maybe that would be the lesson to take from that story.

0:29:12 SC: Yeah, I mean, Daedalus sacrificed his son in the name of scientific experimentation. Where sometimes that’s… You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, I think that’s something we all understand.

0:29:20 AM: Yes, that’s right. And it’s interesting that he anticipated the weak points of his invention too, so…

0:29:27 SC: Yeah. I think that these days we’re romantically invested in the Icarus part of the myth, but you gotta give Daedalus credit. He really figured a whole bunch of stuff out, at least according to the stories. And one of the things I wanted to ask was, that’s at least something where there’s a chance that he was based on a real person or real people, right?

0:29:46 AM: Yeah, some people… Some scholars have suggested that Daedalus was sort of meant as a kind of conglomerate of all the brilliant craftsmen who did actually invent technologies or animated statues, things like that, and so he sort of stands for all of those real artisans and crafts people. And everybody wanted to claim Daedalus. Crete claimed him, and then Sicily claimed him, and then Athens, the city of Athens, actually revised all the myths to make Athens his birthplace. [chuckle] So everybody wanted him as a sort of founding inventor.

0:30:35 SC: And so what are the inventions he’s credited with? The wings, obviously, the labyrinth, which doesn’t seem like as hard as making wings that will make people fly, but he has, like you said, a long resume of inventions to his name.

0:30:47 AM: Well, one of the most infamous of his inventions was the artificial cow that he made for a Queen Pasiphaë.

0:30:56 SC: Oh, yeah, the cow. [chuckle]

0:30:57 AM: She was cursed with a perverse desire to mate with a bull in her husband, King Minos’ pastures. She felt the gods made her fall in love with the bull. And so she asked Daedalus to make her an artificial cow so that she could enter the cow and, in that way, fool the bull into having sex with Pasiphaë inside the cow. This was… There are hundreds of images of this myth.

0:31:29 SC: Yeah, it’s a favorite subject for artists.

0:31:32 AM: Yes. And it’s really interesting, in the Middle Ages, it was also possible… Also popular, and they… But they focus on the actual love story between Pasiphaë and the bull…

0:31:46 SC: Oh, that’s nice.

0:31:46 AM: So they would show her bringing flowers to this sort of love-sick bull. But that’s a kind of sex toy, if you think about it. She animates it by getting inside, so it’s a kind of animated statue. Anyway, that was one of Daedalus’s marvelous inventions.

0:32:04 SC: But then… Then she gave birth.

0:32:05 AM: Yes. Unfortunately, she gave birth to the Minotaur, and there’s a vase painting showing the baby Minotaur. We don’t have very many images of baby monsters, but there is a vase painting that shows the baby Minotaur sitting on Pasiphaë’s lap and she has a very startled look on her face and her gesture is one of anxiety. [chuckle]

0:32:37 SC: It’s a good reminder that even the monster Minotaur was a baby once too.

0:32:41 AM: I know. [chuckle]

0:32:43 SC: He had a mommy who loved him. And what else did Daedalus do after that?

0:32:48 AM: So Daedalus then invented the labyrinth as a place where King Minos could imprison his stepson, the Minotaur.

0:33:01 SC: This is very interesting to me reading your book, how much of what we know is not just textual, but based on these artistic depictions on pottery and so forth. It’s clear that there was a set of stories that every artist in the ancient Greek or Roman world knew and just loved painting.

0:33:20 AM: Yes, and it also… It’s very helpful because we have to think of just and realize how much of Greek literature has been lost. A lot of these myths, we only have incomplete texts or fragments. And so the vase paintings can give us hints about what has been lost and versions of the story that have been lost. They can also confirm things, like the vase painting I mentioned of Jason using a tool to remove the bolt on Talos’ ankle, that’s important for showing just how old that story was.

0:34:03 SC: Right, right. But it goes back even further than that, right? So there’s a section in your book about Prometheus: The Titan, constructing, if you wanna put it that way, the human race itself. So is there a sense in which we, human beings, count as robots in the sense that we were originally created rather than born?

0:34:27 AM: That’s, of course, a very deep philosophical question there. [chuckle]

0:34:32 SC: Yeah. They even knew about evolution, so they had to have some stories.

0:34:37 AM: And so are we all robots? And in fact, Plato does bring that up. In one of his dialogues, he says, “Let us imagine that we are puppets made by a capricious god.” So they thought about those questions. And of course, I think that in Buddhist cultures, they have different ideas about robots and automatons than western cultures. I haven’t delved too deeply into this, but the few ancient stories that I did find that were Buddhist texts about automatons, the messages seem to be something like, “We are all robots. Robots don’t have souls, and neither do we.” So I think that that would be very interesting to look deeper.

0:35:25 SC: It’s always a little tricky right, ’cause obviously they didn’t have the exact words: Robots and androids and cyborgs or something like that. So we have to sort of remember that they were just talking about exactly the same concept in different words than we would use.

0:35:40 AM: Right. And recently, I was writing about the ancient legend from India about Buddha’s relics, his bodily remains being guarded in antiquity right after he died by a set of robotic warriors. And they did have a word for what we would call robot or automaton, and they called them spirit movement machines. They had a word for machine. They had a word for “machine” and they called them spirit movement machines, and they had a word for robot makers. So, yeah, it’s really hard to tease these words out. You’d have to do a lot of reading. These things are not indexed.

0:36:26 SC: Do you think that spirit mover machine… What is the word “spirit” doing in there?

0:36:33 AM: I think that that emphasizes the mysterious origins of their movements.

0:36:40 SC: Okay, yeah.

0:36:41 AM: But the fact that they are machine, the… The third word is machine, “Yantra”, which means some mechanized entity.

0:36:50 SC: Well, it’s clear, from your book, that many of the uses that people imagined for these artificial beings is wartime, fighting battles. I guess, I’m not sure whether there were lots of battles being fought or whether just when he went down to write stories, it was the most fun to write about battles, but clearly, there’s stories of artificial soldiers and elephants, and it’s a lot of fun, really.

0:37:15 AM: Yes. Well, and as we mentioned earlier, a lot of the Greek technology was focused on making novel war machines. So various rulers did actually hold contests for artisans and inventors to design and make innovations in war machines, and that’s how Philip II came up with the torsion catapult; he held a contest for that. And this brings us to the question that many people are worried about today, is does technology favor tyranny or totalitarianism?

0:38:00 SC: Yeah, I went into a much more benign direction. I thought of the XPRIZE.

0:38:04 AM: Oh, you could talk about that too, yes. You know what’s interesting, if you think about Hephaestus, the wonders that he made in his workshop, many of them were for the gods and goddesses. They called on him when they required devices with some spectacular features and magnificent beauty and craftsmanship. He created Talos, but he also had a big list of wonders, a long resume. He made golden hunting dogs, animated statues of watch dogs that were described in Homer’s Odyssey. And Homer’s Iliad tells us that Hephaestus made a set of automated bellows for his forge. These bellows could obey his commands and regulate their blast to blow more or less air as he worked, and then he devised a wondrous fleet of these tables or tables… Tripods, three-legged tables on wheels that were self-driving carts. They brought nectar and ambrosia to the gods and goddesses at their banquets, and they returned when they were empty, and he made automatic Gates for Mount Olympus, the heavens, that would automatically open and close.

0:39:20 AM: These are driverless carts and automated garage doors. And he also made a team of life-sized golden maids to serve as his assistants. And Homer describes these robotic servants as looking exactly like real young women, but that they were endowed with sense and reason, and that they were equipped with all the knowledge of the gods. And in other words, that amounts to a mythological version of artificial intelligence, and that’s written more than 2,500 years ago. But just as you said, when you first asked this question, these things are all very benign and harmless and kind of charming, kind of fun to imagine. It’s when these made not born things come down to earth, like Talos or Pandora, that they… Well, Asimov’s Laws get broken. [chuckle] A lot of chaos, a lot of destruction and chaos.

0:40:24 SC: Well, it’s very interesting to me that Hephaestus, who’s clearly based on a super blacksmith, someone who would forge weapons and armor and things like that, clearly, I guess, they imagined if you’re a god and a blacksmith, then you’re also a wizard inventor, even at a time when inventing new things was not common currency.

0:40:47 AM: Yeah. And as you mentioned before, I think there was a lot of overlap between magic and technology in antiquity, especially with metalworking, because just the things you could do with bronze, to an ordinary person, would seem like magic. You’re using fire and molten metals and forging something that can move or look real, and you could even use real things to cast bronze so that… That’s one of the things that Daedalus was famous for, was that he made a golden honeycomb that looked exactly like a honeycomb. Well, that’s what a goldsmith could do if they cast the gold on a real honeycomb, but it seemed like magic in antiquity.

0:41:36 SC: I have more things about Hephaestus to talk about, but I don’t wanna… Before I forget, I wanna go back to Jason because I forgot about the dragon’s teeth story, which is a great one, and again, has amazing modern resonances.

0:41:51 AM: Yes, it does. Jason had to accomplish these impossible tasks in the myth of the quest for the Golden Fleece, and one of them was that he had to tame or somehow subdue a pair of robo-bronze bulls. These were robot bulls made of bronze created by Hephaestus, for the king, who happened to be Medea’s father. He’s the one who set this task for Jason, and he said, “You need to yoke these bronze fire-breathing bulls and then plow a field. Oh, and here’s a helmet full of dragon’s teeth. You need to plant these dragon’s teeth in the furrows, and from these dragon’s teeth will spring up an unnatural army, and that’s the crop that you will have to harvest. You need to cut down that army. If you can accomplish all that by nightfall, then I’ll tell you where the Golden Fleece is.”

0:43:02 SC: We make fun of James Bond movies for having the villains come up with these cockamamie schemes, but it clearly goes back a long time before that.

0:43:09 AM: Absolutely. Absolutely. Medea creates a special drug, once again, made from ichor to give Jason superhuman power. This is like a human enhancement that she makes in drug form for Jason so that he can overpower those bronze bulls that are snorting fire. The effect only lasts one day, but it gives him superhuman strength. And the description in the myth is quite interesting. He sounds like he’s turning into the Hulk. He’s normally a very skinny guy, as we see in vase paintings, he’s shown as a very unassuming physique, but she gives him him this drug, and he turns into a strong man able to do all these tasks. And sure enough, by dusk, they see that these soldiers are popping up, fully armed, unnatural army popping up out of the furrows that he has plowed and planted the dragons teeth. And now these soldiers are… They’re fully armed, and they are programmed to attack. They can’t be commanded or led, and they can’t stop or halt or change direction. They can only attack.

0:44:32 AM: So, once again, Medea to the rescue. She figures out their vulnerabilities, and she advises Jason to throw rocks into their midst, and he does that, and it works just like Medea said it would. They feel the blows or sense the blows on their shields and believe that they’re being attacked, and they’re programmed to attack, and so they attack whatever’s closest to them, they attack each other. So they’re just in a frenzy, hacking at each other, and then Jason and the Argonauts go and finish them off. So once again, Medea’s the one you want on your side.

0:45:15 SC: And that’s a very realistic sort of technological worry about slightly bad programming. I don’t know if you know the story of the Lord of the Rings movies?

0:45:25 AM: Yes.

0:45:26 SC: So they had all these armies of orcs that were all CGI, and they programmed them individually to make it look realistic, but some of them would just sort of look for the nearest person to fight and didn’t see anyone, so just would run away from the battle, so it looks like the whole orc army was just running to the three winds. So programming these instructions accurately is a harder trick that it might seem like a…

0:45:49 AM: That’s right. And what happens if you want to actually… If the circumstances change, and you need to re-program them or interrupt their train of behavior, pretty difficult. One ancient writer said, “Well, every general would want an army like this,” but I don’t think so.

0:46:09 SC: Yeah, they need some judgement.

0:46:11 AM: They are very, very difficult to control if the circumstances suddenly change. And some people have said we need to make AI, artificial intelligence, that knows when to ask for help from a human. [chuckle]

0:46:29 SC: I mean, I probably know the answer to this, but did any of these ancient sources go into any detail at all about programming, or how the instructions were put into these robots?

0:46:41 AM: Once again, I’m going to appeal to the fact that we have such incomplete record. We do have so many details about Talos, and yet for many of the others, we don’t have the details that might have existed in antiquity. I haven’t found any examples of details of programming, how…

0:47:07 SC: Yeah, that would be pretty advanced. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t there, but it would be curious.

0:47:12 AM: Well, there is an interesting recent discovery of a papyrus that tells… It was founded in the ’70s, I believe, that has a story of a guardian lion that was built by Hephaestus to guard an Aegean island. And the papyrus says that special instructions for the benefit of all mankind were placed in the lion. So there’s a… That’s the most beneficial AI robot that I know of from antiquity that came to earth, that was placed on earth. That’s the only beneficial one I can think of, actually, [chuckle] but was programmed by Hephaestus to be a benefit to all mankind.

0:48:02 SC: Yeah. So speaking of Hephaestus and speaking of benefits to all mankind, I was trying to think of how to sort of characterize all of the different kinds of robots and AIs that you talked about in the book. So there’s androids; there’s robots in human form. There’s human enhancement, like what Daedalus does with the wings and the various attempts at immortality through blood transfusions. And then, of course, there are sex robots.

0:48:27 AM: Yes. [chuckle]

0:48:29 SC: And we can thank Hephaestus for that, is that right?

0:48:31 AM: That’s right. Hephaestus, once again, is commissioned by Zeus, who is always portrayed as a very vindictive, harsh tyrant in these myths. So once again, there you have tyrants seeking out people who can make technology. He wants to punish human kind for accepting the gift of fire from Prometheus. Prometheus not only made humans but then wanted to defend them and compensate for their vulnerability by giving them the technology of fire. Well, he was punished for that. And Zeus then wants to punish humans as well, so he asks Hephaestus to make an artificial woman, as beautiful as a goddess, but he specifically says that this entity who is made, not born, will arouse lust in men, and she will be evil disguised as beauty. So she’s an evil fem-bot who is created by Hephaestus specifically to carry out a mission on earth. She has this sealed jar or urn, it later became a box in the middle ages because of a mistranslation, but she has a mission on earth. She is to insinuate herself in human society and then unseal that jar releasing all the miseries and sufferings of mankind. And then we never hear of her again.

0:50:10 SC: Well, I had this vague feeling that I was taught that Pandora was the first woman, almost like a precursor to Eve in some versions of the story. Are there different versions, or was she always robotic, or once again, the boundary line is just very blurry here.

0:50:25 AM: In the very earliest text we have of the story of Pandora comes from Hesiod, the epic poet, Hesiod, who wrote the story twice, in two different works, in about 700 BC. He lives in around the time of Homer, so this is an extremely ancient story. And once again, he’s drawing on oral traditions, and he does not describe her as the first woman. He describes her as made not born and a product of technology. From the very beginning, she’s not said to be the first woman, but I think she gets sort of overlaps with Eve as the story gets perpetuated. And we all think of a very benign fairy tale version of Pandora, that she was an innocent young woman who just couldn’t restrain her curiosity. And that is not the original story at all.

0:51:21 SC: Yeah, I’m gonna return to this theme once again, because I think it’s very interesting about how many of these stories are ultimately cautionary tales. And it’s weird to think that they were cautionary tales about the dangers of technology since those dangers were not very manifest at the time.

0:51:40 AM: That’s right. But as I say, these are kind of science fiction. So they are imagining what wonders could be created if only possessed the creativity and the divine abilities of the gods or someone like Medea. Yeah, that’s right, it is interesting that they seem to be cautionary, they do have lessons for us.

0:52:07 SC: Is it just the idea that reaching too far and being hubristic is something to be warned against and this idea of manipulating nature through technology is just one illustration of that?

0:52:21 AM: Well, I did notice that, and I think I just mentioned earlier that these self-moving devices and automatons that Hephaestus made for his own use and the use of the gods and goddesses in heaven are all harmless and benign and charming. But the ones that are sent to earth to interact with humans are dangerous. We’ve got the killer robot Talos and Pandora, and then the various guard dogs and lions and creatures like that. So maybe this lesson in the myths, or something that we can draw from them, is that maybe they’re trying to say that it’s interesting to think about, in a sort of abstract way, but if these technologies are going to interact with humans, we need to think them over. And of course, the story of Pandora really emphasizes that when you think about the relationship between Prometheus and his brother, Epimethius, in that story, Pandora’s…

0:53:29 SC: That was what relationship was, yeah.

0:53:31 AM: Yeah they’re brothers, Prometheus and Epimethius. Prometheus is the one who made the humans and then gave them fire. His name means foresight; he looks ahead. His brother, Epimethius, his name means hindsight. He’s short-sighted; he never looks ahead.

0:53:56 SC: Okay. Your…

0:53:57 AM: The Greeks are capable of humor in these myths.

0:54:00 SC: Well, I was just gonna say you’re predestined by your name to have certain characteristics. It’s a tough life.

0:54:05 AM: Maybe there were named later, I don’t know, but… So Epimethius is the perfect patsy for Zeus’s trick on humans, this cruel trick that he’s going to play. He sends Hermes, the messenger god, to escort Pandora down to earth, and he presents Pandora as a bride to Epimethius. And Epimethius is dazzled by her beauty, but Prometheus tries to stop him from accepting this gift. He says, “This isn’t a gift. Do not accept any gifts from Zeus. Please do not do this.” And Epimethius shrugs him off and goes for the short-term gain. And as Hesiod, the poet, in 700 BC tells us, he realized his error too late.

[laughter]

0:54:57 SC: Is there also some sort of warning against the wiles of women going on here, or is it mostly technological, you think?

0:55:05 AM: I think that it could be interpreted that way, but mostly, I think it’s a story of caution. When you think about the role of hope in the story of Pandora, now, if we think of the fairytale version, we’ve all seen the illustrations of Pandora sort of reeling back in horror when she opens this sealed box or jar. But actually, that was her mission. And the last thing in her jar, in that sealed vessel, it was hope, right?

0:55:39 SC: Yeah.

0:55:40 AM: And we’re used to seeing illustrations from fairytales, European fairytales, that show hope as the sort of beautiful fairy who arise, it flies up out of the jar and comforts human kind, but that’s… Once again, that’s not what the original myth said. In antiquity, Greeks did not think of hope as a good thing. Hope was called blind hope. It robs you of foresight. It makes you into an Epimethean character; you can never look ahead. And they really thought… We know that they really thought about that a lot because there are some fragments of plays about Pandora and Prometheus where Prometheus talks about the meaning of hope and blind hope, and the question unresolved in the play and in philosophical arguments, was hope the best thing or the worst thing in Pandora’s jars? Is hope a good thing for humans or a bad thing for humans?

0:56:44 SC: I mean, would it be fair to say that the meaning of hope in this context is closer to something like wishful thinking?

0:56:50 AM: I think so, yes. We certainly have a lot of Epimethean types in AI and robotics who assure us that, “We’re so innovative and creative that we’ll be fine. We’ll be able to solve all the problems as they come up.” And then we have Prometheans who say, “We need to step back and try to think about unexpected unintended consequences, if we possibly can.”

0:57:18 SC: Yeah, the two attitudes are never gonna go away. They just need to be in conversation with each other in an intelligent way, which is all we can hope for.

0:57:23 AM: Yeah, that’s right.

0:57:26 AM: Now, I’m sure, there’s many other stories that are in your wonderful book, and I encourage everyone to buy it, but in our last few minutes here, I wanted to completely switch topics. Maybe it’s not a complete switch, you tell me, but you’ve written a whole another book, which I thought was fascinating, about Amazons. And I’ve seen Wonder Woman. I know about the Amazons, but I think… I haven’t read that one, I’ll confess, but I think you make the case that the myth of the Amazons was based, to a surprising degree, on real life events. Is that right?

0:57:58 AM: Yes, I make that case in my book, The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World. If you’ve heard of the myths of Amazons, then you know that there were fierce warrior women from exotic lands to the east. They lived around the Black Sea and beyond, all the way to Central Asia. And what I wanted to emphasize is that the myths of the Amazons were probably influenced by real women who rode to war alongside the men in cultures around the Black Seas on the steps that were known to the ancient Greeks, and that their lifestyle was so egalitarian when it came to male and female roles, that the Greeks really spun many exciting stories about Amazons. And the reason I feel I could make that argument is that there are some spectacular and recent archeological discoveries of the graves of hundreds of battle-scarred female skeletons buried with weapons, just like the men, given honors like the males and buried with their weapons and their horses in about the 5th Century BC and onwards, all across the steps around the Black Sea, and all the way to…

0:59:26 SC: And so it’s not that there was an entire society of nothing but women warriors, which sort of would fail to be reasonable for all sorts of reasons.

0:59:33 AM: For all sorts of reasons, yes. And even the Greeks told other stories about Amazons who actually did have relationships with men in their myths, but the exaggeration of the egalitarianism led to stories of a society of nothing but women.

0:59:56 SC: And part of it was just that the Greek fighting style, which was sort of brutish and hand-to-hand, would naturally favor the taller, stronger men, whereas the societies, the cultures on the steps were more riding on horseback, shooting bows and arrows, things that women could do just as well as men could.

1:00:15 AM: Absolutely. The Greek style of warfare was on foot, heavily armed, all armed exactly the same and all taught the same tactics, hoplite soldiers who would march in a Phalanx out to meet the enemy who would be another force of similarly armed and trained men. But the Scythians, their ancestors were the people who domesticated the horse and perfected the recurve bow. So these cultures of Scythian nomads, very diverse cultures, but they were culturally related because they all were centered on archery and riding horses. And if you put a woman on a horse with a bow and arrow, she’s just as fast, just as deadly as a man. And their lifestyle was egalitarian because it was a necessity for their survival. Everyone in the tribe learned to ride horses when they’re toddlers, and they learned to shoot bows and arrows, everyone could hunt, everyone could defend the tribe, it’s just a necessity. They dressed the same in long pants or leggings, trousers, because you have to have those to write a horse, and long sleeves. Very practical active wear for both the men and women, and their whole society just astounded the Greeks because they kept their women at home weaving and taking care of children. They didn’t have an outdoor life at all, so…

1:01:50 SC: And everyone thinks that their own local customs should be laws of nature, right? So the idea that other people do it differently is hard to fathom.

1:01:57 AM: That’s right. So I think that this outpouring of Amazon tales, which everyone knew these stories by heart, they knew about all the stories of their greatest Greek heroes had to prove themselves by fighting noble enemies. And among those noble enemies were the Amazon queens.

1:02:19 SC: So in both of these big stories, the one about the robots and artificial intelligence ideas in antiquity and about the Amazons, they’re a wonderful reminder of how the debates that we have in the modern world are pre-figured in debates we’ve been having for a very, very, very, very long time. And I think it’s just a wonderful example, in both cases, of how we can still learn and expand our minds and maybe make ourselves little bit more cultured by remembering what people were debating about 2,000 and 3,000 years ago.

1:02:51 AM: Absolutely.

1:02:52 SC: Alright. Adrienne Mayor, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

1:02:55 AM: Thank you.

