Most of us think robots and artificial intelligence are modern inventions. However, there are facts proving that people dreamed about it thousands of years ago.
The earliest records of automatic machines (automatons) are known from the Middle Ages. However, robots, and more advanced ones, were probably created in Ancient Greece.
Stanford researcher Adrianna Mayor recently analyzed ancient Greek texts and found them full of records of artificial creatures being created. Including about the giant bronze robot Talos and the artificial woman Pandora, who were created by the god Hephaestus.
Death of Talos, drawing on an ancient Greek vase, 450 BC.
In his book Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Major analyzes the myths of 2,700 years ago and finds references to robots (self-propelled objects) in his writings the ancient Greek poets Hesiod and Homer, who lived somewhere between 750 and 650 BC.
Including Hesiod describes the history of Talos and according to Major, this is one of the earliest concepts of a real robot.
The myth describes Talos as a giant bronze man built by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention and blacksmithing. Talos was ordered by Zeus, the head of the Greek gods, to protect the island of Crete from invaders. Talos circled the island three times a day and threw huge boulders at the approach of enemy ships.
Inside him was a tube running from his head to one of his legs, through which flowed some mysterious source of life called Ichor.
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The 3rd century BC poem Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes describes how the sorceress Medea defeated Talos by removing the bolt on his ankle and allowing the liquid Ichor to flow out.
Talos and Medea.
The myth of the artificial woman Pandora was first described in Hesiod's Theogony and is yet another example of mythical artificial creatures.
In much later versions of this myth, Pandora is portrayed as an innocent woman who unknowingly opened a box of evil (Pandora's Box). However, in the original by Hesiod, Pandora is described as an artificial and, moreover, an evil woman, built by Hephaestus and sent to Earth by order of Zeus to punish humanity for using fire.
In addition to Talos and Pandora, Hephaestus made other self-moving objects, including a group of automatic maids that looked like women but were made of gold.
According to Homer, Hephaestus even gave these artificial women the knowledge of the gods. According to Major, this can be considered an ancient mythical version of artificial intelligence.
Curiously, each of these myths is associated with negative moral consequences.
It seems that even then, people were desperately afraid of artificial intelligence.
