Artificial Intelligence First Predicted in Ancient Greece. Or Was It India? | Ancient Origins

Ashley Cowie, Scottish historian, author and documentary filmmaker says, When we think of ancient Greece we generally imagine ruthless highly-trained warriors or cloth clad philosophers pondering the schematics and perimeters of geometry, geography, architecture and the like. 

Was artificial intelligence predicted by the Greeks?
Photo: pict rider via Fotolia

But a new book (see bottom - forthcoming November 2018) is about to present them as “skilled forecasters, accurately predicting the rise of artificial intelligence, killer androids and driverless cars.”

More than 2,500 years ago, Greek mythologists, according to American historian Dr Adrienne Mayor of Stanford University, “envisioned many of the technology trends we grapple with today including Killer androids, driverless technology, GPS and AI-powered helper robots.” According to an article about Mayor’s finding in Greek Reporter , in her forthcoming book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology , the creations of Hephaestus (the god of metalworking and an invention in Homer’s Iliad) were “predictions of the rise of humanoid robots.”

Mythological Artificial Intelligence of Greece 
Dr Mayor, who is described on the Stanford University website as “an independent folklorist/historian of science investigating natural knowledge contained in pre-scientific myths and oral traditions,” claims Hephaestus crafted “mechanical maids from gold that were designed to anticipate their master’s requests and act on them without instruction, much like modern machine learning software. “AI-powered helper robots and killer androids,” says Dr Mayor, “appear in tales about Jason and the Argonauts , Medea, Daedalus and Prometheus” and also the 'bronze killer-robot' Talos who guarded the island of Crete. 

The legendary Pandora , who Dr Mayor describes as a 'wicked AI fembot’ like the ‘replicant’ in the blockbuster movie Blade Runner, had been programmed to ‘release eternal suffering upon humanity’ and “Though the Greeks did not know how technology would work, they could foreshadow its rise in society,” explains Mayor. An article about her findings on News said she is “urging leading tech bosses to closely analyze the stories and characters of Greek mythology as we close in on a future dominated by automated technologies.”  
Read more... 

Additional resources 
 

Gods and Robots
Myths, Machines, and Ancient
Dreams of Technology

Source: Ancient Origins