Mechanical beasts and where to find them

Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines and Ancient Dreams of Technology. By Adrienne Mayor.Princeton University Press; 288 pages; $29.95 and £24.

AS JASON AND the Argonauts sailed home with the Golden Fleece, they stopped to rest by the island of Crete and found themselves under attack by a giant robot. Designed by the god Hephaestus to protect the realm of King Minos, this bronze android, called Talos, was built to repel invaders by hurling rocks at any foreign ships that approached. The sorceress Medea saved the day, mesmerising the robot using her mind-control powers and then removing a bronze rivet from his ankle, causing the life fluid to drain away.

This ancient myth raises several surprisingly modern-sounding questions about Talos’s nature. He is described as an automaton, a constructed being. Yet if Medea’s mind-control powers affect him, surely that suggests that he has a mind, and is more than a mere machine? Talos is sometimes depicted as a tragic figure, condemned for blindly following his programming, like HAL, the murderous supercomputer in “2001: A Space Odyssey”. His story can also be read as a cautionary tale about the dangers of giving machines the power to kill when they lack the capacity to make moral judgments.

On close inspection, ancient mythology turns out to be chock-full of robots, androids and mechanical creatures. As well as Talos, Hephaestus created a quiver of drone-like arrows that could never miss, a mechanical dog that always caught its prey, a pair of fire-breathing bronze bulls and a fleet of self-driving cauldrons that acted as butlers to the gods, serving them nectar and ambrosia. The “Odyssey” describes autonomous, crewless ships that work in any weather and can find their way to any port. Pygmalion fell in love with an artificial woman he had created. Mechanical beasts and realistic, moving statues were attributed to the mythical inventor Daedalus.

Adrienne Mayor entertainingly re-examines the various versions of these myths that survive in written and visual form and speculates about their origins. Talos may have been inspired by the large stone figures made by the Nuragic people of Sardinia, for example, who were famed metallurgists; Greek statues were painted to look more lifelike, so adding mechanisms to make them move was an obvious next step. Ms Mayor demonstrates how these myths prefigure modern science-fiction stories such as “Metropolis”, “Blade Runner” and “Terminator”, and connects them to modern debates about machine intelligence, autonomous weapons, human augmentation and artificial life. Aristotle pondered the use of machines in place of slaves and the prospect of technological unemployment; Pygmalion built the first sexbot.

The focus is mainly on Greco-Roman sources, though Etruscan, Persian, Hindu and Buddhist stories also make appearances, including the rich medieval tradition of the “Alexander Romance”. A Persian tale tells of a 1,000-strong troop of fire-breathing mechanical cavalry, supposedly built for Alexander the Great at the suggestion of his vizier Arastu (Aristotle) and sent into battle against the war elephants ofPorus of India. Lively digressions on Alexander’s adventures in a diving bell, or on the development of Greco-Roman torture instruments, are entertaining, even if they deviate somewhat from the author’s central theme.

Ms Mayor ends with a survey of actual (rather than mythical) ancient automata built by historical figures such as Heron of Alexandria and Philo of Byzantium, to illustrate how, then as now, speculative narratives and real technologies can co-evolve and inspire each other. The inescapable conclusion is that when it comes to modern debates about robots and machine intelligence, as with so many other things, the Greeks got there first.