Is the concept of artificial intelligence really that modern? John Markoff sat down with 2018-19 CASBS fellow and historian Adrienne Mayor to discuss Ancient Greek notions of robots and manufactured life.
"Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology"
Adrienne Mayor’s piece on the ancient roots of the uncanny valley - Time
HAL 9000 from "2001: A Space Odyssey"
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
@casbsstanford on twitter
Narrator: When you think of ancient Greece, what comes to mind? For most of us, it's marble and bronze statues, ornate urns, classical architecture, togas, and wine. Or maybe it's philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, the invention of democracy, or vengeful gods and colorful mythology. But how many of us would say science fiction, artificial intelligence, cyborgs, and manufactured life. From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. Our current media is saturated with stories of futuristic robots often responsible for saving or destroying humanity. Today, people speak as if it were a foregone conclusion that these artificial beings are right around the corner. But classicist Adrienne Mayor says we're not the first to this conversation. Her recent book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, explores the untold story of how ancient Greeks imagined robots and other forms of artificial life. Host John Markoff sat down with Adrienne Mayor to explore the similarities between ancient Greece, Silicon Valley, and how each envisioned manufactured life.
John Markoff: Let me start with a question I had from— I have read the beginning and the end of your book, and I've gone through—
Adrienne Mayor: That's what I always expect people to do, so—
John Markoff: to be honest. But one of the first things I looked for was Gollum. And Gollum's only in a footnote, and so why did you stay away from Gollum? Because everybody else deals with Gollum?
Adrienne Mayor: No, Gollum is a medieval legend, and there is a fine book on medieval automatons by E.R. Truitt. Her book is called Medieval Robots, and I'm sure she must cover that. I'm covering antiquity. Most historians of science trace the beginnings of automatons and robots and making artificial life, those kind of things, just even the concepts and then the actual constructions back to the Middle Ages. But for my book and my project, I wondered whether the concepts actually, the ideas about making, creating artificial life, automatons, self-moving objects, robots, what if those ideas could be imagined long before the technology even existed or was feasible? So I went all the way back to Homeric times, 2,700 years ago, and I found a lot of evidence for that. So I don't, I stop after the Hellenistic period. I take it up to about the 1st century AD or BC.
John Markoff: And do you think then that the roots of the Golemic stuff lie— would you— did it get reinvented, or is there parallel, or were there linkages?
Adrienne Mayor: I don't ever look for the Ur-myth or folklore that is dispersed around the world. I'm a big believer in parallel development, independent development, and I think the tendency to want to create artificial life is pretty universal and pretty timeless. I've found a lot of evidence here. That's what I've been doing this year is looking for comparative folklore and mythology around the world of ideas of creating artificial life in antiquity. So I have evidence from China and India as well.
John Markoff: You know, I only went as— when I was looking for antecedents, I only went as far as Gollum, but then I did stumble across some Hindu myths mythology that seemed to predate—
Adrienne Mayor: Well, I found a— I published in The Conversation this legend about Buddha's relics, his bodily remains, being protected by robotic warriors. It's a legend that goes all the way back to the time of Buddha's death, so I wrote that up.
John Markoff: Congress defensive weapons.
Adrienne Mayor: Yes, and that they were defeated by King Ashoka, the great king of the Mauryan Empire. So I don't think it's unique to the ancient Greeks, it's just that we have a lot of material from ancient Greece and Rome. And I have one more thing to say about the golem. One thing I focus on in my book, just for a definition, is that I want to distinguish between inert matter or things that are suddenly brought to life by a god or a magical spell, And I think that the Golem falls into that category. It's a series of letters or words, or sacred words, that bring the Golem to life. And I'm looking for entities, robots, automatons, self-moving objects that are described as made through biotechnē, which is a Greek word for life through craft. That there's some kind of idea of technology that goes into it. So I'm looking at all of the creations, fabrications by the god of innovation and technology, Hephaestus. And there are similar gods in Hindu mythology. Visvakarman is the god of invention and engineering in Hindu mythology. And so there are some entities that he creates, he fabricates them. So that's what I— that's the difference also between the entities I'm looking at that are biotechnically made and those that are brought to life by magic. I mean, Pygmalion and Galatea, the ivory woman carved by Pygmalion as his ideal woman, she was brought to life by a goddess with a— just by fiat, by command. She wasn't manufactured as an automaton.
John Markoff: That raises the interesting question to me that there is a closer link— linkage between actual technology at that point in history and the mythology you saw. The only thing I know in detail is the Antikythera mechanism, right? But when I explored Antikythera, I realized that there is evidence of other robotic technology or automated technology. I think there were doors that opened. Yes, there were other things that maybe there were even robots.
Adrienne Mayor: Were there any, uh, There are a lot of references to animated statues, statues that could move, make noises, blink their eyes, raise their arms, maybe even pour a libation, open a temple door. And I found a lot of evidence. You know, we think of the uncanny valley as something really modern. I think it was first identified by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, 1970, but I found evidence for similar effects in classical antiquity when artists and sculptors began to have the technology to make unbelievably lifelike, life-size statues out of bronze and marble. And you have to remember that these were painted, and they were painted very realistically, not in those garish colors that we see now when they reconstruct the colors of ancient marble statues. They mixed the pigments with wax so that they actually had a, had a sort of texture even, and a warmer appearance. And think of these statues in temples, they're life-size, hyper-realistic, and you see them at night, nothing but an oil lamp or moonlight, and people imagine that they're moving. But then there are actual statues, it's It's easy with levers and gears and pulleys, hydraulics and steam, to make a statue whose eyes can blink. Remember, the eyeballs are made of ivory with inlaid gems so that they sparkle, look alive. So there are all these descriptions of this uncanny valley effect in Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey. That's great.
John Markoff: That's— but that makes me want to jump to Silicon Valley today? Because I had— you mentioned sort of the possibility or the reality that we're coming to this same kind of black box situation where in that period these technologies were sort of treated as black boxes. All of a sudden we're back with advanced technology treating them as black boxes. But also then this other parallel that you're raising, that is, there was a mythology and there was the reality of their technology. Is there a parallel to Silicon Valley perhaps, where our futurism, where, you know, the belief that we're gonna have these thinking machines and stuff, is there a connection or a parallel?
Adrienne Mayor: I couldn't find much evidence for the ancient Greeks in their mythology or even in their writings looking forward to advanced technology. What's very interesting is that the ancient Greeks tended to look back and think that there was advanced technology in previous civilizations. That's a big difference, I think. But the other thing is that the black box, I think we're coming kind of full circle, as you mentioned. We're getting back to this, we use these things but we don't know how they work. What's interesting about my research is that when I found the story of Talos, the first robot in Western literature, a giant bronze man who was first described by Hesiod, lived in the time of Homer, so we're talking about, about 700 BC, describing this self-moving giant robot made of bronze, and he is a robot, he fits our definition. He's self-moving, he carries out activities, interacts with his environment, he's kind of a cyborg, he's partly human, partly machine, and we even know his inner workings and his power source. Those are two things you need for the definition of a robot. And this is the earliest account of a robot we have in Greek mythology, and that's amazing to me. So he's, he's kind of a black box because the inner workings are mysterious and vague. He's, he's built with a— he's hollow, and he has a single tube running from his head to his feet, and through that tube pulsates ichor. Ichor is the life fluid of the gods. It's a mysterious fluid that makes them immortal. And the whole system is sealed by a bronze bolt on his ankle. Now, he's made by technology. He— we know his inner workings. We know the power source. I mean, these are mythologically couched, and yet people are thinking about what would make this thing work. Then what takes him down is a sorceress, Medea, figures out that he may be immortal because he's got the power source, supposedly perpetual motion. But if we can remove that bolt, his iCore will bleed out and will destroy him. So he's made by technology, taken down by technology. Interesting little lesson there for today. There's always going to be a hacker.
John Markoff: What other cautionary tales does it pose for the modern world? Were there other things that emerged? You know, the Terminator debate, for example.
Adrienne Mayor: Killer robots. Talos was a killer robot. He was made to defend the island of Crete for King Minos, defend the island of Crete against approaching strange ships, and he could spot them, and when he spotted a strange ship, He was able to pick up a boulder and throw the boulders at the ships to sink them. But then in close combat, should someone come ashore, he could heat his body to red hot— he's made of bronze— grab up a victim and hug them to his chest, roasting them alive. So Jason and the Argonauts, they're doomed almost to be his next victim, but they've got Medea with them. She's kind of like a techno wizard. She figures out these things. What's interesting is that Talos has a very lively modern afterlife. The first surface-to-air missiles that were mounted on ships after World War II, the scientists named them the Talos rockets. So, I mean, they knew the story and these ships are patrolling the seas with their Talos rockets. And of course, the Pentagon and DARPA are working on a Talos uniform for special ops soldiers.
John Markoff: It's interesting that Talos was an autonomous weapon system. It seems like the Greeks had none of the sort of ethical qualms that we have today about whether a human's in the loop and whether a human makes the killing decision. They just gave the autonomy to the weapon and let the weapon They crossed that line.
Adrienne Mayor: Right, and they did not realize, they did not expect, neither the maker Hephaestus nor the person who deployed Talos, King Minos, expected Talos to develop a kind of human-like consciousness in which he could be persuaded by Medea to allow her to remove the bolt on his ankle. He agrees to that because she says, "I can make you immortal and invincible." invulnerable. He doesn't know his own nature and he agrees to that. So that was an unexpected—
John Markoff: Was that a weakness? Was that— yeah.
Adrienne Mayor: That's his vulnerability and she is kind of a hacker, she exploits it. Yeah. So, but there are other stories. You ask about whether we have any lessons from antiquity. Pandora is one of the perfect examples because We know the fairy tale version, probably, of Pandora, in which she's an innocent young girl who— she just can't restrain herself from opening this forbidden, fateful box. It was originally an urn or jar, and a mistranslation made it into a box. But people are always bringing up Pandora's box when they talk about advanced technology and AI and robotics. But The story is much more relevant than people realize because the original story is that Pandora was a fembot made by Hephaestus with one mission on Earth, and that is to ingratiate herself into human society and then open that jar filled with all of the diseases and sufferings and misfortunes that would plague humankind forever. This was an automaton sent to Earth by Zeus to punish humans for accepting the technology of fire from Prometheus.
John Markoff: Was that sort of original sin in some sense?
Adrienne Mayor: Um, people have compared it to that, but what's interesting is that Prometheus in Greek mythology supposedly created the first humans and then felt bad because they were so vulnerable. And so they weren't as well prepared to defend themselves or live in the world as animals were, so he gave them— stole fire from the gods, gave fire. And that's a technology that allows humans to come together, cooperate, develop language and other tools. Zeus is very— he's a tyrant and he's vengeful. That's something I was pursuing here at the center this year. This year is whether technology favors tyranny, and it goes all the way back to Zeus.
John Markoff: And have you— what about your conclusion about the modern question? Does it favor? Well, I think we looked—
Adrienne Mayor: I think we— and I, I not only looked at mythology— it's autocrats and kings who deploy killer robots like Talos and Pandora— so then I looked at ancient, ancient Greek history And it turns out that there are many tyrants who commissioned engineers and craftsmen to create machines of malice for torture and for war. So technology did favor tyrants in antiquity, in history and myth. So I think we need to look very carefully at who's pushing most to make AI technology, human enhancements, things like that. Robots, and they always give us a story that it'll be beneficial. For instance, most recently I read about this AI that's going to be able to read lips, and they say, oh, this will be a great boon. But we don't always immediately know what the negative consequences can be.
John Markoff: One of the things that I saw you also explored, you know, in What the Dormouse Said, I discovered that there were two 2 labs at the dawn of interactive computing on either side of campus. There was John McCarthy's lab, which, you know, he coined the term artificial intelligence, and he started to build this machine that would be artificially intelligent in '62. And in the same year, Engelbart started out to augment human on the other side of campus, and there was this tension or dichotomy. And you point to the same tension between the artificial and the— what'd you call it? You called it the imitation and the augmentation of that was already in play.
Adrienne Mayor: Yeah, yeah, all of these myths about automatons and self-moving devices and the entities that are created by Hephaestus are always described as made, not born, which emphasizes their manufactured or fabricated nature as opposed to their natural biologically reproduced nature. For instance, Pandora is made to be an artificial woman, more beautiful than any living woman, and endowed with such beauty that she arouses painful lust in men. So she's one of the first sexbots, and Pygmalion has another one. So, I mean, even those things go all the way back. But I think that phrase "made, not born" is really really significant to us and to the Greeks because it is the distinction between natural and unnatural, real and artificial, manufactured and biological.
John Markoff: And we're right back there, whether it's with AI or with CRISPR. I mean, there's, you know, the opening sentence in your Whole Earth Catalog was, "We are as gods and we might as well get good at it." Yes.
Adrienne Mayor: Which raises all kinds of questions about I remember feeling very dubious about that when I opened it. Yeah.
John Markoff: So this notion that bubbles up all the time, this implicit desire to create human life, to make human life or human-like life, did you find, did you come to any sense of why it's innate? Why it, what is it about humans that want to do this?
Adrienne Mayor: They want to become gods, I don't know. But I mean, these stories are not just limited to Greece. There's an Egyptian god who supposedly made the first humans. As I said, Prometheus was credited with making the first humans. And there's the Hindu stories, and there's Chinese stories about craftspeople or artisans or engineers who want to create artificial life. That was really interesting to find all of these miniature gems, these exquisitely carved gems from Etruscan craftspeople depicting Prometheus making the first prototypical human, starting with the framework. He starts with the internal workings, the, the skeleton, and all these gems show him as an engineer, a craftsman, making the framework of humans. And then some of them even show him adding the flesh and the molding them into basically automatons, which is a philosophical question, and I imagine you might have been planning to ask me about that. And of course philosophers have since Plato, probably before, but Plato expressed it. Let's imagine we are the automatons of a superior being. So those little gems showing Prometheus creating the first humans make you think that way too.
John Markoff: I wanted to ask you about something related. So the other thing I notice about modern culture is we have this tendency to anthropomorphize every animate and inanimate object we come in contact with. There seems to be some human quality that we want to turn it to talk to our cars or treat our cars as humans.
Adrienne Mayor: I may be one of the few people that doesn't do that. I like to know the difference between human and non-human, but I certainly have noticed that. I have never given my car a name. But we tend to do that, and I think psychologists— there are a lot of psychologists who try to figure out why do we tend to anthropomorphize inanimate objects, especially the ones that seem alive, that we seem to interact with in some way. And I ran into that in my first book about how Greeks and Romans interpreted gigantic, enormous fossils of extinct animals that they found throughout the Mediterranean. And of course they're not fi— because it's an earthquake zone, seismic activity, the bones are all jumbled and broken except for the largest limb bones. So like a femur, shoulder blade, that's all that they find. And of course because they're prehistoric elephants like mammoths and mastodons, they're mammals, so those bones look exactly like our human, except they're 3 times the size of humans. And so they anthropomorphized them and said that they belong to the heroes of the Golden Age of myth, who were 3 times the size of us puny humans. So people tend to anthropomorphize. I think it just makes it more exciting for us. I mean, we look for life in space too. We don't— we're always looking for allies or enemies that are like us in some way. But psychologists have, when it comes to robotics or AI, if the entity has a name or you give it a name and then it has a backstory of some sort, then you really tend to anthropomorphize it, recognize it as some humanoid entity. Just thinking of the movie 2001, when HAL is being disabled by the astronaut, he starts to tell his backstory. We know his name, but now he starts telling us his memories from childhood and singing, and that just— that is when he seems most human. He's got the backstory and the name. And I think that was true for Talos, the bronze robot in antiquity. The artists humanized him on the vase paintings. They paint him as a bronze man. He's different, he's larger than the other humans around him, and his flesh is painted in the same way they paint bronze armor. So it's a yellowish cast to it, and he's got seams and rivets. And yet when he's dying, he's falling back, his eyes are rolling up like a human, and one artist actually painted a teardrop falling out from his eye. So I think that they in antiquity did anthropomorphize this automaton, and it just seems to be a timeless and universal tendency.
John Markoff: One of the things that I stumbled across when I was writing Machines of Loving Grace, when I was talking to a generation of AI researchers, I kept running into guys who were roboticists and AI people who'd gone into the field after they saw 2001, and they wanted to build HAL. This was true. They actually made the decision to go into the field after they saw the science fiction movie.
Adrienne Mayor: And was it sympathy for HAL, or was it the interest in his human qualities before his demise?
John Markoff: I confess, I did— you know, that's the obvious question to ask that I didn't ask. But it is an obvious question. 'Cause that's not the reaction I had when I said to this woman.
Adrienne Mayor: No, stay away. It's really funny, people ask me, "Oh, you're so into AI and robotics." I went to Andreessen Horowitz, I did a podcast there, and then I went to Bloomberg Beta. Everyone asked me how, you know, "So you must really," and I don't even speak to Alexa. I have nothing to do with Siri. I drive across the country, I drive up to Montana and back, I use like 3 different printed maps. I don't even— I don't use GPS systems, nothing. I don't want anything to do with it. The last of my kind.
John Markoff: So might there be a book of yours in the study of geomythology? Are you that focused on it?
Adrienne Mayor: That is one of my projects this year that I'm working on. I owe Princeton University Press another book, and it's going to be about geomythology. So I'm just trying to figure out the focus that I'm going to take. I'm very interested in geomythologies worldwide, but also especially Greece and Roman, because I know that best, and there's a lot of material. Mythology and folklore about natural disasters, I think, would be quite interesting.
John Markoff: Is Atlantis on your radar?
Adrienne Mayor: Yes, because, I mean, the story comes from Plato.
John Markoff: Yeah.
Adrienne Mayor: And we don't know whether he made it up or whether there was this story or rumor or legend floating around. We know that Plato made up a lot of folklore that he called folklore, but we also know that he took things from Herodotus and other writers. And another thing to keep in mind is how much of ancient literature we've lost. So there could have been even writings about Atlantis that we don't know about.
John Markoff: But was Santorini and the volcano a candidate for— is that still thought of as a candidate for—
Adrienne Mayor: it could have influenced the story or the idea of a very advanced civilization that was destroyed by a natural catastrophe. Absolutely. But we also have other stories of real Greek cities that were inundated by tsunamis because of earthquakes in the Aegean. Helike is one of them. And I'm interested in how people describe the natural disasters in antiquity and then how they thought maybe they could predict them or how they could describe what caused them. So I'm I'm really interested in that. So I think my next book will be on geomythology.
John Markoff: And when you pursue these things, do you do it from here, or do you get to go to Greece? Do you actually get to—
Adrienne Mayor: I have traveled a lot in Greece, and I have very, very fond memories of living there for several years, where I did a lot of research in the libraries there, and also in the topography, and just traveling around a lot. So I would love to go back and actually, if I want to write a field guide to geomythology, I would have to go back, yes. Luckily I have a research fund.
John Markoff: So have you spent much time in conversation with your— you're a Berggruen Fellow this year, and one of your compatriots, Tobias Reese, has a project about sort of the redefinition of the human. And have you gotten involved in that at all?
Adrienne Mayor: I haven't been involved in redefinition The Human. But I was working with Nils Gilman on— all of the Berggruen Fellows were asked to write an article based on our research. So I have just finished the draft of my article on human enhancements, ancient and modern, comparing just their ideas of human enhancements, not just prosthetic devices, but that figures a lot in it. So I'm waiting for the editorial suggestions on that article.
John Markoff: Where will you try to publish it?
Adrienne Mayor: The Berggruen Institute is planning to establish a new magazine, I believe, and so these articles are for that.
John Markoff: I'm intrigued by the notion of cognitive prosthesis as we get older and in our current incarnation.
Adrienne Mayor: Yes, the other Berggruen fellows that I've really had a lot of interaction with. I only got to meet Joshua Burson once. He's based in LA, and so we met in LA. All of the Berggruen Fellows gathered there in September. But we've been corresponding back and forth. We have a lot of interests in common. And also Joseph Lemille, I'm not sure how to pronounce his name. He's based at the MIT AI Lab this year in Massachusetts. And we have talked a lot about Aristotle and artificial life, so that's been very interesting. In fact, there's a passage in Aristotle that I just can't get out of my mind because it's the one instance where a philosopher is talking about the myths, the Greek myths of artificial life, and then actually musing about the future. It's a tiny passage, but it's so remarkable. Aristotle is— it's in the Politics— he's justifying the practice of slavery in ancient Athens. He has a really dubious argument, but he takes time off from that. First of all, he's saying that slaves and servants are like tools or implements for us, and the best tool or implement is would be one that can anticipate your needs. And if only we had slaves that could anticipate your needs. Well, Hephaestus, the god of innovation and technology, the blacksmith god, in Greek mythology, Hephaestus built automatic gates or doors for the heavens that would open and close as the chariots of the gods approached them. He built a bank of automated bellows for his forge that anticipated his every need. They could blow more or less air as he needed it, working with these heated metals. He created a fleet of driverless carts that would deliver ambrosia and nectar to the gods' banquets and then return when they were empty. He— I think the most remarkable of his creations was a crew or a staff of golden maidens. These are women made of gold who could anticipate his needs, helped him in his workshop. And Homer— this is in Homer's Iliad— Homer says they were endowed with reason and speech, but even more remarkably, they were endowed with all of the knowledge of the gods. Now that's a data dump. You don't need that much information, but you never know, you might. And that is an ancient mythological version of AI.
John Markoff: Yeah, absolutely.
Adrienne Mayor: Yeah, so, but what's interesting about Aristotle is that he muses on this. He said, "If only we could, here on Earth, have those automatons," created by Hephaestus. What if we had looms that could weave on their own? What if we had musical instruments that could play themselves? We would have no need for slavery. And then he doesn't continue the argument, goes back. But I mean, the fact that he wrote that down suggests to me that he may not have been the only one thinking that way.
John Markoff: But you're saying, earlier on you said that was largely an exception, the Greeks tended to look backwards and not look forward.
Adrienne Mayor: That is the one instance I know of, of looking forward.
John Markoff: You know, Hegel has this discussion of the dehumanization of the master in the relationship to the slave, which was interesting. It's in the Phenomenology of Mind.
Adrienne Mayor: Harms the master as much as the slave.
John Markoff: And I was talking about the design of AIs with Alan Kay, who's the person who's largely thought of to have invented the modern personal computer that we use. And Kay said, well, you know, it's a design choice. You can design these things as partners or as our masters or as our slaves, and that's a human choice to make that design decision.
Adrienne Mayor: Yes, and I— were you gonna ask? No, go ahead. In my book I do discuss that a little bit. Aristotle would consider them replacements for slaves or servants. But I tend to agree with people like Patrick Lin, who works on the ethics of driverless cars, and Joanna Bryson, who insist that we should make AI as our tools. These are tools, possessions, that we are responsible for. Because if we don't, then who is responsible for the decisions of these things? Are the actions. And so I think that's extremely important, and I would fall into that category. They should be our tools.
John Markoff: Yeah, that's a position taken as well by another computer scientist who's thoughtful on this, Ben Schneiderman at University of Maryland, I think, who argues for keeping— he argues against autonomy because of the issue of responsibility. If the machine is autonomous, no one will have responsibility.
Adrienne Mayor: Then who will be responsible, especially They're going to be black boxes. They are already. I mean, look at all the things we use that are black boxes to us.
John Markoff: Back to— away from mythology and to the history of the period, the Antikythera mechanism was such a remarkable window for me into a world. How much more technology do you think we just don't know about because the metals were cannibalized or whatever happened in the interim?
Adrienne Mayor: The only bronze artifacts that we have, statues, are that device. Almost maybe 90% of the bronze that we have from antiquity is recovered from shipwrecks or from the sea because all bronze was—
John Markoff: Cannibalized.
Adrienne Mayor: As you say, cannibalized and melted down to make cannons and weapons, things like that. So there must have been other Antikythera-like devices. In fact, I think Cicero mentions something like that. And of course, that's from the Hellenistic period. That's not from the Classical period. It's, it's from the period after the death of Alexander. So 4th century on. And in fact, a lot of actual automatons and self-moving devices were created. There was just a profusion of them. In Alexandria at that time. And the first— not just in Alexandria— the first model of a flying bird, probably steam-driven, we know that it flew a few yards and then had to be reactivated, was created by a friend of Plato's who lived in Italy. He was a statesman and engineer. All of his works have disappeared, but there are many quotations of his treatises and we know that he made this model bird and some other devices. And that's 4th century BC in the time of Plato. So they did begin making self-moving devices and automatons, some very complicated and some very simple. Ptolemy Philadelphus in Alexandria in about 279 BC, he had a lot of engineers working for him in Alexandria. And he had this grand procession that lasted several days, went over several kilometers. These gigantic, what we would call floats, carts pulled by like 300 men with gigantic automatons on them. One of them was the goddess Nysa. She's a seated figure. She's 10 feet tall when seated. Periodically along the route, she would stand up, pour a libation of milk into a bowl, and then sit down again. Very sophisticated. Engineers in Amsterdam who have tried to figure out exactly how this would work, they've got a whole article on all of the mechanisms that would have to be at play inside, the inner workings. And as they point out, it had to be very robust for her to do this periodically over and over again in a stately manner befitting a goddess. So that's just one example of the things they were making in those days.
John Markoff: I have this image of these laboratories, or workshops, I guess.
Adrienne Mayor: They were, they were in what was called the Museum of Alexandria. The Grand Library of Alexandria is very famous. But there was also a museum. And it wasn't just a— it wasn't a museum as we think of it today, but it was like a workshop. And there were lots of these guys, and there were rivals and showing off to each other. Ptolemy Philadelphus also had plans with an engineer. He wanted them to build a temple with a statue of his dead wife Arsinoe. That would be suspended in the air over the altar in this temple by means of magnetism. Well, that's impossible until electromagnetism. But they were working on this, hoping that they could suspend a statue with a core of iron inside and a magnetic roof. So that—
John Markoff: I mean, they're a cool idea.
Adrienne Mayor: They're They're working on dream technologies even then. Well, you know, philosophers of science have actually stated that there couldn't— one reason I did this book is that they have stated there could not— no one could imagine artificial life before that, or robots, or self-moving devices before the technology existed. It's just such an insane thing to say. You can't say that. How does innovation— happen unless people imagine something that doesn't exist.
John Markoff: Absolutely.
Adrienne Mayor: It's just— yeah.
John Markoff: So, thank you.
Adrienne Mayor: Thanks for your questions. They're really fascinating.
John Markoff: Eye-opening.
Adrienne Mayor: I didn't even have to take out my note card.
Narrator: If you'd like to know more about contemporary scholarship of the ancient world, and perhaps strangely, what we can learn from older perspectives of our contemporary technology, check out Adrienne Mayor's latest book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology. You can find a link to the book and other interesting resources in the show notes. We hope you enjoyed this conversation. Thanks for listening.