The first robot was imagined in Greek mythology more than 2,500 years ago. Talos was a giant bronze automaton fabricated by Hephaestos, the blacksmith god of innovation and technology. Commissioned by Zeus to defend the island kingdom of Crete, ruled by King Minos, Talos actually fits the definition of a robot. Talos was self-moving, with inner workings (an internal “artery”) and a power source (ichor, life-fluid of immortal gods). This vivisystem was sealed with a bolt on his ankle. Half-machine, half-human, Talos marched around the island at high speed three times a day, on the lookout for strangers. “Programmed” with something like Artificial Intelligence, Talos was able to interpret and interact with his surroundings. When he spotted invaders approaching by sea, he hurled boulders to sink the ships. At close range, Talos heated his bronze body red-hot and crushed men to his chest, roasting them alive. In the myth, Jason and the Argonauts were doomed to become victims of Talos when they anchored on Crete. Fortunately for the mythic heroes, the sorceress Medea figured out how to demolish the giant android, with her knowledge of his inner works and a clever guess that the robot had human-like traits. She played on his vulnerabilities—his emotions and the bolt on his ankle. Medea convinced Talos that she could make him immortal, but only if he allowed her to remove the bolt that sealed his internal workings. Unaware of his own nature, susceptible to persuasion, and fearing death, he agreed. When Medea and Jason unsealed the bolt, Talos’s ichor bled out and he was destroyed. The myth of Talos, from the time of Homer, evokes the practical and ethical dilemmas of modern AI. In posing knotty questions about links between tyranny and technology and how to control automatons, the story foreshadows the qualms that surround new AI technologies. Medea’s destruction of Talos shows that robots and AI do not always behave as expected by their builders and users. Like Talos, they might make disastrous decisions on their own. No matter how advanced the technology, there is always the danger of a techno-wizard like Medea hacking the system by exploiting its weaknesses.
Appearance List Science and Literature: Aristotle’s Organon (384 BC–322 BC), Porphyry’s Isagogê (260 AD), Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague claimed invention of the Golem (~1580), Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620), Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1641), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels described the Engine on the island of Laputa (1726), Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine (1750), Thomas Bayes’s An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances (1763), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818), Work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (1822–1859), of Bernard Bolzano (1837) made the first modern attempt to formalize semantics, of George Boole (1854), Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (1913), Leonardo Torres y Quevedo’s chess automaton El Ajedrecista (1915), Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots, 1923), Work of Kurt Gödel (1931), of Alan Mathison Turing (1935), Edward Condon displays Nimatron (1940), Warren Sturgis McCulloch and Walter Pitts publish “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” (1943), Norbert Wiener’s “Cybernetics” (1948), “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (1944), Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” (The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945), Alan Turing proposes the Turing test (1950), Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics (1950), Checkers-playing program by Christopher Strachey and chess-playing program by Dietrich Prinz (1951), The Dartmouth College summer AI conference (1956), Logic Theorist (LT) by Allen Newell, J.C. Shaw and Herbert A. Simon (1956), John McCarthy invented Lisp (1958), Teddington Conference on the Mechanization of Thought Processes (1958), etc. Podcast: Astonishing Legends: Episode 237-238 I Think Therefore AI
Sample Read Astonishing Legends: Episode 237 I Think Therefore AI Part 1 [YT]
Description The first robot was imagined in Greek mythology more than 2,500 years ago. Talos was a giant bronze automaton fabricated by Hephaestos, the blacksmith god of innovation and technology. Commissioned by Zeus to defend the island kingdom of Crete, ruled by King Minos, Talos actually fits the definition of a robot. Talos was self-moving, with inner workings (an internal “artery”) and a power source (ichor, life-fluid of immortal gods). This vivisystem was sealed with a bolt on his ankle. Half-machine, half-human, Talos marched around the island at high speed three times a day, on the lookout for strangers. “Programmed” with something like Artificial Intelligence, Talos was able to interpret and interact with his surroundings. When he spotted invaders approaching by sea, he hurled boulders to sink the ships. At close range, Talos heated his bronze body red-hot and crushed men to his chest, roasting them alive. In the myth, Jason and the Argonauts were doomed to become victims of Talos when they anchored on Crete. Fortunately for the mythic heroes, the sorceress Medea figured out how to demolish the giant android, with her knowledge of his inner works and a clever guess that the robot had human-like traits. She played on his vulnerabilities—his emotions and the bolt on his ankle. Medea convinced Talos that she could make him immortal, but only if he allowed her to remove the bolt that sealed his internal workings. Unaware of his own nature, susceptible to persuasion, and fearing death, he agreed. When Medea and Jason unsealed the bolt, Talos’s ichor bled out and he was destroyed. The myth of Talos, from the time of Homer, evokes the practical and ethical dilemmas of modern AI. In posing knotty questions about links between tyranny and technology and how to control automatons, the story foreshadows the qualms that surround new AI technologies. Medea’s destruction of Talos shows that robots and AI do not always behave as expected by their builders and users. Like Talos, they might make disastrous decisions on their own. No matter how advanced the technology, there is always the danger of a techno-wizard like Medea hacking the system by exploiting its weaknesses.
