Hello and welcome, everyone, to this colloquium on Gods and Robots, Smith's machines and ancient dreams of technology.
And apologies for our delay this evening because of a technical hitch with YouTube.
My name is John Textualists and I'm the director of Oxford Institute for Ethics in.
How would the ancient Greeks relevant to our efforts to grapple with the contemporary challenges posed by robots and A.I. to discuss this question?
I'm delighted to welcome our main speaker this evening, Adrian Mayer,
who is a research scholar in the classics department and the History and Philosophy of Science programme at Stanford University.
Adrian is also the author of a marvellous book on this topic entitled Gods, Robots, Gods and Robots, Myths,
Machines and Ancient Dreams of Technology, published by Princeton University Press in twenty eighteen.
Welcome, Adrian. Thank you. I'm also very pleased to welcome to distinguished commentators Chardy Botched Zimmer, who is Helen,
a reconciling distinguished service professor of Classics and the programme in gender studies at the University of Chicago.
The most recent publication is The Aeneid, a new translation published by Random House last year, and Armand Dango,
who is professor of classical languages and literature at Oxford University and a fellow of Jesus College.
His books include Socrates in Love The Making of a Philosopher, published by Bloomsbury in Twenty Eighteen.
Welcome to you both. Now, at a quite fundamental level, the ancient Greeks are relevant because it challenges a very soft conception as human beings,
a soft conception that has been shaped by Greek thought.
According to Plato and Aristotle, just to pick up two random ancient Greeks,
we humans are essentially rational in nature and our personal flourishing lies in the cultivation and exercise of our rational faculties.
This self conception still resonates today.
For example, it's widespread in the notion of human dignity that plays such an important role, for example, in thinking about human rights,
even if, of course, it has taken a battering over the centuries from various forms of naturalism and scepticism, some scientistic and postmodern.
I, however, confronts us uniquely with the prospect of artificial intelligence,
we can do things that normally require the exercise of human and things like making a medical diagnosis,
predicting the likelihood that a criminal offence, deciding whether credit should be extended to someone.
But beyond this general point, Adrian's book reveals that the Greeks are like us in addressing the challenge of robots and AI in two ways.
First, that there were actual examples of automata to guide their reflections.
Like the philosopher, engineer and friend of Plato, Qantas caused a sensation, apparently with this mechanical flying Darth.
But second, and more importantly, because of the presence of Automator in many of the ancient myths from the bronze giant,
tell us to the ambiguous figure of Pandora. And like us, the Greeks did,
between fear and hope in the face of the imagined technological advances that replicated or surpassed human powers of reason,
as Adrian puts it in her book and I quote, The unsettling oscillation between techno nightmares and grand futuristic dreams is timeless.
It is with us now, and it is present in the ancient Greeks understanding of humanity's drive to transcend itself.
Sometimes to strive to transcendence takes a noble form. All too often, however, it is a source of fear and dread.
And it is surely instructive for us today grappling with the power of big tech and A.I. enabled government
surveillance to subvert democracy in various ways to observe that many of the most famous ancient Automator,
Telos and Pandora included were created as expressions of absolute arbitrary power, whether a vengeful God like Zoosk or a tyrant like King Bynum's.
So I'm very much looking forward to this discussion.
Please remember that there was a Q&A session towards the end, so feel free to put your questions in the chat box on YouTube.
But I have now very great pleasure in turning over to you.
Thank you, John. I'm so honoured to be invited to this colloquium and I ethics.
I'm really looking forward to talking with you and shot in Armaan and everyone else about how automatons were first imagined in classical antiquity.
And for my book I started with a question who first imagined robots, automatons, artificial intelligence,
replicants and historians of technology usually traced the first self Drizzt
driven self driving machines to the Middle Ages using clockwork mechanisms.
But we know that, as you just mentioned,
arthritis was able to make self a self moving bird in the fourth century B.C. And some philosophers of science, to my surprise,
have argued that no one in antiquity could even imagine automatons before the technology existed,
which is seems patently counterintuitive because where does innovation come from, if not from imagining things that don't already exist?
And I do have some images tonight. So if we could have the first slide Huli that just shows the book and the two automatons
and artificial entities that I'm that I'm going to be talking about tonight.
I wondered, was it possible? I think we'll go to the first slide.
Well, you can you can do that.
Was it possible that the idea, the concepts of making artificial life automatons and even I could have appeared much earlier in history,
could people in antiquity actually imagine such things before technology ever made them possible?
And it does turn out that more than two thousand five hundred years ago, in the time of Homer,
some vivid Greek myths did envision how one might fabricate artificial life robots and other synthetic beings.
And these myths emerge long before the technological innovations of the Hellenistic era,
beginning in the fourth century B.C. that I mentioned earlier, long before that.
People were imagining making artificial life, and I know this is a rather strange exercise for a very future oriented group,
but I'm inviting you to consider imaginative ideas about creating artificial life explored in mythic stories from more than two millennia ago.
And these consider these myths. Think of them as thought experiments.
I think it's fun to call them the first first ever science fiction tales.
And now the next slide, please. These artificial forms of life were described as made, not born,
so that we know they were imagined as manufactured, not reproduced biologically or naturally.
So we're not talking about just lifeless objects or inert matter that was brought to life by a magical spell or a God's command.
I mean, there are stories like that. Every culture has stories like that.
I'm talking today about entities that were imagined as products of what we might call biotechnology or life through craft.
So these were technological products and they were constructed by gods using familiar tools and materials and methods of the day.
But because the makers were gods, they achieved awesome results.
The next slide, please. And so today we'll start with the very first robot to walk the earth and talk about mythology.
For us, this is tell us the giant bronze automaton made by the God of invention and technology.
Hephaestus the blacksmith God. This is a very ancient oral tradition.
And it was first written down in about 700 B.C. around the time of Homer.
And this famous ancient Vaisse painting by the Talos painter shows Talos as a man constructed out of bronze.
Telos was a killer robot. He was given by the gods to his son, King Minos, to defend the kingdom of Crete from invaders.
Telos was able to march around the island three times a day.
His task was to spot invaders and then he could pick up boulders and hurl them at approaching ships to try and sink the ships.
But tell us had other capabilities in close combat, he could heat his metallic bodies made of bronze,
heat his body red hot, and then grab the victims and crush them to his chest and roast them along.
Next slide, please. Yes, these capabilities were shown on ancient coins from Crete,
you see him throwing rocks or boulders and the bronze mirror, he is crushing some victims.
Remarkably, we even know something about the automatons, InnerWorkings.
And I think these details confirm his technological origins.
Tell us, had a single tube or artery running from his head to his foot, but instead of blood, iCore is what pulsed in that conduit or tube.
And iCore was the mysterious life force of the gods.
That's what made them immortal. This entire river system was sealed with a bronze bolt on his ankle.
So tell us, does it really fit? The basic definition of a robot is a self moving android as innerworkings as a power source,
and he interacts with this environment and tell us was featured in the Greek myth about Jason and the Argonauts they encountered.
Tell us when they tried to drop anchor in the rest after gaining the Golden Fleece.
Next slide, please. And this scene is from the vintage cult movie Jason and the Argonauts from nineteen sixty three.
Maybe some of you are familiar with it, a highly recommended just really stop motion animation.
And I actually I like to talk about movies when I'm talking about Greek myths because they're after all, they're all cultural dreams in the myth.
Jason, the Argonauts were doomed to become the victims of tell us.
But luckily for them, the powerful sorceress media was able to save them from tell us.
She's a resourceful and clever which media figured out how to destroy, neutralise and kill the bronze robot.
And she used, I think it's interesting, a combination of persuasion and technology to do that.
Media was able to convince Telos that someday he would die and then she promised that she could make him immortal, make him immortal,
but only if he would allow them to remove the vital bolt on his on his ankle and unaware of his own nature, telling them that.
Next slide, please. The D.A. unsealed the bolt so that the automatons power source, the iCore, would bleed out completely and that is what killed him.
The remarkable idea of using a tool to dismantle tell us.
That's another very ancient idea in the myth. And we know it goes back at least to the fifth century B.C. because we have these paintings
like this one from about 440 B.C. that showed Jason actually using a tool to remove the bolt,
the robot's weak point on his ankle and the robot's power source, iCore.
We hear that it flowed out like molten lead and Telos collapses and topples over.
I think all these details from the myth and the artwork emphasise that Telos was not only made with technology, but he was destroyed.
So tell us was imagined as a metallic automaton, but with some human features.
So he's kind of envisioned as a kind of cyborg, a machine human hybrid.
The techno wizard media was able to guess that TALOS might have developed or had some humanlike desires and she played on that.
For example, TALOS fear, death, he wished to be immortal and tell us could be persuaded and fooled by Medea.
More humanoid features that Mediaa could exploit.
Tell us was a fearsome machine then. But his human aspects also made him a sympathetic figure in antiquity.
Today, psychologists try to figure out why. Why do we tend to anthropomorphise robots and feel empathy for them as though they were human?
We do seem to be hardwired to bestow emotions on things that somehow seem alive to us and of interest to those who work in AI and robotics.
Studies do show that empathy is especially likely for robots and A.I. if the entity has a name and a back story about their creation, as TALOS did.
Next slide, please. A famous modern example of that, some of you might remember the the Stanley Kubrick film, 2001, A Space Odyssey from 1968,
another cult movie, the iconic scene when the astronaut Dave is destroying the spaceships artificial intelligence computer.
Hal and Hal seems most human when he's being deactivated by the astronaut as Hal is dying.
He starts to tell his name and he begins to recite memories from his childhood.
And this evokes sympathy in the audience. Well, in the 1963 film Jason in the Afternoons, US doesn't really have any facial expressions.
The Bronze Robot in the movie. But the animation sequence manages to suggest his personality and intellect in the bronze giant.
Next slide, please. And in that poignant movie scene, as his life force is bleeding out, the great robot struggles to breathe.
You see, on the left there, he clutches his throat while his bronze body cracks and crumbles.
And the modern audience feels pity for the helpless automaton and human qualities are what make the robots destruction feel tragic to us.
And just like in antiquity, people felt sympathy for the robot who was tricked and killed while simply doing his job.
And so in the ancient Vaisse painting there in the centre two thousand five hundred years ago, the dying bronze Talos is humanised, his arms are limp.
He's falling backwards as as he's dying and his eyes are rolling back.
And I think what is even more striking and rare, the ancient artist has painted a teardrop falling from the robot's eye.
Well, that ancient idea of an automaton guard.
Cast in human form, like us, able to defend against invaders that continued to capture people's imagination in the Middle Ages.
Next slide, please. As you may know, Leonardo da Vinci designed a life sized robotic knight in armour in fourteen ninety five, you see on the left.
And a century later, that idea was taken up by the poet Edmund Spencer in his epic poem written in fifty ninety six,
Spencer retooled that bronze robot Talos from Greek myth as The Iron Knight also named TALOS.
And this Iron Knight was a grim enforcer companion given to her article,
who was a virtuous hero who travelled around the land trying to bring justice to lawbreakers and the Iron Knight TALOS.
Was intended to help him bring law and order to the countryside, but it soon became a relentless killer robot totally without mercy.
Ultimately, this Iron Knight imposed iron law.
The robot had no compassion, no mercy and no interest in individual circumstances, motives, forgiveness or remorse.
And I think that brings up some interesting questions about eye in the law.
Next slide, please.
And now I'm returning to the ancient myth of Jason and the Argonauts tell us, was not the only deadly automaton that media had to overcome.
Jason also had to survive the attacks of a pair of fire breathing bronze bulls.
And an unstoppable automaton army, those technical obstacles belong to a powerful king who wanted Jason dead.
And with Madea's help. Jason was able to subdue the terrifying robo bulls and he took them to a plough.
And next, Jason and his men had to fight and defeat the kings sinister army of invincible atomic
automatic warriors that popped out of the ground fully armed and programmed to attack.
Next slide, please. And here we see a mediaeval image of those automaton soldiers emerging from the field,
fully armed, these diabolical soldiers, they couldn't be commanded or ordered.
They couldn't retreat or halt their sort of hard wired to attack.
And the army of androids advance on the nearest enemy, which is Jason and the Argonauts.
And once again, Madea to the rescue. Madea figures out how to take advantage of the encoding that's imprinted in this unnatural army,
just as she exploited the brothers robots weak points.
She hit on a clever way to trigger them to self-destruct.
Well, I just want to point out that if you're facing machines of malice, you want Madea or someone like her on your side.
She really is an ancient version of a brilliant hacker.
And I think these myths show that the Greeks understood that even the most awesome technology has can have weaknesses,
vulnerabilities that can be exploited and that automatons do not always perform as expected by the maker or or those who deploy them.
Tell us in the bronze bowls or just some of the many marvellous automatons that were made for powerful case by her.
That's just as good as the God of invention.
The first is really had an impressive resume of animated androids and self-loathing devices that he made for
the gods and for himself and the other gods and goddesses is interesting because the only God with the job,
he's the only God who sweats you.
He's always pictured hard at work, is using familiar tools, materials and methods that people saw in real workshops and forges on earth.
But as I mentioned, because Vestas was the god of invention and technology and blacksmithing and forges his imaginary creations were marvellous,
far beyond the dreams of any mere mortal craftsperson could achieve.
Next slide, please.
For example, Homer tells us that he made automated gates for the heavens so the gods could drive their chariots back and forth with ease.
Of the first automatic garage door is here. And Festus also built a fleet of self-driving vehicles.
They were three wheeled autonomous carts that delivered nectar and ambrosia to the gods banquets and then returned when they were empty.
The first is constructed a set of self-regulating bellows for his forge.
And according to Homer in the Iliad,
these automated bellows could blast more or less air depending on what was required by his just as he was working.
But I think one of his most amazing inventions, maybe the most amazing invention, was a crew of life sized, lifelike women made of gold.
And these golden maiden served as his personal helpers.
Homer describes them bustling around the festivities workshop, and they were able to anticipate his every need.
And Homer tells us that the golden maidens looked just like real young women.
And these female androids were intelligent. They were endowed with strength and reason.
And I think most astonishing, Homer says they were equipped with all the knowledge of the gods.
So essentially, these lifelike automatons seem to possess what amounts to a mythological version of a all the knowledge of the gods.
And they they have strength and able to reason. The capstone, however, of Festus creations with yet another lifelike replicant like tell us.
This one was designed to interact with humans on Earth.
And this marvel was called Pandora. Next slide, please.
Now,
I want to point out that Pandora in the original myth was not anything like the fairy tale version that most of us have heard of in our childhoods.
Pandora was not an innocent, curious young woman with a tragic case of curiosity,
couldn't resist opening a forbidden box or jar, inadvertently unleashing a swarm of evils on the world.
The original story of Pandora is much darker.
The myth was first written down by Hesiod, about seven hundred B.C., around the same time that that Homer was describing the golden female servants.
And some of the wording that the two authors use is very similar.
Whishes description makes it very clear that Pandora was an artificial young woman made not born.
And in the myth, the king of the gods zus very vengeful and harsh tyrant decides to take revenge
on human beings for accepting the gift of fire that was stolen by Prometheus.
Zeus commands investors to fabricate an evil disguised as beauty in the form of a lovely and seductive young woman.
This is to be a trap for humans, we are told takes malicious glee in this cruel trick.
He's laughing out loud as he gives the instructions to investors,
telling him to give this bewitching young artificial woman the power to move on its own.
Next, he orders the gods and goddesses to come and bestow gifts, capabilities and personality traits on Pandora.
Afine addresses her in fabulous garments of Aphrodite.
The Goddess of love fills Pandora with irresistible sex appeal and Hermes the messenger.
God instils Pandora with a deceitful, shameless nature.
So this deceptive fembot kind of A.I. agent in the shape of a young woman was to be sent,
sent by zoo down to earth, carrying a sealed jar filled with evils to plague mortals forever.
And her only mission on Earth was to open that fateful jar and release eternal misery and suffering on humankind.
Next slide, please. And here we have a painting of Jesus admiring Pandora made to his specifications before sending her to Earth,
and you can see she looks like a statue or a doll.
And I think it's interesting to cast this myth in robotic A.I. terms.
And this is thanks to a philosopher, George Xhaka Dorkus.
He he points out that's the word used for four Zoosk coming up with the intellectual concept of Pandora, uses the word he says as he crafts that idea.
Then Zus commissions as best as to build the basic hardware.
Vestas makes this female replicant lifelike enough to be accepted as a real young woman by humans.
The other gods then supply the operating system by giving Pandora various humanoid functions and properties and businesses design specifications.
Pandora is programmed to open and then close the jar of Eagles and there therefore accomplish her mission on Earth.
Next slide, please. And this is the magnificent Nairobi vaisse,
more than a foot tall that shows just showing off the completed figure of Pandora to all the gods, and I can give you some better details.
Could see the figures a little better in the next slide, please.
And in the top row, you see Tsou seated on his throne on the left there.
And Pandora is in the top row centre facing out, looking at us.
All the gods and goddesses, as you can see, are very active. They're lively.
They're filled with are at this realistic artificial woman.
They're gesturing and talking. And in the next slide, a close up of Pandora.
Next slide, please. In contrast, Pandora standing there stiffly like a statue.
She's gazing out at us with a kind of uncanny smile. And as one art historian says, she looks like a wind up doll about to be activated.
And what's remarkable is that inves paintings of this time faces looking straight out at the viewer.
That's very rare. A full frontal face indicates a kind of mindlessness.
It's appropriate for for dead dead bodies or inanimate things like masks or statues.
And frontal views like this can also suggest a mesmerising gaze.
And I think on this vaisse, both of those effects, a blank mind and a kind of compelling gaze seem to be intended by the artist.
And the other remarkable thing is facial expressions are also extremely rare in face painting.
But this Pandora is smiling. Does that stature like appearance, that creepy smile?
They represent Pandora as a kind of wicked automaton and that fits.
He sees depiction of Pandora as evil, described as beauty.
And here I have another movie reference. Next slide, please.
Pandora, I think, is eerily reminiscent of the evil robot Maria in the great silent film Metropolis,
which was made in nineteen twenty seven, made just a few years after the invention of the of the word robot.
Next slide, please. Already in Metropolis, that film shows that already by nineteen twenty seven,
people were already imagining a future techno dystopia where the rich ruling class oppressed,
miserable workers with automation and robots in the scene of all of those artificial women being prepared is quite striking.
Well, to return to the Greek myth, next slide, please,
ZUS orders Hermes to escort Pandora to Earth and present her as a bride to a man named Amethyst.
And here we see that. And the guy in the middle there is Hermes finding amusement in the hole in the whole interchange.
Prometheus, humanity's protector, tries to warn Prometheus not to accept this nefarious gift from Snook's.
But Prometheus ignores the warning. He's dazzled by Pandoras beauty, and he, according to Hesiod,
accepts the gift from Zeus and only realises his terrible error to light after he's opened the jar.
And the names here are significant. In ancient Greek, Prometheus means foresight.
Looking ahead at Prometheus means hindsight, and that makes him the perfect patsy for those cruel trap.
And I guess we could draw a lesson here. I think maybe as the science of robotics and A.I. advances at a relentless rate,
maybe we need a few more Promethean thinkers and not just a million people going for short term gains without looking ahead.
And also notice that have Restasis selectwoman devices and automatons are charming, they're harmless.
They're benevolent when they're confined to the heavenly realm, when they're used by the gods and goddesses up in heaven.
But when you sends automatons to earth, things go badly for humans.
You could say that as Isaac Asimov's laws get broken when they come to Earth and the myths seem to be suggesting,
or we can take this lesson that maybe these things are good to think about in the abstract,
but you have to take great care when they interact on a human plate.
I think another point to ponder is the association between technology and tyranny.
It's arousing a lot of concern today and we can notice who commissions and deploys automatons in these myths.
It's people with powers, the gods, especially the tyrannical guards, Zoosk and powerful kings.
And technology then was linked with tyranny very early in human history in these myths.
But this pattern also occurred in real historical times in antiquity,
with examples going back to at least the 6th century B.C. with powerful kings commissioning machines to kill and torture others.
I think Prometheus is a valuable model for those to.
We're thinking about or seeking to create artificial life because he is the one who's always looking out for humankind,
according to Miss, it was Prometheus who made the first human being.
And there is an amazing set of engravings, more than 60 of those engravings on tiny gems worn as rings are made and seals that depict
Prometheus as a kind of engineer using tools to construct the first human prototype.
Next slide, please. He's working step by step, working from the inside out, beginning with the internal framework, the skeleton.
And then he will add muscles and tendons, internal organs and flesh.
And these gems are from about 300 to one hundred B.C. after he made humans.
And we hear this from Sapho very early, early in Greek literature.
Sakwa says that it's that he stole the technology of fire after he made the
first human beings and he stole the fire because he was worried about the naked,
vulnerable humans surviving in the harsh world.
So he stole the technology of fire and taught the first men and women crafts and how to use them,
which allowed them to begin to invent language and plan cooperatively together all sorts of hallmarks of civilisation and culture.
And as I'm sure many of you recall, Mary Shelley's great science fiction novel of 200 years ago, 18 Frankenstein.
It was subtitled A Modern Prometheus and comparing the Prometheus of a Greek myth with the modern scientist in that novel,
Victor Frankenstein, one is struck with the question of what creators might.
Oh, to their creations of artificial mud and Victor Frankenstein, you recall, was repulsed by his creation.
It was monstrous and he disowned it in the end.
Well, Prometheus remains a kind of archetype of the responsible creator who tries to help his creations.
Well, I think these examples from literature and art do show that the ability to imagine making
artificial life automatons robots has more ancient roots than most people realise.
We can trace these cultural dreams of technology all the way back to the myths of classical Greece,
first written down between the 8th and 7th century B.C.
And here I do want to mention that the Greeks were not unique in imagining automatons or artificial life.
Stories about making artificial life also appear in ancient India and China as well.
So it is clear that automatons are not only thinkable long before the technology was available or existed,
but many of the practical and ethical issues about imitating nature.
They're foreshadowed in these ancient myths. If you really look closely at myths about what one could achieve if one had advanced biotechnical.
So just to conclude, it's probably seems ironic to be looking back to the ancient past,
but I've asked you to time travel more than two millennia to consider some of the first science fiction tales.
But I do hope that the sophistication and the relevance of these ancient dreams and the calm's that they
express about technology might enrich our understanding of the timeless link between imagination and science.
Look forward to hearing your comments and questions. Thank you so much, Adrian.
That was a really fascinating presentation and some spectacular images there.
So I want to turn to our first commentator, Professor SandBoxing.
I've enjoyed thinking with Adrienne Mayer's pioneering work on gods and robots in antiquity,
modern A.I. has many manifestations, of course, and Mayer's study leans towards the idea of the robot.
That is the thing made not born, the thing that shares some qualities with human life weathervanes unwilling iCore the ability
for spontaneous movement or the modicum of intelligence needed to serve a glass of wine,
a function which even my dog has not mastered.
Another model for a modern A.I. is that embraced by corporations such as Amazon, Google, Facebook and IBM.
Machine learning systems dedicated to forms of cognition associated with human intelligence such as learning, problem solving and pattern recognition.
Yet another category of A.I. common today includes what we might call human enhancing devices like Data Lassus Wings.
That is, forms of technology that allow us to transcend human abilities while retaining our own humanity, at least for a while.
Mayer's book touches on this last sort of A.I. in passing, but I'd like to expand on her observations in my comments for this panel.
To do so,
I should first point out that most scholars treat ancient Greek techne craft skill as distinct from the modern term technology as Stanley Rosen,
George Grant and Arthur Meltzer have argued.
Technology tries to bend nature to our will, a stance that takes the offensive in seeking to combat or transcend the natural world.
It also brings with it the potential for ruin. Did the ancients think about technology in that sense as well?
I'd suggest that the answer is yes and that we can find and Sophocles the first stirrings of fear about technology over two millennia before our time.
Dr. Mayz robot, Thomas, of course, does not seek to conquer nature except by dint of being a natural and confusing.
The boundary between the animate and the inanimate colours does count in modern terms as a sort of technology.
On the other hand, Tallis fails what we might call the Stanley Rosen test for A.I. He is a wonder,
but he does not have the potential to ruin the world. Data, listen, swings are more complicated, interesting in transcending nature,
they lead to individual death by, but their impact is limited to those who choose to wear them.
It is instead in the famous Danus Ode of Sophocles, Antigoni, I'd suggest that Roslyn's criteria are met.
In that coral oad, the chorus sings, quote, Many things are formidable, danus, none more formidable than men.
He crosses the grey sea beneath the winter wind, passing beneath the surface that surround him.
And he wears away the highest of the gods earth, immortal and wearying as his ploughs go back and forth from year to year,
turning the soil with the aid of the breed of horses, end quote.
According to the chorus, man has also conquered birds and beasts and fish and disease.
Everything besides death skillfull beyond expectation is his techne, the chorus adds.
And so he advances sometimes to evil, at other times to good.
When he applies the laws of the earth and the justice of the courts, he may remain in the city if his aim is gain.
However, he must be out. Techni, as this chorus sees, it strives to overcome the harshness of nature as a whole, it is large scale and offensive.
The chorus is treatment of cleverness,
they note has also corresponds with Aristotle's view in the nick of a key and ethics six 12 that it may be used for good or for evil.
It is the latter when it stops at nothing, when it encompasses all doing pan or and when is that?
The answer lies in the fact that the chorus speaks of the laws of the Earth, not the city and the justice of the gods, not of men.
The Earth and the gods must be the arbitrators of large scale offensive techne.
Even in Sophocles, techne or as Rozin would call it, technology.
The Earth and the gods represent the needs of our planet and an ethical system uncorrupted by human desire.
Anyone who violates these ethical ends for profit is a danger.
Is this not a harbinger of modern technology clad in the pelts of techne?
Jack Elul in the Technological Society argues that more efficient techniques will always triumph over lesser ones,
and that man has no control over this iron clad rule.
In other words, that neither human ethics nor the welfare of our planet can stop us, let alone will,
Sophocles Chorus may have hoped that we could avert this by removing the facilitators of technology from human society, but we have not.
And the fears that the chorus voices may have proven all too true.
Here, I think, is the most terrible information in antiquity of what A.I. and technology could bring thousands of years later.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
I will pass on to a second commentator and thank you.
Thank you very much. I enjoyed hearing Adrianne talk about her book, which I think is terrific and Charlie's comments.
Thank you. I just like to make three broad points touched on three issues which relate to the connexion between
the kind of thing we've heard about in the classical world and the world of ancient Greece and modern.
I assure you, he said the kind of thing that Adrianna's was concentrating on,
at least in the talk, was really to do more with with robots and tools and things created.
Whereas, of course, we tend to think of artificial intelligence as much more,
how we can achieve certain kinds of goals through understanding the way people think or the way we can create artificial ways of thinking.
The kinds of things that Turing Test looks into, for example, it does this thing, whether it's a computer or monitor or something,
know make us think this could be the same level as we are on a human level in terms of human intelligence.
So one thing that it made me think was what would have been the equivalent in the ancient world of having access to some kind of intelligence,
particularly predictive intelligence. One thinks about it.
A lot of what science is doing is trying to say, look,
we want to think about how things will be in the future and how that may benefit us individually or collectively.
And of course, the answer in the ancient world is purely supernatural.
It is the access to divine minds such as that of the God Apollo through the the work the operation of of an individual such as the Delphic Oracle,
the young woman who was said to have gone into a trance.
Apollo invested this woman's body and mind, and from her mouth came intelligence.
People believed instinct deeply in the Delphic oracle.
They would go and ask questions of it.
And what the Oracle said was taken very seriously, though, of course, famously the Delphic oracle was ambiguous.
So what it said could be interpreted, but was likely to be misinterpreted according to the wishful thinking of the recipient.
So that's just one aspect of the idea that artificial intelligence is seeking some kind of.
Some kind of access to knowledge, but that that access may well deceive us through our own projection of what we want onto that thing.
So the second point I just want to take up is what Charlie was saying about the dangers of techno technology being both potentially good and bad and.
One of the things that I looked into for many years and ended up in my book,
The Greece and the New in 2011, was how the Greeks thought about novelty and innovation.
And the standard trope in ancient studies was the Greeks didn't like anything new.
There's a whole book devoted to that in the 1950s, calls in the grip of the past.
And that is the bottom line. The Greeks didn't like anything new.
And this is about a culture which invented philosophy, theatre, the first monetary economy, logic, mathematical proof.
You know, you could go on. How is it that these people, despite not wanting, not liking anything new, managed to be so massively innovative?
I mean, they really were masochists, weren't they?
So one of the things that my book sought to do is show that there were areas in which they not only sought the new,
but they promoted it as a good thing. And when one looks into the history of ancient thinkers talking about innovation,
it's actually hard to find any treatise that talks about the new as such.
About the closest we come to it is Aristotle's Politics, in which he talks about innovative constitutions,
ways in which people came up with imaginative ideas about how to create a new kind of governmental constitution.
And of course, Plato's Republic is one of those. It's a utopia and Aristotle criticises it.
He also talks about some of the communistic schemes that were suggested as national failures of Chalcedon.
He talks about you came up with the idea of sharing property in common.
I an extraordinary proto communism.
And Aristotle comes up with a very good, sensible objections to why it's not going to work, basically because of human nature.
And he talks about Mancos. Hippiedom, amongst other things, was a very great city planner.
And he worked out the grid system that was used in Paris. And he said he was very flamboyant and innovative individual.
Amongst other things. He suggested that there should be a prise instituted for innovative political ideas.
So a prise for coming up with a good new kind of constitution.
So the idea of a prise, of course, leads us to the sort of incentives the Greeks were very keen on rewards and prises.
I mean, they were very competitive and they thought, you know, it is a good prise and you can incentivise things.
Then people will come up with new ideas. So I think that that's an area of Greek society which showed how keen they were on innovation.
And of course, we can talk about a lot of the actual technological innovations that happen at a slightly later period.
Hellenistic another period essentially to do with hydraulics and steam combustion and so on, which was the principle on which our Chitose dive flew.
In fact, it was a kind of steam powered dive. Those things never quite got off the ground.
I once gave a talk on ancient aeronautics, a bit of a tongue in cheek, and I said, you know,
flying was of great interest to the ancient Greeks, but it never quite goes off the ground.
Nonetheless, as I said at the time, flying was in the air and in the 5th century B.C.,
I mean, there was a lot of interest in this idea of using wings.
There's a place called the comedy called The Birds by Aristophanes where people don't wings and pretend to be birds.
And you can imagine people trying out flying in that way.
But what is interesting is a lot of that goes back to Delice,
as we heard from Shaddai and of the invention of a man powered flight by this inventive man,
inventor of all kinds of ways he was supposed to have been.
One of them was that he he built the wings for his son, Icarus, and, of course, failed tremendously.
But where does that very early myth come from? It seems to be connected to the Greeks Connexions, to ancient Egyptians sailing technology.
And if you think about it, when people first come across certain kinds of technology,
they think, my goodness, maybe that means, you know, what are these boats doing?
They actually capturing the wind in sales and flying across the sea.
So maybe we can adapt that kind of technology and think about using it for flying.
So. The idea of techno then as something that might be good or bad, most of the ancients in any text that you read thought that any kind of.
Attempts to scale the sea was a bad thing, sailing was basically seen as negative.
I mean, it was very dangerous. There were frequent shipwrecks there all over the Mediterranean, boats at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
So sailing itself was bad enough. Flying would go one step further.
And, of course, the whole myth of Icarus is dressed up in this idea that he's committing a hubris by attempting to fly too close to the sun,
look at it and fly. His wax wings melt and he falls and becomes the name of the Icarian sea.
And so the third point I want to bring up is the idea of an orientation towards the future, because that,
it seems to me, is something that changes in the history of the physical world as we know it.
One very simple concrete example of this is that when we read in Homer about the Prophet CalCars, we're told he could see behind him.
He could not only see in front of him, he could see behind him.
And what that means is he could not only see the past, which was in front of him, there it is spread out in front of us.
I mean, that was what Karkus could see, but he can see behind, which was the future.
And so one has to imagine that the idea, the imagination of the Greeks at that age with something like this,
we're travelling in a cart, travelling backwards into the future.
We can't see what's going to happen behind us. It might hit us suddenly.
We can, of course, look and see what happens in the past because it's right in front of our eyes.
But we really feel quite blind to the future. As I mentioned, as divination, as the idea of prophecy,
you can perhaps glimpse occasionally behind you like CalCars the prophet and see what's coming.
But on the whole, we are blind to the future. We are facing the past.
And then something changes in the middle of the fifth century B.C.,
the sort of period around 440 when Sophocles is writing his antigoni and that OWD talking about the formidable nature of human beings,
they can do basically anything. The only thing they can't do is stop us from dying.
We created medicine. We created our agriculture, we created cities and ideas.
And it's this wonderful celebration of human ability.
And in that century, we find texts where on the whole, the idea of the future is something that we can look forward to.
The idea of progress first emerges in some form during that century.
The idea that, for example, in medicine we can look forward to a future in which one day,
by analysing disease and health, we can eventually attain the whole of medical knowledge.
They actually say that in some of the Hippocratic treatises as so ambitious, they realise that we can actually do it.
Human beings are now striding forward confidently into a future which is ours.
And of course, there are dangers with that view as well,
because in some ways it is a much more realistic point of view to suggest we simply are travelling backwards,
our faces are oriented towards the front.
And so this image of us as travelling forwards in the future is potentially very dangerous because actually we are not looking at the future.
We are imagining the future and we are imagining the future based on the past.
And so I think this comes very nicely back to what Adrian has said,
because she has managed to increase our sense of the imaginative resources that the ancient Greeks brought to the idea of artificial imagination.
Thank you. Thank you so much. And that's an excellent discussion so far.
Let me ask Adrian, is there anything you'd like to pick up, Adrian, and what's been said before we go to questions?
You need 12 metre. Yes, I really enjoyed those comments, all very astute,
especially enjoy the reference to Sophocles paean to human ingenuity and and
how it could either be used for good or evil and that tendency to imitate,
improve and surpass nature.
And as I think Shotty pointed out, that that is there a feeling of danger to buy automatons or technology?
Is there a danger to more than just individuals and sort of a mass danger?
And I think Armand mentions this, too, about technology.
And competition and rewards and prises, and so if you look at what did the Greeks use technology for practical technology for,
it's for theatre and religions and war.
And no one has mentioned war machines yet, but not all machines of war were rewarded by powerful kings and rulers,
starting with maybe Dionysius of Syracuse in four hundred invited inventors and artisans and engineers to a contest to make advanced weapons of war.
And the competitions spurred them. And this resulted in the first TORSHIN catapult, even the first mechanised catapult.
And now we're taking these prises and contests continue.
Philip of Macedon also rewarded military engineers.
So did Demetrius. Oligarchy's siege these machines and Mr. Davies, the Great, also had many engineers who built innovative war machines in his court.
So and then, of course, Archimedes, who also built a lot of technological machines for war.
So there we see that what you predicted Armaan of competition and the idea that there will be prises for innovation.
It's all right there in in war technology. So so we military engineers invented in order to beat the military industrial complex of the ancient world.
There we there we go. And I as I pointed out in my book, DARPA, the military scientists of the Pentagon,
we're building a an advanced exoskeleton that would be human enhancements and I and make soldiers invulnerable.
And what did they name it? They chose an acronym T a. S Tactical attack.
I can't remember what the acronym was, but they knew the story of TALOS and they wanted to make their soldiers invulnerable like Telo.
So one of the things sometimes is why the Greeks didn't go on and invent the kind of technological advances that we we see ourselves.
I think there's every reason that they could have done had it not been that they were concentrating
on military technology and conquest because they invented hydraulics and steam machines.
Already in the third century,
we'd have had an industrial revolution had it not been for Alexander's desire and his successors desire to conquer the world and divide it up.
So Demosthenes says, we have reached an age in which we have come to the end of innovation because it's all military.
And I think that must have been the case. Yeah.
Though it is kind of interesting to note that a lot of our contemporary innovations are also driven by military spending,
but I guess in a very broad sort of way. Let me go to a question from our audience.
This is from Liz. She asks, Did the Greeks and Romans think of progress in a linear way?
Did they think society was improving or did they have a different way of viewing?
Time connects up a little bit with comments, comments at the end. Anyone want to take that up?
Maybe go ahead. And before you come, I want our man to comment on it.
But I was struck by your idea of whether the past is in front of us or behind us.
And there are anthropological studies of various cultures that imagine how do they imagine their ancestors?
Did they imagine themselves at the head of the line of the ancestors behind them, or are they marching behind their ancestors?
And there are differences in various cultures.
And as you say, the Greeks had they had the idea that the that they were one way and then began to change.
So now I think you should answer the question.
Well, just in response to that question of famously, the Greeks at the earliest, Greeks believed in regress, not progress.
And he said in the seven eight, the 7th century gives the myth of how human society has simply regressed over various
different ages from a golden age far in the past to a Bronze Age and Iron Age.
And the next stage is going to be even worse. So that's a massive of is quite common in the ancient world.
And you find it all the way through and even into Roman times.
But alongside that and beginning in the fifth century, basically, as exemplified exactly by the antoniades, which Chardy read out,
you have this sense of increasing ability, a growth and capacity of human abilities and knowledge which will lead to a better future.
So famously, Dods wrote a book called The Greek Ideal of Progress as a series of essays in
which he talks about how there is this switch towards an idea of progress.
But it's not our idea of process, which some continuous linear one, which is mentioned by the questioner,
is that in certain areas, in certain ways, we can do better in future and we will.
But I think that that basic idea that things are always getting worse and certainly morally worse is continuously present in the world.
And they also tend to look at past societies as having advanced technology, for instance,
the way they the way the Greeks looked at Egypt and building the pyramids and things like that.
So. So there's this idea that people in the past.
Whether in real history or remote history or myth had advanced technology that that we don't have now.
Tony, you want to talk about the Roman conceptions? It's the same in the Roman world.
This idea of a falling away from a state of of moral purity,
an age in which the earth gave up its goods automatically without man having to toil for them, which seems to be a universal story,
very much reminiscent, for example,
of the Adam and Eve story in which it's only after the fall that Adam has to scramble in the fields and it has to be the pains of childbirth.
So definitely in the real world. Yes.
And one of the propaganda points that Augustus leans on heavily when it comes to power after 31 B.C. is that he's going to reverse the small book.
And one of the things he doesn't see restores all the ancient temples in the city of Rome as part of this new
way of thinking about what who the Romans are and what they're accomplishing during this first Pax Romana.
Can I ask a follow up about this? Because you talked about a shift in the understanding of time and the future is something we can look forward to.
How does that relate to conceptions of hope? So, for example, in the Pandora movies, there's a suspicion that hope is a mug's game,
that basically it's this optimistic attitude you have basically on the basis of ignorance or someone's manipulating you.
Do we then get our personhood becoming something that is closer to see the understanding
of it as a virtue or at least an element of a virtue as this change happens?
Yes, mean I think, again, textually you can find examples. And again, in the Hippocratic Corpus, in some of the treaties, that very word is used.
There is a hope, I say, that we will get the whole knowledge of health and disease.
So that is sometime later this century, probably that treaties before that.
And I didn't with this very nicely in Hesiod, you have this jar of evils.
All the evils come into the world and what is left is hope.
So on the face of it, hope is yet one other evil that is the one that is retained.
So the idea that hope itself is blind, that hope is not something that we really want to have, but we are left with it.
It's a very hard image to interpret.
But the invitation, I think, is that he was yet one of the other evils, because hope is vain.
Hope is not knowledge, and that is what's left. And I think that can also be traced as something that changes hope,
as bad expectation turning into hope as a good expectation over the course of a few centuries.
If I could add a little footnote to that,
Armande mentioned the pronouncements of the Oracle of Apollo as being as a way of imagining the future in antiquity.
And I just wanted to point out that every single literary representation we have of of those oracles being
uttered show us that they are misinterpreted through the hope of the person receiving the pronouncement.
So, for example, I think it's Christmas or somebody else hears from the Oracle, you will destroy a great empire and all he wishes with his army,
assuming that the empire he destroys will not be his own, which of course, it is.
So hope is very destructive in that context. Brilliant if you ask a really silly question.
But you depicted Prometheus building a human.
So how is the human brain different from Pandora, who's also.
And there we have the philosophical question that is still being pondered, I mean, if you think of the Gnostics,
for instance, they they believe that we were all a product of incompetent Demi urges.
And Plato actually is the one of the first to express that that question.
He he says let's let's imagine or let's pretend or let's consider that we are all puppets of the gods.
So it certainly brings up all sorts of questions of autonomy and free will.
If he's if we are but a technological project of Prometheus, how do we have free will?
It goes on and on. I mean, that that question is still pondered, of course.
Let me ask you this question from Stan Gilmore. He says, Pandora, who is a robot and it seems rather foolish.
First to Pyra, mother of Helen father agrees by Deucalion.
So I stopped humanity from dying out and brought forth the grand civilisation.
Do we owe it all to EHI? That's a very Brigg's a very complex,
interesting questions about whether or not artificial life can reproduce itself, whether replicants like Pandora.
Or Galatea in the Pygmalion story, can could they reproduce,
we never hear anything about Pandora after she has opened the jar, completed her mission on Earth in Greek literature.
The story that that she actually married Eva.
Yes.
And reproduced had offspring, I believe comes from the Roman writer who could not resist saying that she was so lifelike that she could have babies.
And that's where the story comes, comes from that she did reproduce.
And I think it's her genus. And even later, Roman writer who says that Pygmalion and Galatea also had children.
So I think that's just a science fiction tendency that people just couldn't resist thinking about.
And it's, of course, the theme of Blade Runner.
Forty nine, the most recent Blade Runner film is turns on the mystery of the question of whether or not a replicant woman could actually give birth.
So I just think that's a probably a bit of this should say that, of course, the first man has to be made out of clay,
whether it's in the Greek tradition or in the Hebrew tradition, the biblical tradition.
Adam, he's earth. And there is this misogynistic element in common to ancient societies whereby women as secondary.
You, Eve, is made out of Adam's rib. Pandora comes along to destroy the sort of wonderful life that men are having.
So I think one has to accept that there are certain cultural, culturally specific ways of thinking about both men and women,
but nonetheless that initially there has to be animal from inanimate animals.
Breathe into clay after that.
Yeah, you have human reproduction. Apart from individual creations.
There is another story about justice making various robotic guard dogs for
various kings to guard their palaces and a later Roman writer than it might be.
Jenice claims that Melosi and the best melosi and hounds actually there,
they were descendants of the robotic dogs of gold and silver that were made by happenstance.
So once again, you just it's just a natural science fiction type of idea.
It's an interesting there's an interesting many, many cultures have the idea that the first humans were made from mud or clay,
soil and water or tears or blood or something like that.
But it's rare that they have any technology or technique associated with them.
The biblical story doesn't really have a craft associated with the creation,
whereas the images of Prometheus do show him using tools and it's technological.
The only other ancient story I know that's similar to the Prometheus type of story is the Egyptian myth of cartoon,
and I'm not pronouncing it correctly. Who was the God who made the first humans?
And he is the God of the Potter's Wheel, which is technology that was perfected in Egypt about about three thousand.
And he is shown creating the first humans on a potter's wheel, which involves technology plus the clay and the earth and water.
So I think that's a really interesting difference in in those ancient stories of the first humans.
Can I ask a question about a trip that came up that is very popular, which is that of robots or Aiyaz Mercilus,
so we had a discussion recently in the institute about autonomous weapons systems.
One of the objections to deploying them in war is that unlike a human soldier, they wouldn't show mercy towards other combatants or non-combatants.
So the question is, why is there this association or in the Greek context between mercilessness and being an automaton?
Now, it's probably important to distinguish two ideas. One is the idea of equity.
So the idea that you have a rule, but in a particular case, this rule doesn't apply.
So you need the flexibility to realise that a rule shouldn't be applied rigidly in this case.
So that's one idea that this kind of flexibility in the application of rules, knowing when to deviate.
But the other is the more I guess probably more, Román, in my view, kind of idea and sinica,
that sometimes something is just a punishment is justly deserved, but nonetheless out of mercy here.
You might then moderate justice, a punishment.
Why is there a link between mercilessness of either of these sorts and being an automaton in this great context?
You're right, the robots, one of these robots lacking, in other words, that makes the Mercilus.
Well, they're half human and half machine or partly partly more cyborg like and their humanity part seems to be about themselves rather than others,
at least in the tell a story. He makes a bad decision based on what he wants.
But what you're talking about, the drones and killing from afar,
which caused a lot of ambiguous feelings in in antiquity in Greece, the ambivalent feelings about archers,
for instance, who can kill from afar without facing battle face to face now that its its brains are over brawn and still have celebrated, of course.
But there's also this feeling that ambush and arrows or the technology of being able to kill from afar is somehow in vain because it's.
It violates the principle of reciprocal risk in face to face fighting,
you have reciprocal risk and with the drones and those kinds of modern weapons, we certainly don't have reciprocal reviews.
And we know that the army, at least in the Gulf wars of the early Gulf War, nineteen ninety one thousand three,
looked for soldiers who were really good at first person video games where they were.
You cannot have any mercy. You can't stop to think who you're killing.
They looked for soldiers who were adept at that and had practised.
Getting rid of empathy for people that are killing.
I could just add something, which is that, of course, not all the robotic creatures such as those aliens talking about are maligned.
So the golden assistance officers are things that we'd all like to have in the house, really.
But it seems to me that this is where another nation comes in, and that is the notion of the uncanny.
And a lot of I mean, Freud talked about the untimely here, which is the notion of the uncanny.
It's related to the double the doppelganger. And the reason that a doppelganger is uncanny is because it is so like us.
So we might see a square object which is emitting fire as as threatening, but not uncanny and horrible,
but something that looks like a human being, something that is crazy human but isn't actually human is much worse.
And you think of Planet of the Apes or you think actually even of Daleks, I mean, God has scared me.
Of those, the 1980s. They aren't really even human looking.
But because they kind of talk and they move in a slightly uncannily human way, know, that is,
I think, what's going on, especially with these very lifelike robot characters like TALOS.
Recently, a Boston Dynamics just released a video of some of their incredibly advanced robots dancing,
and they they they actually presented this as, see, robots are less intimidating because they can dance.
And I believe that many of us here are saying, no, no,
we're here because all the I felt bad for all the graduate students in dance mechanics
and things like that body movement who were helping Boston mechanics make these moves.
These moves are for killer robots and. But this happens a lot, people who are making advanced technology presented to us as beneficial.
For instance, we have libris, cameras, this will be such a boon to you.
And we but we all know all the dark reasons that they're making, so.
We need to be Promethea.
Let me ask one final question, and that is that might be thought that through all the fears that technological advance and A.I. conjures up,
the Greeks were immune to one of the fears that we have.
Because a lot of people, when they think about the problems with I worry about the future of work and they say,
well, obviously work is a way of making a livelihood. So there is a financial or economic aspect to it.
But it's also a source of self-respect and self-fulfilment that for a lot of people,
doing work is what gives meaning to their lives and that they fear because even if there was a universal basic income,
they would lose this source of meaning. I take it the Greeks did have this anxiety.
They didn't value work in this way. Well, what would be considered more menial, at least in ancient Athens,
where it was relegated to non-citizens and slaves and the the definition of
the human was the man who participated in the life of the city and politics,
which is what Greek citizen males of Athens did do.
And so they simply found their meaning in a different realm. They had other people doing the hard work, the hard labour of of farming or mining.
They reap the benefits themselves and they could spend all their lives yakking it up.
And they said, that's great, because John Maynard Keynes raises this question.
He says, you know, one of the few justifications for having the super rich is that they are pioneering
for us what it would be like to have a meaningful life if you didn't have to work,
if you weren't constrained by necessity. So do the Greeks have an answer to that anxiety yukking it up?
Is that the answer? Look at the Garden of Eden.
Look at the God of innovation first, as he's always shown working.
He's described as perspiring in his work. He doesn't have to do that.
He's a God. On the other hand, he's a disabled God.
So you can imagine that maybe that's why he builds all these practical aids.
But we do have we do have an example of all these gods and goddesses have lives of pleasure to
jack it up and gossip and that they don't necessarily do philosophy like the ancient Greek elites.
Imagine themselves do it. But there is one God who works hard.
Yes. And he is not a model for any ancient Greeks who aspire to that.
More to the point, they didn't even aspire to being, for example, artists as it is a Lucian dialogue in which a young man who said,
well, even if you could be polyglots, the great sculptural fides, you know, you wouldn't want to be that.
So that kind of work was not valued. And I should just remind you that in Aristotle's ethics, when he talks about what makes us you diamine happy,
what makes for well being, what's his answer to eternal contemplation of the truths of mathematics?
What we have to do is find what makes human beings flourishing and happy.
That doesn't involve what we normally call work. Definitely the contemplation of mathematics like I know it.
Thank you very much, everyone. This has been an amazing discussion. Thank you for that wonderful talk and the fantastic graphics.
Thank you to our two excellent commentators, Botch and Dango.
I just want to mention that on February the 16th, we will have a launch event on the democratic culture.
So please join us at 5:00 pm on February the 16th. Speakers will be Professor Josh Cohen, Professor Helen Langmore and Sir Nigel Shadbolt.
So that will be a very interesting discussion about a number of very topical issues related to the interplay between free and democracy.
Thank you again for tuning in and hopefully see you next week.
Thank you, everybody. Thank you.