Gods and Robots

by Adrienne Mayor

  Several ancient Greek myths caution that cheating death causes chaos on earth and involves grievous suffering. “Sisyphean task” is a cliché connoting futile, impossible work—but few recall why Sisyphus must push a boulder to the top of a hill forever. Sisyphus, the legendary tyrant of Corinth, was known for his cruelty, craftiness, and deceit. According to the myth, he slyly captured and bound up Thanatos (Death) with chains. Now no living things on earth could die. Not only did this deed overturn the natural order and threaten overpopulation, but no one could sacrifice animals to the gods or eat any meat. What would happen to politics and society if tyrants lived forever? Moreover, men and women who were old and sick or wounded were condemned to suffer interminably. The war god Ares was especially irritated because if no one was in danger of dying, warfare was no longer a serious enterprise. In one version of the myth, Ares freed Thanatos and delivered Sisyphus into the arms of Death. But then, once in the Underworld, the cunning Sisyphus managed to convince the gods to release him to rejoin the living, temporarily, to attend to some unfinished business. Thus he slipped out of Death’s grasp again. In the end, Sisyphus died of old age, but he was never enrolled among the shades of the dead fluttering uselessly about the Underworld. Instead, he spends eternity in hard labor. The story of Sisyphus was the theme of tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.18

  In the realm of myth, then, immortality posed dilemmas for gods and humans alike. In chapter 2, the old men Aeson and Pelias sought to turn back the clock but died anyway, and the myths of Talos, Achilles, Heracles, and others also point to the impossibility of preparing for every potential design flaw in the quest to become something more than human. Yet the dream of eternal, ageless life persists.

  The myth of Eos and Tithonus is a dramatic illustration of the jinxes that lurk in the desire to surpass a natural human life span. The tale of Tithonus is quite old, first recounted in the Homeric Hymns, a set of thirty-three poems mostly composed in the seventh and sixth centuries BC. The story tells how Eos (Dawn or Aurora, the “rosy-fingered” goddess of morning light) fell in love with the handsome young singer-musician of Troy named Tithonus. Eos took Tithonus to her celestial bower at the end of the earth to be her lover.

  Unable to accept the inevitable death of her mortal lover, Eos fervently requested life everlasting for Tithonus. In some versions, it is Tithonus himself who longed to be immortal. At any rate, the gods granted the wish.

  In typical fairy-tale logic, however, the devil was in the details. Eos had forgotten to specify eternal youth for her beloved. For him, the years pass in real time. When loathsome old age begins to weigh upon Tithonus, Eos despairs. In sorrow, she places her aged lover in a chamber behind golden doors where he remains for eternity. There, devoid of memory or even the strength to move, Tithonus babbles on endlessly. In some versions, Tithonus shrivels into a cicada, whose monotonous song is a never-ending plea for death.19

  FIG. 3.1. Eos (Dawn) pursuing Tithonus, Attic red-figure cup, Penthesilea Painter, 470–460 BC, inv. 1836,0224.82. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

  Gods and goddesses, forever young and glamorous, were believed to grieve over the death of their children conceived with mortals. In the myth, Eos and Tithonus had a son, Memnon. The Ethiopian ally of the Trojans in the legendary Trojan War, Memnon fought courageously against the Greek hero Achilles. Memnon was killed. The dewdrops that appear at dawn were said to be the tears of Eos, mourning for her son. Zeus took pity on Eos and granted her plea that Memnon would live eternally on Mount Olympus. This time, Eos remembered to request that her son would remain as young as he was at the moment of his death.20

  Just as mortals regret their own mortality, the gods regret the mortality of their human favorites. But gods are especially averse to the natural progression of old age and decrepitude, particularly in their human lovers. In Homer’s Odyssey, mentioned above, the nymph Calypso complained bitterly that the other gods begrudged happiness to goddesses like her and Eos who fall in love with mortal men. In the archaic Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the goddess of love herself callously takes leave of her own mortal lover Anchises. “I would not choose to have you be immortal and suffer the fate of Tithonus,” Aphrodite explains to Anchises. “If only you could retain your present appearance and stature, then we could remain together. But soon savage old age will overtake you—ruthless old age, which we gods despise as so dreadful, so wearying.”21

  FIG. 3.2. Eos (Tesan) and Tithonus (Tinthun), Etruscan bronze mirror, fourth century BC, inv. 1949,0714.1. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

  Itself ageless, the Tithonus myth has been immortalized by artists and poets over millennia. Early modern artists tend to emphasize the contrast between the white-haired oldster and the ever-rosy Dawn.22 But the myth’s darker message is the focus in the ancient Greek illustrations. Vase painters depicted the young musician nervously fleeing capture by the lustful Eos, as though he already senses how the story must end. Love matches between pitiless gods and mere mortals end tragically. A similar foreboding affected the young maiden Marpessa, who was wooed by the handsome god Apollo and by a mortal named Idas. In that myth, Idas and Apollo fought for her hand, but Zeus allowed the girl to chose between the suitors. Marpessa chose Idas because she knew that Apollo would desert her in old age (Apollodorus Library 1.7.8).

  FIG. 3.3. Tithonus turning into a cicada, engraving, Michel de Marolles, Tableaux du Temple des Muses (Paris, 1655). HIP / Art Resource, NY.

  A fragment of a verse by the great poet Sappho (ca. 630–570 BC) written on scraps of papyrus was deciphered in 2004. The verse is known as the Tithonus or old age poem. Lamenting that she is growing old and gray, Sappho recalls the myth of Tithonus and urges younger songstresses to revel in their music while they may. Along similar lines, in the first century BC, the Roman poet Horace refers to the misery of Tithonus and other would-be immortals in his ode (1.28) warning of the perils and the false allure of immortality, which “entails a fate worse than death.” Many centuries later, in a poem penned in 1859, Alfred Lord Tennyson imagined the heartbroken Tithonus, consumed by the cruel curse of immortality, not only exiled by his unnatural longevity from his beloved’s embrace but cast out of humanity. A senescent Tithonus, a pitiful shadow of a man isolated by dementia, is attended by young Eos in a haunting poem by Alicia E. Stallings (“Tithonus,” Archaic Smile, 1999). This depressing myth about the “horror of aging” would have been forgotten thousands of years ago if the message did not somehow give people subconscious comfort about the inevitability of death, declares Aubrey de Grey, a gerontologist who seeks limitless rejuvenation through futuristic science.23

  In the Homeric imagination, gods and goddesses remained youthful and vital forever because of their special diet. They were sustained by ambrosia and nectar, which produced ethereal ichor instead of blood. Ambrosia (the term derives from a Sanskrit word for “undying”) was also a protective and rejuvenating body lotion used by goddesses (Homer Iliad 14.170). In the Odyssey (18.191–96), Aphrodite gives Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, “immortal gifts” including ambrosia to maintain her youthful beauty. As with the mysterious “waters of life,” the actual composition of ambrosia and nectar was never specified. Deities could give ambrosia to mortals to make them invulnerable, as Thetis attempted with her son, Achilles (above) or to confer agelessness and/or immortality on chosen humans, as was done for Heracles (chapter 2). An intriguing fragment of a poem by Ibycus (sixth century BC), preserved by Aelian (On Animals 6.51), refers to an ancient story about Zeus rewarding the humans who tattled on Prometheus “with a drug to ward off old age.” About a thousand years later, the poet Nonnus (Dionysiaca 7.7) cynically complained that Prometheus should have stolen the nectar of the gods instead of fire.

  Tantalus was another figure who was eternally punished for misdeeds against the gods. One of his crimes was his attempt to steal divine ambrosia and nectar to give to humans to make them immortal (Pindar Olympian 1.50). It is interesting that the mythic key to eternal yo
uth and life was nutrition: the gods had a special diet of life-giving food and drink. Notably, nutrition is the most basic common denominator that distinguished living from nonliving things in Aristotle’s biological system. Hoping to unravel the mysteries of longevity, Aristotle investigated aging, senescence, decay, and death in his treatises Youth and Old Age, Life and Death, and Short and Long Lifespans. Aristotle’s scientific theories about aging concluded that senescence is controlled by reproduction, regeneration, and diet. The philosopher noted that sterile or continent creatures live longer than those that drain energy in sexual activity. Perhaps it is no surprise that modern life-extension researchers also focus on nutrition and caloric restriction. And Aristotle would be gratified to learn that there is indeed an evolutionary trade-off between longevity and reproduction, and that long-term modern studies suggest that sexual abstinence can add years to individuals’ life spans.24

  In all the iterations of the Tithonus myth, ancient and modern, the final image of the once-vital singer is one of lost dignity. His awful fate—“life detested but death denied”—casts a heavy shadow over the practical and spiritual problems of stretching human life spans far beyond natural limits, thanks to advances in medicine.25 As Sophocles remarked in his play Electra, “Death is a debt all of us must pay.” Echoing the prescience of Greek mythology, more than two millennia ago the philosopher Plato had Socrates argue that it is wrong to keep people alive when they can no longer function. Medicine, Socrates asserts, should be used only to treat curable diseases and to heal wounds, not to prolong a person’s life beyond its proper time (Republic 405a–409e). Today, however, rejuvenation researchers and optimistic transhumanists believe that science can make death optional. Modern immortalists look forward to living indefinitely through utopian diets, medicine, and advanced biotechne, merging humans and machines or uploading brains into the Cloud (and its technological progeny).26

  But human cells are naturally programmed to age and expire; bodies have evolved to be disposable vessels for transmitting genes from one generation to the next. This fact is recognized by scientists as the “Tithonus dilemma,” namely, the consequences of longevity without health and vigor. The dilemma plagues the project of keeping people alive indefinitely without their bodies and brains succumbing to age and cellular decay, like Eos’s tragic lover in the myth. Aubrey de Grey believes that modern humans need to overcome what he calls the “Tithonus error,” the humble acquiescence to aging and death. To counter the Tithonus dilemma, he founded SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Research Foundation in 2009, with the mission of supporting scientific innovations to bypass or switch off the natural decrepitude of cells as death is increasingly postponed. Failure raises the specter of a future dystopia populated by myriad transhuman Tithonus-like wraiths, a prospect even more hellish than the Homeric Underworld of gibbering ghosts.27

  Tithonus embodies a stark tale: for human beings, excessive life, inappropriate or unseemly survival—living too long—could be more horrifying and tragic than dying too soon. Living forever robs memories of human meaning, just as surely as a life cut too short precludes a store of memories. The Tithonus story and similar myths give voice to anxieties about “overliving,” continuing to exist beyond what should mark a natural death. As we saw, overliving also concerned ancient philosophers. Those who overlive become superannuated, obsolete, pitiable. Even agelessness—eternal youth—offers no solace. This idea suffuses Anne Rice’s influential modern gothic novels The Vampire Chronicles (1976–2016) and the film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013, Jim Jarmusch). The immortal, ever-youthful vampires are lost, wandering souls who grow more world-weary, more jaded and bored with each passing millennium.28

  Overliving, overreaching: a host of myths and legends reveal the folly of seeking immortality. But if turning back old age and postponing natural death were unreasonable and forbidden, as Medea cautioned Jason (chapter 2), then could mortals at least hope to somehow enhance their physical capabilities—which are so paltry compared to those of the gods? Even some unthinking animals enjoy more magnificent powers than do weak, vulnerable human beings. Another thought-provoking body of Greek myths about artificial life investigates whether biotechne might be used to “upgrade” nature and somehow engineer hyperhuman powers.

  CHAPTER 4

  BEYOND NATURE

  ENHANCED POWERS BORROWED

  FROM GODS AND ANIMALS

  HOW DID HUMANS come to be weaker and more vulnerable than wild beasts? As Plato recounted the story, human beings were stinted because it was left to a committee of two to distribute the abilities of earthly creatures (Protagoras 320c–322b). After the creation of humans and animals, the gods put two Titans, Prometheus and his younger brother Epimetheus, in charge of allocating capabilities. Epimetheus (“Afterthought”) was not as wise as his brother Prometheus (“Forethought”). Epimetheus begged to have the privilege of assigning various powers, promising that Prometheus could then inspect his work.

  Epimetheus began sorting out the natures of animals of land, sea, and sky. He was so absorbed in the task of ensuring their survival, with gifts of speed, strength, agility, camouflage, fur, feathers, scales, keen eyesight and hearing, superb sense of smell, wings, fangs, venoms, talons, hooves, and horns, that he absentmindedly used up all the abilities on nonreasoning creatures. With a start, he realized that there was nothing left for the naked, defenseless humans, just as his brother Prometheus arrived to inspect the creatures—and on the very day they were destined to emerge on earth.1

  “Desperate to find some means of survival for the human race,” Prometheus stole the powers of technical skills, speech, and fire from the gods to bestow on the weak mortals, so that the men and women could at least make tools and figure out how to compensate for their pitiful capabilities. As Brett Rogers and Benjamin Stevens point out in their comparative study of classical Greco-Roman literature and modern science fiction, the myth of Prometheus can be read as an early “explanatory account and as a symbol for the ongoing human relationship to technology,” an example of “speculative fiction” conceived by an ancient culture not usually seen as “techno-scientific.” The gifts bestowed by Prometheus represent the first “human enhancements,” defined as “attempts to temporarily or permanently overcome limitations of the human body by natural or artificial means.”2

  As the Greek myth tells us, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to perpetual pain, commanding his Eagle to devour the Titan’s liver every day. But the Titan’s gifts to humanity keep on giving, with potential for both positive and worrisome ramifications. “Technology makes up for our absurd frailty,” comments Patrick Lin, a philosopher who studies the ethics of robotics, AI, and human enhancement technologies (HET). “We naked apes couldn’t survive at all if it weren’t for our tool-making intellect and resourcefulness.” Today, human enhancements such as visual and hearing aids, titanium joints, pacemakers, stimulants, and bionic prosthetics are commonplace and welcomed.3 But controversies arise over some human improvements and supernatural enhancements slated for questionable uses. People start to worry when, for example, military scientists seek to make soldiers “more than human” through drugs, implants, exoskeletons like the TALOS project (chapter 1), human-machine hybrids, neurorobotics, and by replicating the enviable powers of animals. As Lin and his colleagues warn, multiple practical and moral risks swarm around modern attempts to “upgrade” the bodies of humans and to develop augmented soldiers, military androids, cyborg creatures, drones, and robot-AI auxiliaries.4 By now, it will come as no surprise that the outlines of some of those quandaries were foreshadowed in ancient Greek times.

  Techne combined with intellect and audacity—these are the unique gifts that human beings rely on to survive in the world. This ancient Greek understanding was beautifully summarized by the playwright Sophocles (Antigone 332–71). “Humans are formidable,” declared Sophocles, for no other creatures have the skills and daring to navigate the stormy seas, plow the earth, tame horses and oxen,
hunt and fish, devise laws and make war, and build and rule cities; no other creatures have the facilities of language and “wind-swift thought” of “all-resourceful” humans, ceaselessly contriving ways to escape the forces of nature. “Skillful beyond hope is the contrivance of humans’ inventive arts (mechanoen technas) which advances them sometimes to evil and other times to good.”5

  In the myths about Medea, Jason, and the legendary inventor Daedalus we find the earliest records of how humans desired to exceed and augment human powers, to create unnatural forms of life, and to harness artificial beings—including animal replicas. As we have seen, Prometheus suffers eternal punishment for giving mortals tools and fire, and Tantalus pays forever for stealing ambrosia for humans. Now, let us take a look at another myth of human enhancement, in which the cunning wizard Medea manages to make off with a quantity of divine ichor, to help Jason defend himself against superior deadly forces.