Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll and you might remember a couple weeks ago

We did a slight detour from our usual topics. I'm not exactly sure what our usual topics are

But we took a detour back into the ancient world

We talked with ed Watts about the decline of the Roman Republic and of course one of the interesting things about ancient history or history at all

Is its resonances with contemporary history?

So today we're gonna go back to the ancient world. I had a good time in that previous podcast

I hope you did too. So today we're gonna go back but with a slightly different twist

Connecting it to our issues of technology and artificial intelligence

In fact, we're gonna be asking what were robots and AI systems like

2,500 years ago now you might be thinking to yourself

There weren't any robots or artificial intelligences back in ancient Greece and Rome and you're correct

But that didn't stop people from talking about them the mythology the stories the poems of ancient Greece and Rome

Were in some sense similar to the science fiction and fantasy of today

They allowed the authors to let their imaginations roam free and they would often stop at the point where they were talking about

Constructed beings in the shape or manner of humans. So today's guest is Adrian Mayer

Who is a historian of ancient scientists and a classical folklorist at Stanford?

She's very interesting at this because she not only reads the ancient texts but also consults the archeological

Paleontological evidence. So we're gonna talk about all the different appearances in Greek mythology of

robot-like creatures and of course being that with Greek mythology there was always a lesson right?

There was always something went wrong because somebody did something bad and

What it reflects is the fact that the worries or the interesting conundrums that face you when you talk about human-like

Machines were just as relevant

...