The fascinating untold story of the way the ancients imagined robots and other styles of artificial life-and even invented real automated machines

The first robot to walk the planet earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not really by MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. A lot more than 2,500 years ago, long before middle ages automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was discovering ideas about creating about Gods and Robots: Myths, Devices, and Ancient Dreams of Technology artificial life-and grappling with still-unresolved moral issues about biotechne, “existence through art.” Within this compelling, richly illustrated book, Adrienne Mayor tells the fascinating tale of how ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese language common myths envisioned artificial lifestyle, automata, self-moving products, and human being enhancements-and how these visions relate with and reflect the historic invention of actual animated machines.

As soon as Homer, Greeks were imagining robotic servants, animated statues, and even ancient versions of Artificial Intelligence, while in Indian story, Buddha’s precious relics were defended by robot warriors copied from Greco-Roman styles for true automata. Mythic automata appear in stories about Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, Daedalus, Prometheus, and Pandora, and several of these machines are described as being constructed with the same components and strategies that human artisans used to create tools and statues. And, certainly, many sophisticated cartoon devices were in fact built in antiquity, reaching a climax using the creation of a bunch of automata in the historic town of learning, Alexandria, the original Silicon Valley.

A groundbreaking account of the initial expressions of the timeless impulse to create artificial lifestyle, Gods and Robots reveals how a few of today’s most advanced innovations in robotics and AI were foreshadowed in ancient myth-and how science has always been driven by imagination. That is mythology for the age of AI.