Thus, in the West, the ‘otherness’ of mechanical simulacra was compounded. Around ad 850, for instance, the Banu Musa brothers in what is now Iraq published the Book of Ingenious Devices, which featured automata such as a water-powered organ. Truitt describes in Medieval Robots (2015), it was the Byzantine Empire and Arab world that preserved the mechanical arts over those centuries. But as the influence of Greece declined over the first centuries ad, the West entered a millennium in which the skills of automaton-making were lost, along with the aspirations associated with them.
These classical stories reveal how, then as now, humanoid machines were mostly conceived as representing straightforward hopes - the ideal servant who always obeys, the perfect soldier who never tires. In his first-century-ad treatise On Automaton-Making, the mathematician-engineer Hero of Alexandria describes a fully automated puppet theatre that, through a combination of displaced grain, axles, levers, pulleys and wheels, could enact an entire tragedy. In her forthcoming book Gods and Robots, classicist Adrienne Mayor describes bronze automata that featured at the Olympic Games two centuries before the Argonautica - a leaping dolphin and eagle in apparent flight. These fictions were grounded in reality: ancient Greek technologists were astonishingly skilled in mechanics and metalwork. A mechanical bronze colossus featuring in the third-century-bc epic Argonautica, it patrolled the shores of Crete, lobbing boulders at invaders.Ī nineteenth-century engraving of Hero of Alexandria’s first-century-AD puppet theatre. Hephaestus was also supposedly responsible for the first ‘killer robot’, Talos. In it, Hephaestus, disabled god of metalworking, creates golden handmaidens to help him in his forge: “In them is understanding in their hearts, and in them speech and strength, and they know cunning handiwork”.
Digging into the deep history of intelligent machines, both real and imagined, we see how these attitudes evolved: from fantasies of trusty mechanical helpers to fears that runaway advances in technology might lead to creatures that supersede humanity itself.Īrguably the oldest known story of something approximating AI can be found in the eighth-century-bc Iliad, Homer’s epic poem of the Trojan War. In our era of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), those polarized responses persist, with pundits and the public applauding or warning against each advance. But this very unnaturalness terrifies and repulses others. Those who build such devices do so in the hope that they will overcome natural limits - in Descartes’s case, death itself. But it sums up the hopes and fears that have been associated with human-like machines for nearly three millennia.
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