Gods and Robots

by Adrienne Mayor

  25. Definition, Truitt 2015a, 2. Ancient Greek automata as “self-moving,” Aristotle Movement of Animals 701b.

  26. This quote is from Berryman 2007, 36; Aristotle on natural and unnatural life, 36–39.

  27. Truitt 2015b, commenting on Cohen 1963.

  28. The myths of Pandora, Talos, the Golden Maidens, and other androids “distinguish these simulations, these artificial ‘humans’ from organic, natural life forms by the composition of the body,” not necessarily by “mechanistic” qualities. “Artificial life, in these myths, is made of the same substances” and methods “that human craftsmen use to make tools, buildings, and artworks” and statues. As with robots today, their functions are “labor, defense, and sex.” Raphael 2015, 186. See Berryman 2009, 49 and n119, techne is better translated as science rather than art.

  29. Popular links between metalworking and magic are widespread: Blakely 2006; Truitt 2015b; Truitt 2015a, guarding borders, 62–63; Faraone 1992, 19 and 29n11, 18–35. Weinryb 2016, 109, 128–34.

  30. Blakely 2006, 81, 209. Weinryb 2016, 153, 53–54, 154–56. Clarke 1973, 14, 21, 36.

  31. On the history of ancient Greek belief in the agency of statues, Bremmer 2013.

  32. Blakely 2006, 210–12.

  33. Cook 1914, 1:723–24; Buxton 2013, 86–87; Weinryb 2016, 4–7, 14, 44–52.

  34. Lost-wax process: Mattusch 1975; Hodges 1970, 127–29. Bronze techniques using wax and clay models, Hemingway and Hemingway 2003. Wooden armatures, see chapter 6. Realistic bronze statues from plaster casts of humans, chapter 5 and Konstam and Hoffmann 2004.

  35. Raphael 2015, 187. Berryman 2009, 27. Mayor 2007; Mayor 2016.

  36. Apollonius (Hunter trans.) 2015, 300; Raphael 2015, 183–84;. Aristotle on automata, puppets, biology, physiology, and mechanics, Leroi 2014, 172–73, 199–202. De Groot 2008.

  37. Ichor: Homer Iliad 5.364–82. “Talos in fact has ichor, rather than blood in his vein,” although we “should perhaps not enquire too closely as to what flowed in Talos’s vein,” notes R. Hunter trans., Apollonius 2015, 189, 300, 304. Ichor in myth and medical treatises, Buxton 2013, 94–96.

  38. Bloodletting was thought to have beneficial value in healing various ailments. Hippocrates On the Nature of Man 11; Aristotle History of Animals 512b 12–26. Bloodletting is depicted on the Peytal Aryballos, 480 BC, Louvre. Buxton 2013, 93. The location of Talos’s weak point, the ankle, conforms to the trope of vulnerability associated with feet, e.g., Achilles’s heel and Oedipus’s lame foot.

  39. Plutarch Moralia 5.7.680C–83B; Dickie 1990 and 1991; Apollonius (Hunter trans.) 2015, 6, 302. On bronze and evil eye, Weinryb 2016, 131–33. Examples of realistic painted and inlaid bronze statues, Brinkmann and Wünsche 2007.

  40. Truitt 2015a and b. Kang 2011, 22–25, 65–66. Buxton 2013, 74. Gray 2015. “In-betweenness” of Pandora, chapter 8 and Francis 2009, 14–15. In a sense, Talos could be said to have “narrow” or Type I reactive AI (see glossary). On the “Uncanny Valley” effect of realistic artificial life, see chapter 5; and Lin, Abney, and Bekey 2014, 25–26.

  41. Newman 2014. The myth of Talos as an invincible ancient security system underlies the name of the “world’s largest hub of security intelligence” working “tirelessly to identify and counter cyber-crime attacks,” called Talos, maintained by Cisco Systems, since 2008. http://www.talosintelligence.com/about/.

  42. Kang 2011, 65. On modern concerns about the ethics of replacing human judges with AI, see Bhorat 2017. Lin 2015; Lin, Abney, and Bekey 2014, 53, 60, and chapters 4 and 5. Thanks to Norton Wise for valuable suggestions on these questions. Spenser’s Iron Knight, Talus, was named for the mythic Talos but may have been modeled in part on Leonardo da Vinci’s robotic knight in armor (ca. 1495) clad in heavy medieval armor and powered by pulleys, cranks, gears, and levers.

  43. See chapter 9 for ancient Persian “batteries.” Ambrosino 2017. Shtulman 2017, 53–56.

  44. Tenn 1958. Talos served as “a primitive home alarm system,” Mendelsohn 2015.

  45. Garten and Dean 1982, 118. Talos missiles were decommissioned in 1980. Talos in the Harryhausen film of 1963 also combined preprogrammed “brawn” with “brains.” Winkler 2007, 462–63.

  46. History of efforts to create military robotics, Jacobsen 2015 and Tyagi 2018. Nissenbaum 2014. SOCOM TALOS project renewed its official call for proposals in December 2017–18.

  CHAPTER 2. MEDEA’S CAULDRON OF REJUVENATION

  1. Ovid Metamorphoses 7.159–293.

  2. Nostoi frag. 7, and Medea’s plot against Pelias in the lost play by Sophocles, Rhizotomoi, “Root-Cutters,” see Gantz 1993, 1:191, 367; some accounts indicate that she placed Aeson in the boiling kettle. Godwin 1876, 41.

  3. Medea’s rejuvenation plan in the Aeschylus play, according to scholia on Euripides Medea, see Denys Page, ed., Euripides, Medea (Oxford, 1938). Diodorus Siculus 4.78 on the revivifying effects of the steam bath invented by Daedalus. New technologies often misconstrued, Hawes 2014, 59–60; on Palaephatus and his date, see 37–91 and 227–38. Aristotle on metabolism, aging, and life spans, Leroi 2014, 260–65.

  4. Ovid Metamorphoses 7.159–293; Clauss and Johnston 1997, 33–34; Godwin 1876, 41; Newlands 1997, 186–92. Only mercury corrupts gold. Maluf 1954. Exchange transfusions are lifesaving procedures for sickle-cell anemia and blood diseases of newborns. Blood exchange parabiosis experiments, in which young blood is transfused into an older body, Friend 2017, 60–61. Older mouse tissues were rejuvenated but the young donor mice aged faster.

  5. Psamtik’s suicide by drinking bull’s blood, Herodotus 3.15.4; Plutarch Themistocles 31; and Midas, see Strabo 1.3.21. Stormorken 1957.

  6. See “Ruse of the Talismanic Statue,” Faraone 1992, 100–104.

  7. Faraone 1992, 100.

  8. Quotes from Diodorus Siculus 4.50–52; other sources include Pindar Pythian 4.138–67; 4.249–50; Apollonius of Rhodes Argonautica 4.241–43; Apollodorus Library 1.9.27–28; Ovid Metamorphoses 7.159–351; Pausanias 8.11.2–3; Hyginus Fabulae 21–24. A lost play of 455 BC by Euripides, Peliades, dramatized this myth. Gantz 1993, 1:365–68. Medea’s transformation mirrors the goddesses’ use of ambrosia as a rejuvenating salve, Homer Iliad 14.170 and Odyssey18.188.

  9. Diodorus Siculus (4.52.2) suggests that Medea hypnotized the daughters and created the illusion (eidolon) of a young lamb emerging from the pot.

  10. Examples include an Etruscan olpe, Oriental style, ca. 630 BC with incised image of Medea inscribed “Metaia,” black bucchero, from Caere (Cerveteri), Museo Archeologico Nazionale inv. 110976; de Grummond 2006, 4–6 and fig. 1.7. Two black-figure vases from Vulci show Medea and a ram in the cauldron in the British Museum, B 221 and B 328; black-figure vase has similar images by the Leagros Group, in the Harvard University Art Museum, 1960.315.

  11. Red-figure krater in Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1970.567; red-figure vase from Vulci, ca. 470 BC, British Museum E 163. Woodford 2003, 80–83, fig. 54, red-figure cup, 440 BC, Vatican Museum.

  12. Dolly was cloned from an adult cell (cows had previously been cloned) by the Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh. Dolly and other cloned sheep in the project died of a fatal contagious virus, but a 2016 study by Sinclair et al. of Dolly’s skeletal remains (stored in the National Museum of Scotland) did not reveal evidence of premature aging of her bones. http://www.roslin.ed.ac.uk/public-interest/dolly-the-sheep/a-life-of-dolly/.

  13. Buddhist perspectives on replicating life and cloning, see Han 2017, 67.

  14. Apollodorus Epitome 5.5; scholiast on Apollonius Argonautica 4.815. Medea contemplates suicide in Argonautica 3.800–815.

  15. On promotions of mortals to immortality, Hansen 2004, 271–73. Iolaus: Pindar Pythian 9.137; Euripides Heraclidae.

  16. Ovid Metamorphoses 7.171–78; Newlands 1997, 186–87. In Homer’s Odyssey 7.259, the witch-nymph Calypso’s offer of immortality to Odysseus was seen as “irrational” by the skeptic Heraclitus: Hawes 2014, 96. See chapter 3 for that story.

  17. Chiron,
Apollodorus Library 2.5.4.

  18. Dioscuri, Apollodorus Library 3.11.2.

  CHAPTER 3. THE QUEST FOR IMMORTALITY AND ETERNAL YOUTH

  1. Mayor 2016. “Cheating Death” 2016. Raphael 2015, 192–93. Boissoneault 2017. Blade Runner was loosely adapted from the science-fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968). In Jo Walton’s science-fiction novel set in antiquity, The Just City (2015), 254, 300, robot-slaves are punished by having their memories deleted. In the popular TV series Westworld (HBO, 2016 premiere) the androids’ memories are swept clean each day.

  2. Lefkowitz 2003, 90–91. Reeve 2017. Rogers and Stevens 2015, 221–22.

  3. Aristotle (On the Soul 2.2.413a21–25) defines a living thing as able to take in nutrition (lowest common denominator) and to change (plants), capable of movement, motivation or desire, and perception (animals), and, for humans, having the added capacity for thought. For Aristotle, plants and animals change, but artificial artifacts cannot change. Steiner 2001, 95. Exceptions include Hephaestus, who is lame and hardworking; see chapter 7.

  4. The Titan Prometheus is an exception—his aid to humans entailed high-stakes risks, and his immortality would be part of the punishment. John Gray’s Soul of the Marionette (2015) explores human freedom and immortality through the lens of Gnosticism.

  5. Cave 2012, 6–7, 202, 205–9. Gilgamesh and immortality, Eliade 1967. Amazons die as heroes, Mayor 2014, 28–29.

  6. Colarusso 2016, 11.

  7. Hansen 2002, 387–89. Human life span of 120 years, Zimmer 2016.

  8. Pindar cited by Pausanias 9.22.7; Plato Republic 611d; Ovid Metamorphoses 13.904–65. Palaephatus 27 Glaukos of the Sea. Glaukos, Hyginus Fabulae 136; Apollodorus Library 3.3.1–2.

  9. Alexander Romance traditions, Stoneman 2008, 94, 98–100, 146–47; 150–69. Aerts 2014, 498, 521.

  10. In the Classic of Mountain and Seas, Birrell 1999, 241.

  11. Mercury fumes can be lethal but ingestion is not. Qin Shi Huang: Kaplan 2015, 53–59; Cooper 1990, 13–28; 44–45.

  12. Alexander quotes Homer Iliad 5.340. The story appears in Plutarch Moralia 341b, Moralia 180e, and Plutarch Alexander 28, among others. Buxton 2013, 95–96.

  13. Homer Odyssey 24.5.

  14. Stoneman 2008, 152–53.

  15. Gantz 1993, 1:154–56. Apollodorus Library 1.7, 2.5.4. Hard 2004, 271. Kaplan 2015, 24–28. Simons 1992, 27. Hyginus (Astronomica 2.15) says the torment lasted 30,000 years, elsewhere 30 years. Strabo (11.5.5) says 1,000 years. Liver regeneration is reflected in Chinese folklore in the utopian figure of shih-jou, a mound of meat that looks like ox liver and can never be completely consumed because it regenerates, Birrell 1999, 237.

  16. Heracles and the Hydra, Hard 2004, 258. Mayor 2009, 41–49.

  17. Hansen 2002, 36–38. Felton 2001, 83–84.

  18. Sisyphus: Apollodorus Library 1.9.3–5 and Frazer’s note 3, Loeb ed., pp. 78–79; Homer Odyssey 11.593–600; scholiasts on Homer Iliad 1.180 and 6.153; Pherecydes FGrH 3 F 119.

  19. Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 218–38; Apollodorus Library 3.12.4 and Frazer’s note 4, Loeb ed., pp. 43–44. In antiquity, cicadas were associated with renewed youth and living forever, sloughing off old skin and emerging anew. Tithonus and Eos in classical art and literature, Gantz 1993, 1:36–37. Woodford 2003, 60–61. Lefkowitz 2003, 38–39.

  20. Hansen 2004, 222, 273. Cohen 1966, 15, 16, 24.

  21. Hansen 2004, 269–73. Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 239–48.

  22. Eos and Tithonus in medieval and modern arts, Reid 1993, 1:386–88.

  23. Sappho’s Tithonus poem, West 2005, 1–9. D’Angour (2003) discusses Horace’s ode in view of Pythagorean notions. Tennyson’s “Tithonus,” Wilson 2004, 214n78. Ageless longevity is a universal theme in the folklore of utopias, Stoneman 2008, 99–100; 153–54. De Grey 2008 and 2007. In the final novel of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995, 1997, 2000), God himself is revealed as a “twittering ghost.”

  24. Leroi 2014, 260–65. Friend 2017, link between sexual abstinence and extending life, 65. Named for the mythic afterlife of heroes, “Elysium” health supplements aim to guarantee “overliving”: https://www.fastcompany.com/3041800/one-of-the-worlds-top-aging-researchers-has-a-pill-to-keep-you-feeling-young.

  25. “Life detested,” Woodford 2003, 60. On anxiety ancient and modern about technoculture’s threat to “human finitude” and “humanity,” Cusack 2008, 232.

  26. Cave 2012. Friend 2017. Harari 2017, 21–43. Buddhist transhumanism, Mori 2012; Borody 2013. What is the limit for human longevity? Scientists debate this controversial question; some findings suggest that the maximum life span with current technology is about 115–20 years: Zimmer 2016.

  27. “The disposable soma” springs the “trap of Tithonus”: “Cheating Death” 2016 and “Longevity” 2016. Liu 2011, 242–43. Richardson 2013. Kaplan 2015, 68–73. Cave 2012, 64, 67–71. Friend 2017, 56–57; de Grey 2007, 8 and 379n2; de Grey 2008, “global nursing home.”

  28. The replicants of Blade Runner die too soon, before they can become human, Raphael 2015. Talos, Buxton 2013, 78. The ancient Greek concept of living too long is explored through the mythic figures of Oedipus and Heracles and Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Lear in Wilson 2004, 2, 207nn2–3, 214.

  CHAPTER 4. BEYOND NATURE: ENHANCED POWERS BORROWED FROM GODS AND ANIMALS

  1. Plato’s legend and pre-Socratic writings, Gantz 1993, 1:166. Plato Protagoras 320d–321e. The etymologies are Plato’s, accepted in antiquity. In some ancient traditions, it was Prometheus who made the first humans and animals; see chapter 6 and Tassarini 1992, 61–62, 78–80.

  2. Rogers and Stevens 2015, 1–3. On modern “Human Enhancement Technologies [HET],” see Lin 2012 and 2015. Martinho-Truswell 2018 points out that many creatures use tools, but humans are the only animals who “automate” tools, and the impulse is at least as old as the first atlatl and bow and arrow.

  3. Prosthetics in ancient myth and history: James and Thorpe 1994, 36–37: LaGrandeur 2013. Zarkadakis 2015, 79–82.

  4. Lin 2012; Patrick Lin is director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group, California Polytechnic State University. History of religious qualms about artificial human enhancements and robots: Simons 1992, 28–32.

  5. Ancient technology, Brunschwig and Lloyd 2000, 486–94.

  6. Gantz 1993, 1:359–63. Medea collecting the Promethean drug from the gore of his liver was taken up by later authors: Propertius Elegies 1.12; Seneca Medea 705; Valerius Flaccus Argonautica 7.352. The ichor of the primeval giants killed by the gods spilled into the ground, causing evil-smelling springs, a belief reported by Strabo 6.3.5.

  7. Apollonius, Argonautica 3.835–69; 3.1026–45; 3.1246–83. Pindar, Pythian 4.220–42. The tasks set for Jason by Aeetes were dramatized by Sophocles in his lost play Colchides (“The Colchians”), probably the source for Apollonius, Gantz 1993, 1:358–61.

  8. Zarkadakis 2015, 79–82. Harari 2017, 289–91. See Lin 2012, 2015; for a series of reports and articles on the grave ethical issues surrounding “supersoldiers” and cyber weapons and enhancing fighters through technology and drugs, see Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group, http://ethics.calpoly.edu/he.htm. Research on neurocomputer technology to delete thoughts threatens mental integrity and cognitive liberty, Ienca and Andorno 2017.

  9. The fire-breathing bulls episode also appears in Pindar Pythian 4.224–50 (ca. 462 BC), Shapiro 1994, 94–96.

  10. Apollonius Argonautica 3.401–21; 3.492–535; 3.1035–62; 3.1170–1407. Godwin 1876, 41. This tactic is the same one that saved the hero Cadmus in Thebes. In that myth, Cadmus casts rocks among the Spartoi, “Sown Men,” who spring up from the planted teeth of another slain dragon. Rationalizing of the sown men, Hawes 2014, 140–41, 146.

  11. Mayor 2016.

  12. Mayor 2009, 193–94; Stoneman 2008, 77; Aerts 2014, 255.

  13. Mayor 2009, 235–36, fig. 39, illustration of Alexander’s fire-breathing iron riders and horses on wheels in Firdowsi’s Shahnama manuscri
pt of Great Il-Khanid AD 1330–40, Sackler Museum, Harvard University.

  14. It is interesting that Firdowsi’s epic also describes an enchanted castle defended by automaton-archers. A later sixteenth-century illustrated manuscript shows the automatic archer shooting arrows at an invading army from its post on the castle walls; Shahnama by Firdowsi, Moghul, sixteenth-century illustrated MS 607, fol. 12v, Musée Condé, Chantilly, France.

  15. Cusack 2008, on Talos, Nuada, Freyja, and the Hindu Savitr.

  16. Rig Veda 1.13, 1.116–18, 10.39. Prosthetics technologies, Zarkadakis 2015, 79–81.

  17. These and the following archaeological examples of prosthetics, see Nostrand 2015.

  18. James and Thorpe 1994, 36–37. Egyptian toe, Voon 2017. Nostrand 2015. Mori 2012; Borody 2013.

  19. Cohen 1966, 16–18. Morris 1992, 17–35, 244–50; Hawes 2014, 49–53, 207–12; “first inventor motif,” 59–60, 109, 120–21, 210–11, 230–31. First “hero” inventor, Kris and Kurz 1981; “archetypal craftsman,” Berryman 2009, 26. Lane Fox 2009, 186–91. Ancient sources for Daedalus’s works, Pollitt 1990, 13–15. In the Classic of Mountain and Seas, Chinese mythology designates several inventor gods and culture heroes, such as Hsien-yuan, “Cart Shaft,” who first harnessed animals to draw vehicles; Chi Kuang, “Lucky Glare,” inventor of the chariot; Chi’iao Ch’ui, “Skill Weights,” god of inventive technology, Birrell 1999, 205, 220, 239, 256.

  20. Apollodorus Library 3.15.1; Antoninus Liberalis Transformations 41.

  21. Spy in the Wild, BBC-PBS Nature miniseries, 2017, features more than thirty animatronic creatures fitted with cameras to secretly observe animals in nature; the animals accept and interact with the robots, even mourning their “death.” Artistic works that deceive humans and animals in antiquity, Morris 1992, 232, 246. Spivey 1995.

  22. Pornography and automata, Kang 2011, 108, 138–39, 165–66; Lin, Abney, and Bekey 2014, 58, 223–248; Higley 1997. Morris 1992, 246 on erotic interaction with lifelike statues; cf. Hersey 2009 and Wood 2002, 138–39.

  23. Sources for the myth include Palaephatus 2 and 12; Apollodorus Library 3.1.3–4; Hyginus Fabulae 40; Hesiod frag. 145 MW; Bacchylides 26; Euripides’s lost play The Cretans; Sophocles’s lost play Minos; Isocrates 10 Helen 27; Diodorus Siculus 4.77; Ovid Metamorphoses 8.131–33 and 9.736–40; Ovid Ars Amatoria 1.289–326.