Modern humans weren't the first to dream up robots and artificial beings, and not the first to worry about the consequences of creating them.
, Homer tells of how Hephaestus fashioned handmaids of gold to help him in his forge. Earlier stories tell of another of Hephaestus’s creations, Talos, a giant mechanical man made of bronze who was, Mayor writes, “the first ‘robot’ to walk the earth.“ Talos tirelessly patrolled the shores of Crete to protect the island from invasion.
Talos’s role was to protect humans. But another of Hephaestus’s artificial life forms was intended for just the opposite purpose. After the Titan Prometheus had given mortals the gift of fire, Zeus was enraged. To exact revenge on mortals for accepting this gift, he commissioned Hephaestus to make from clay a beautiful woman, Pandora — an enchanting creation Mayor calls a “fem-bot.” Pandora was sent to earth, along with a jar , to be wife to Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus.
Wiley Zeus, however, had already instructed her to open the jar. When she finally did, all the ills that beset humanity — sickness, old age, insanity, famine — and all manner of suffering and troubles flew out.Though gods and magic were often involved in creations such as Talos and Pandora, Mayor argues that these ancient robots were not called into being simply by the fiat of a god.
Today, our robots are real. But we’re still working out a lot of “what ifs” — and these ancient myths can help us to do that. Mayor compares Stephen Hawking and others who have warned us of the risks of artificial intelligence to Prometheus, who warned of the dangers of accepting gifts from the gods. But that warning has been there all along; we just need to read the old myths to find it.
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